How To Make A Living Running A Small-scale Broiler Operation

Raising chickens is relatively easy; selling them and actually making a living out of the enterprise is the real challenge. This is according to Anneke Loock, who in 2017 started a broiler poultry business on a smallholding in Bainsvlei, Bloemfontein.

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Loock, on maternity leave at the time, was facing her second retrenchment in as many years. She and her partner, Hardus Steyn, a contract worker, considered various ways in which they could earn a living on their smallholding, and finally settled on poultry, as it has a faster turnaround time than other farming endeavours such as feedlot cattle or sheep.

Loock soon realised, however, that while it is possible to earn a living from a small-scale broiler business, it is not easy money. The couple have learnt many lessons over the past 18 months, but Loock believes she finally has a grip on how to optimise broiler production.

STARTING OUT

Loock kicked off her enterprise when she bought her first batch of 200 Ross 308 day-old chicks in September 2017.

An immediate challenge was that nobody was willing to share lessons from their own failures. When she tried researching on the Internet or speaking to other farmers, all she could find was evidence of their successes, or how to set up optimal rearing facilities. She discovered that this was not financially possible for a small-scale producer, who has to make do with less.

“So I ended up having to learn the hard way: by trial and error.”

By the middle of last year, she had scaled up production to about 1 000 chicks a week. This phase of the business, however, was a disaster: her system was simply not geared yet to handle so many birds and she started suffering increasingly high mortality rates.

Loock is now at the stage where she receives 400 chicks a week from reputable suppliers. These are reared for between six and seven weeks before being taken to a nearby abattoir for slaughter.