YAP proposal #177: Indigenous Poultry Farming (Chelulei Denis, Kenya)

I am Chelulei Denis, 23, a fourth year student at Kenyatta University, School of Agriculture and Enterprise Development. I live in Tindiret Sub-County, Nandi County, Kenya.

My project deals with indigenous poultry farming: a passion I realized in 2013 and one in which I recently carried out research as partial fulfillment of the requirements of a degree in agricultural resource management.

Think about it this way: if you can add value to a unit egg which costs USD 0.1 by incubating it and later raising it into a hen whose market price is USD 5—a 4,900 % turnover in six months—how about that? Is that not great?

An indigenous chicken lays between 40–100 eggs per year, but under controlled conditions, such as restricted broodiness, one can lay up to 150 eggs.

As a Project Co-ordinator, I have been training and inviting households to workshops to encourage them to venture into this lucrative business. I’ve told them to make sure that, after each and every month, they ought to be injecting a specified number of baby chicks into the farm. So, by the seventh month, the farmer can sell the seventh-month-old flock, and make it a routine. The sixth old flock will soon be ready for sale.

Hence, the farmer will be bringing in chicks and selling ready flock at the end of every month, getting income.

Most of the tenants of Nandi County have limited capacity to attract stable and sustainable job opportunities. They are therefore attracted to cheap and heavy labour, where they work in tea estates plucking tea under unfavourable working conditions. These households can work well with poultry farming, which does not require more land or capital to start.

My objective is to use poultry farming as an empowerment tool to encourage economic development within the vulnerable in the society especially the youth and women. This will provide an avenue to poverty alleviation.

Poultry creates employment for youth and women who have been bound to stay at home as housewives, leaving their husbands as the only breadwinners.

Just as the Government gives out free tree seedlings to encourage afforestation, I want to give a certain level of free service to the ten households I hav selected.

My project has ten households in the first phase in which I am working hard to ensure that, each unit has a simple and suitable poultry house. Three already have completed their poultry structures. I intend to offer each unit incubation services for 30 eggs a month, for free, until their poultry firm is sustainable.

In the second phase, we intend to expand to accommodate a population of 100 chicks for each of the ten households. We will have to ensure that there is adequate space to accommodate flock population of around 500 per unit.

The third phase will involve each of my ten households training and building their own ten household units. They will be the managers of their own units and fully responsible for the groups. This will ensure that the project is sustained and carried on from village to village, from generation to generation.

This is how I intend to use the USD 5,000 grant:

1^st Phase

Use USD 2,000 to ensure that the ten households have poultry friendly housing structures within three months.

2nd Phase

Use USD 2,000 in setting up an incubation plant where farmers can bring their eggs to be hatched at lower cost within two months .

3rd Phase

Use USD 2,000 to gather for management needs such as vaccinations, pest and disease control, as well as for expansion of the Incubation plant.

 

Blogpost and picture submitted by Chelulei Denis (Kenya): mailto:dchelulei[at]gmail.com

The content, structure and grammar are at the discretion of the author only.

 

This post is published as proposal #177 of “YAP” – our “Youth Agripreneur Project”.

The first selection of the winners will be based on the number of comments, likes and views each proposal gets.

As a reader, you can support this speaker’s entry:

• Leave a comment (question, suggestion,..) on this project in the comment field at the bottom of this page
• Support the post by clicking the “Like” button below (only possible for those with a com account)
• Spread this post via your social media channels, using the hashtag: #GCARD3

 

Have a look at the other “YAP” proposals too!


As a donor, support young agripreneurs and sponsor this unique project.

Check out the side column for our current sponsors.
“YAP” is part of the #GCARD3 process, the third Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development.