Happy New Year to you all, trust you are doing great. The last time we had a post here was last year.
To start this year, we want to take a good look at some lessons learned from the poor sales experienced by many poultry farmers last year, especially during the festive season. A lot of complaints have ensured from the poor sales farmers witnessed in the previous festive season. As a result of this and more, we have compiled some lessons we have learned, which we believe will help to forestall a re-occurrence.
There was less money to spend: Compared to previous seasons when many people had money to buy as many birds as possible for the festive season, this past year, due to the state of the economy, many people could not afford it; some even saw it as a luxury; alternative means were sought.
Many people reared birds themselves. I don’t know if you noticed that some people took the risk and reared some birds themselves, hoping to reduce the cost. They might not have achieved good success with the birds in terms of management, but they sure saved some cash from doing so, by so doing, reduced the number of birds demanded.
Poor feasibility studies: Many farmers felt they could sell their birds just the same way they did the last time; many were waiting to start selling a week before Christmas, but it didn’t go down well. 3 weeks after Christmas, I can tell you that a lot of farmers still have birds they have not sold. It would have been far better if they started selling 2-3 weeks before the yuletide. Animal husbandry is all about targets, many farmers raise animals without specific targets, thus incurring avoidable losses. High cost of birds.
Unfortunately, a lot of people, overpriced their birds, with the high cost of feeds and even the birds at DOC at some point, an average farmer spent 12,000 or more on each bird if they sold each bird at a price that would allow themto make a profit of 5,000 naira per bird, it would have made some sense, but we saw some farmers showing greed and insatiable want for unrealistic profit.
There you have it. Those are some lessons I want us to learn from as we start the new year.
Let’s ensure we do not make such mistakes again.
Happy New Year once again, may this year Favour You and I.
