WHY REARING YOUR OWN CHICKENS FOR CONSUMPTION IS MORE PROFITABLE.
Celebrating festivities in Nigeria is incomplete without adding chicken meat to the party menu. Be it New year, Easter, or Sallah, markets always feature traders selling clucking chickens in wire mesh cases, or cane baskets. In the rush to buy ingredients and foodstuff, live chickens too are bought and carted away in car boots and sacks. However, it should be noted that as much as live chickens are being sold at the roadside and in markets during festive periods, many more chickens are being stored in large cold rooms in their frozen numbers. Frozen food is also an option many people turn to, as a relief from the strain of killing, plucking and carving a live chicken.
Rearing poultry birds is generally viewed as smelly work. Some of the society’s elite members prefer to buy frozen chicken more than live chickens while many average families buy live chickens. The economic people who sometimes live below the average family have crude sheds made from old wood and tarpaulin which they use in rearing live chickens. They often rear between 5-10 chickens at a go. They feed their chickens a combination of chicken feed and leftovers, sometimes they may release them from their cages to roam freely and forage for scrap to eat. Lastly, there are those average people who rear chickens for consumption. They adhere to all the rules of poultry farming and end up with nice, robust, and healthy chickens.
Not separating the local chicken rearers from the more standard ones, raising your own chickens for consumption is far more profitable for the following reasons:
- You get value for your money.
You may spend money on chicken feed, and other maintenance actions, but at the end of the whole process, you get fattened healthier chickens. You get to choose how you want your bird’s diet and how their environment should be, hence you can enjoy your chickens rest assured that they grew up on a healthy organic diet, and have all the necessary nutrients they should have.
- You pay less.
Chicken sellers often want to gain some profit on their products. So besides the cost of feeding, they add certain amounts to the total price of each bird. This amount covers the chicken feed used, medication, and other poultry supplies. When you rear your chickens at home, you do not have to pay these extra fees. You only spend money on these essential poultry supplies and once they are fattened enough to eat, you slaughter them. The healthy meat you get to eat, as well as the fact that poultry supplies can be used for new batches of birds, is your profit.
- More eggs at your own convenience.
Investing in layers yields fresh eggs daily. You also get to eat easily accessible fresh eggs without having to make trips outside your homestead to buy eggs.
- You make money from selling off surplus.
In most cases, the extra eggs or even fattened chickens are sold off to neighbours, family, and friends. This is a great way to earn extra cash and offset some of the cost spent on poultry products.
In conclusion, when you consider the reduced cost, freedom of quality control, surplus sales, and easy accessibility to fresh meat, rearing your own chickens is more cost friendly.