How I Cross My Chicken For More Income

Marion Dome smiles as she watches her chicks chirp and run inside the brooder located in a pen in her quarter-acre farm in Maili Nne, 7km west of Eldoret town. Looking at the chicks, they are bigger and healthier than the normal ones.

“The chicks are bigger because they are from crossbreed chickens,” she says.

“I get different chicken breeds and cross with others. I have crossbred, for instance, the indigenous cocks with Sasso, Kari kienyeji and Bovan Black hens,” adds Marion, who keeps over 500 chickens, 200 of them which are layers.

Inside her homestead, the farmer has constructed three wooden pens. One is for layers, the other for chicks while the last one hosts over three-week-old chickens.

“I separate them for three reasons. First is to avoid cannibalism, second is to keep diseases at bay and lastly to curb inbreeding,” explains Marion, who sources for new cockerels after every six months.

She gets the cocks from fellow farmers and uses them to serve the hens. Each cock serves eight hens.

“I started doing this out of curiosity. I crossbred an indigenous cock with a Sasso hen and realised the chicks were bigger.”

The farmers who bought the chicks noticed their bigger sizes and kept on coming for more.

“I sell about 400 chicks every month which I hatch using an incubator. I collect over 100 eggs every day,” says the mother of two girls. A day-old chick goes for Sh100 and a week-old at Sh150.

With crossbreeding, according to the farmer, she ends up with birds that produce more as layers and broilers are heavier.

“Some farmers use a cock to serve hens for about two years. This is wrong because the offspring become weaker and prone to diseases.” A crossbreed chick, according to the farmer, lays eggs every day and matures faster.

Besides selective breeding, Marion follows a strict feeding regime. The farmer makes her own feeds using a mill shredder and a 500kg capacity mixer.

“I grind maize and mix with cotton and sunflower seeds and dagaa (omena) to make nutritious feeds. I travel to Mbita regularly to collect dagaa.”

The layers consume a 40kg bag of feeds every day. She advises farmers who want to keep chickens to give great attention to feeds. “People tend to give layers a lot of calcium, which hardens shells making the birds fail to hatch eggs on time.”

Dr Mary Ambula, an animal scientist at Egerton University, acknowledges that selective breeding leads to better chickens. She says that indigenous hens normally lay 40 to 50g eggs. However, those that are crossbred lay eggs weighing 50 to 57g.

“An indigenous breed produces about 200 eggs annually but when one crosses it, the crossbreed offers more than 250 eggs.” The offspring of those bred also tend to mature faster and will start laying eggs at about six months.

“Most indigenous chicks start to produce eggs at seven to eight months, the crossbreed offspring from 20 weeks they will drop eggs.”

However, there are challenges that come with crossbreeding, according to the expert.

“While the crossbreed is better, it normally tends to be less resistant to diseases like Newcastle, gumboro and sometimes coccidiosis.”

“They will sit on eggs for only five days then walk away from brooding nests, instead of the whole 21 days,” she adds.

Story by Stanley Kimuge.

How to Produce Insect Meals That Will Cut Your Poultry Feeds Costs By 50 Per Cent

All of us generate tonnes of kitchen waste each month, which sometimes we use in our vegetable gardens as manure. This is highly recommended, but you can now do more with that kitchen waste that some of us burn.

Scientists have developed a way to make nutritious poultry and fish feeds from the waste. The innovation involves putting the waste in a special plastic container that has black soldier flies that lay eggs.

“The larvae hatch from the eggs in about 100 hours. They then feed on the waste for 14 to 20 days before they later turn into pupae,” explains Dr Rene Haller, the director of Baobab Trust and one of the researchers behind the project dubbed Green Insect.

A single fly hatches between 500 and 1,200 eggs at once. A gram of the eggs produces 2.4kg of larvae with 42 per cent protein, 35 per cent fat and other minerals that include calcium, vitamins and amino acids.

It is this larvae that is fed to poultry for faster growth and to increase production.

“If you are a keen observer, indigenous chickens hunt for larvae from compost pits. This diet does not affect the quality and taste of the meat and eggs products. We are trying to fill this gap because most farmers these days keep their poultry under the intensive system.”

The container has a pipe through which the farmer harvests the larvae. “They crawl from the container through a pipe and into a bucket. There they are left to turn into inactive pupae, which is then dried and crushed into powder that is feed to the fish. The larvae, on the other hand, is directly fed to chicken.”

Dr Haller noted that trials are ongoing to establish the actual rations of larvae farmers can feed their poultry but for fish, 1.8kg of pupae produces a kilo of fish.

NO SIDE EFFECTS

“The protein from insects is natural and has no chemicals. It has no side effects.  It is also easily available and can be produced in large quantities and cheaply,” he says adding that fish fed on the larvae attains 350g in six months. “We are looking at the future where farmers will substitute oil and natural cereal feeds with sufficient proteins from insects.”

Using the larvae feeds will enable farmers to keep poultry, fish and grow a variety of vegetables.

“On the farm, the larvae can also be useful for bio-conversion of environmental wastes to be used as manure.”

Lead researcher Prof Monicah Ayieko from Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology says the objective of the project is to transfer the flies to the farmers.

“The farmers will be able to rear them in large quantities without the insects escaping to the community.”

She notes that in the US and South Africa, farmers rear the insects in large quantities to develop fish feeds with high protein content.

“Once we establish a colony and the flies can be controlled at farm level, harvested, dried and be fed to fish or poultry, we will transfer the technology to farmers,” she says.

“We are working to reduce the oil content in the larvae that has lots of fat and increase protein levels to about 60 per cent. From 2.5kg of waste of vegetable materials, about 2.5kg of larvae can be harvested. But still research is ongoing to get exact numbers.”

According to Prof Ayieko, farmers will need initial investment in infrastructure that they will use to raise the flies and generate garbage.

It is expected that poultry and fish farmers will cut their costs by up to 50 per cent through the technology.

“With a higher colony, the garbage will not emit a lot of stench. Hydrogen will be reduced to make protein and make the environment clean. After the larvae eats the garbage, clean manure is generated for the farmers,” she says, adding that the system can be used for garbage management in estates.

Article by Bozo Jenje; Seeds of Gold.