The question of the weekend for our followers is a simple one….Is Chicken Rearing Profitable? Can one make good profits from rearing chickens especially broilers? Before answering this question lets look at the photo below from Novatek.
The cost of raising a bird is $3.13 per bird and the average selling price per bird is $6 giving us a profit of $2.87 per bird.
Now the above cost of $3.13 has not taken into account the following costs:
1.Labour costs
2.Water and Electricity charges
3.Travel costs
4.Marketing costs
You can add more costs but for now allow us to just add the above 4 costs. If we add labour ($60), Water and Electricity ($20), Transport costs ($10) then the total cost of production shoots up to $4.03 per bird and therefore reducing the profit to $1.97 per bird assuming that there is no loss of birds due to death.
So what does this tell us about rearing broilers in Zimbabwe?
- It is a profitable business venture provided you have expertise of raising chickens
- Profitable if you have a ready market
- Very Profitable if you can push volumes so as to enjoy economies of scale
Reducing Costs
Growing own chicken feed is an option in reducing chicken rearing costs. It can however be tricky as it can affect the rate of growth of chickens. If you are not careful, you may end up spending more than the person buying chicken feed from reputable suppliers. If you have a ready market then this can help in reducing marketing costs as well as travelling or communication costs as you chase up debtors.
Marketing Chickens
Most people now know how to raise poultry and this is an easy part especially if you raise them over time. The biggest headache is the market! Finding reliable markets where you sell all of your chickens in bulk is the greatest challenge that farmers face. Most farmers are resorting to selling chickens to individuals on credit and this often brings more problems-people who refuse or fail to pay! Defaulters increase the costs of rearing chickens and thereby reducing the profit per bird.
What is ZBIN doing about Marketing Challenges?
1.You are free to use our adverts section to market your chickens. We do not mind whether you are a ZBIN registered member or not, log in and put your advert. Our Admin team is working hard to promote the page so that it can be viewed by many people as we expand our operations. We have in mind one online Poultry Market for Zimbabwe to help our members to sell or buy chickens.
2. Profitability can be improved if you reduce costs. Members should therefore form consortiums that enable them to sell their chickens in bulk. We will announce an interesting ZBIN innovation to help solve this, a first of its kind in Zimbabwe, we have discussed extensively about this on our group and even held meetings to brainstorm on the feasibility of the initiative.
So there you are poultry farmers, keep watching your costs and becareful of the term ‘profit’ because you may be excluding key costs in your calculations. We also advise our members to be wary of increasing cases of poultry thefts. When your broilers are almost ready for the market, make sure that you increase your security as you may risk losing all of your birds to thieves.
Are you interested in joining our popular ZBIN Poultry Whatsapp Group? If the answer is yes then kindly app me on +263774081808 as i have 10 places available.
