I don’t know whether it is the kind of success that poultry farmers in Kenya like Nelson Muguku have made in the chicken rearing business that has motivated more youths to join the business, but one thing is sure; more youths are now considering keeping chickens as a viable business. One such young man is Alphard Ndung'u, a 23-year old third-year bachelor of Economics and Statistics student at the University of Nairobi. Ndung'u made his resolve to go into poultry farming after a six month fellowship programme on climate and economic justice in Norway.
While attending the programme, Alphard Ndung'u happened to meet a 28-year old man who lived in Norway and ran a successful farm. The young man had a farm on which he kept 60 high-yield dairy cows and had become one of the major suppliers of milk to the supermarkets and hotels in his country. Ndung'u was so impressed by the way the young man would attend classes in the morning then rush to the farm after classes to assess the progress, that by the time he left Norway to return to Kenya, he knew that the one thing he would want to do is try his hand in farming.
Ndung'u’s parents had in the past done poultry farming so he decided to take advantage of the infrastructure that still remained from that project to give his a kick start. He started by renovating the old chicken house. He then bought 200 chicks at Sh.60 each and by the time they were getting to maturity, he had used approximately Sh.50,000 for renovations, feeds and the buying of the chicks.
Challenges in poultry farming in Kenya
With the few items Ndung'u inherited from his parents’ chicken project and the savings that he made while in Norway, starting and rearing the chickens to maturity wasn’t much of a challenge. The first real huddle that he faced was searching for a good market for his chickens. He had to literally walk from one hotel to another and it wasn’t very successful at first. However, focused on the foreseeable bright future, he pressed on and finally his breakthrough came. He landed a deal to supply chicken to Roasters Hotel on Thika Road.
Poultry farming in Kenya pays well
From his first lot of chicken, Ndung'u was able to make more than Sh.76,000, thereby returning his initial capital and giving him quite some good profits. He invested the money back into the business and growing the number of chicken to over 1500. He says that each chicken fetches about Sh.400. the one challenge about marketing chicken is that just like any other farm product, there are times the supply is high, which affects the prices.
However, once you get a firm footing on the business, you will easily get supply tenders from big firms and organizations and it pays really well. For example, early 2013, Ndung’u got a tender to supply chickens to the Youth Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Nairobi. Selling 1KG of chicken meat at Sh.300 and more than 300 chicken which weigh about 1.3Kgs each, he makes over Sh.100,000 per month. In addition to this, he also sells 30 trays of eggs to Roasters Hotels every week and another 6 trays every day to another hotel, making Sh.300 per tray. That is approximately Sh.90,000 from eggs.
Good money huh? Vijana kweli tunawesmake doh na poultry farming in Kenya!
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