©Lucian Coman/Shutterstock: African egg farm at sunset with red hens in Botswana.
I saw this post on Instagram:
“Comfort is a drug. Once you get used to it, it becomes addicting. Give a weak person consistent stimulation, good food, cheap entertainment and they’ll throw their ambitions right out the window.”
IG: @valuetainment
I strongly disagree with statement above because you don’t necessarily need millions of cedis to be happy. With that said, even though you could make GH¢ 3,000 per month running a 1000-layer farm, that doesn’t mean you should rest on your laurels and you’ll soon find out why.
I used to do some bookkeeping work for one farmer and at the time, things were going pretty well. She had close to a thousand layers and used to rear broilers during festive occasions. I identified at the time that the demand for her eggs far exceeded what she could supply so I believed that was the right time for focus on rapid expansion.
To ensure my expansion plan became a reality, I advised that she drew a monthly salary. By now, you might be wondering how drawing more money from a business you are trying to expand makes any sense, aren’t you?
You see, because she wasn’t drawing a regular salary, what she did was that whenever she wanted to purchase anything, she just took the money out of the farm’s coffers. Because of this, whenever I did the accounts, I realized that even though the farm was making a profit, I’d find that there was almost no money in the farm’s coffers. Hence if she had regularly drawn a salary, there would have been some portion of the profit left for reinvesting into the farm.
To put things into perspective, assuming at the time she was making an average monthly profit of GH₵ 3000. If she took out a salary of GH₵ 1,500 there would still be GH₵ 1,500 of the profit left over at the end of the month. Now, if she continually reinvested at least half of the profits she was generating, she would have doubled her flock from 1000 to 2000 layers in just three years.
When I confronted her about how she could potentially reach a 5000-layer capacity in five years if she just made a little tweak to how she managed her finances, she told me she didn’t need to grow her farm any bigger. Of course, she was right because at that time she also held a government job that paid her close to GH₵ 2,000 per month. Combined with her poultry earnings, and she was earning around GH₵ 5,000 every month which is more than enough to cater for her family.
The point I want to make is that even though a relatively smaller operation could make you live a fairly comfortable life, you should know that expanding your farm not only makes you rich but also impacts the lives of others. From the example above, assuming the farmer at 1000-layer capacity employed around 2 people, if she grew her farm to a 5000-layer capacity, she might have provided jobs for 7 additional individuals.
Now, becoming wealthy and providing jobs for others is very admirable however that doesn’t mean you should recklessly add new birds to your farm because remember, each new addition will require, feed, veterinary services, utility costs, etc. Therefore, you should get yourself a very good business plan to help you grow your farm sustainably.
Pkom 