Backyard Broilers: Working Towards A Large-Scale Business

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and Emmanuel Gumede has taken this proverb to heart in his dream to one day own and operate a large-scale broiler farming operation. He shared his experiences as a fledgling broiler grower with Lloyd Phillips.

- Lloyd Phillips

Emmanuel Gumede (26) is a determined young man. He is currently employed full- time as a call-centre supervisor, but his heart lies in fulfilling the big dreams that he has for his 18-month-old, small-scale broiler farming business.

It was only in March last year that Gumede began a small production trial in his family’s backyard with 10-day-old New Hampshire chicks he had bought in a Durban pet shop. These were the only chicks left when he arrived at the shop that day, and despite New Hampshire chickens having been bred primarily for egg production, he learnt a number of valuable lessons about how to take chickens to maturity.

“At the beginning of last year, before I bought the New Hampshire chicks, I’d started to search the Internet for as much information as I could find about growing broilers in the backyard,” says Gumede.

“The information I read and YouTube videos I watched were very helpful. My mother, Ernestina Gugu, also taught me some lessons from her younger years when she raised small flocks of free-range chickens in the backyard.”

A SIMPLE, FUNCTIONAL CHICKEN HOUSE

Scraping together every cent of cash he could spare, Gumede bought materials and built himself a simple 7m x 14m broiler grower house comprising corrugated iron sheets, wooden poles and planks, and an earthen floor.

A bonus was that his family’s property, situated in KwaZulu-Natal’s (KZN) Upper Buffelsdraai area just north of Durban, had an empty rondavel within which he could rear his day-old broiler chicks until they were 14 days old. They could then be transferred to the grower house for finishing.