Broilers are young chicks of about a day old or more and Layers are matured hen and cock that mate to give birth to young ones. Layers are the producer of eggs we eat, so going into this business can fetch you double money, both from selling the chickens or selling the eggs. Broilers are young ones that are breed to adult. This also can fetch them double money, they can either sell them young to customers or they can grow them properly and sell them.
Broilers are very cheap to buy, in Nigeria, their prices are from the range of N10 – N150, it depends on location. You can’t expect someone leaving in the village or one local area to buy them at the same price as someone in the urban and more civilized area. Cost of living and cost of products are different.
Breeding of broilers are almost the same as breeding of fishes. Ways of breeding are different because some are breeding them for their own consumption while others are breading them for business. People that are breeding them for consumption might not acquire everything they needed to nurture them nicely or they might not be able to afford what they needed to grow, so they only give them what they have as food, like giving them our own daily food, giving them human kind of medicine and things like that.
All those broilers might not survive at the end of the day. For example, I know someone that bought 50 pieces of broilers at the price of N50 each for own consumption. Because of this, the broilers only consume broiler’s food for two weeks which after, they started giving them human being food. And before they could clock a month, 20 chicks died along the way, to the breeder, it nothing, it no big deal. After another two weeks, about four more died. There is probability that not less than 10 chicks or more might also die before they reach three months for them to be consumable. Now, calculate the losses of 34 chickens before you sell them.
How much will you have left? To some it might be gain if at all they decide to sell the remaining 16 for like N2,000 in the market or anywhere, that is like N32,000 minus the cost of production of N2,500 their purchasing prices as broiler plus their cost of feeding of about N8,000 making the profit to be N21,500. At least without them doing it for business, profit still surface, so is not really a bad venture. But for business, this is worst, imagine the profit of N21,500 for three months, that is like N7,200 profit in a month. For your information, this is not your way of doing business; this is just an example of people breeding them for self-consumption.
Breeding of broilers for good business must not take you exactly more than a month to breed them and sell for profitable gain. When breeding broilers, you provide conducive environment for them to move around freely or else, they can fall sick easily and this might transmit faster to the others.
If you are not breeding them outside the open compound or outside their cage, let there be light where they are, because if they are in darkness, they might end up stepping on each other with poor ventilation, and this will cause havoc to their survival. Check on them regularly to notice any sign or symptoms that might be shown by anyone of them for quick treatment. The quicker you attend to them, the better their survival. Once you notice any sign of sluggish attitude or sneezing from any of them, quickly attend to it and don’t postpone it till another day, you might be surprise that the chick won’t survive another day if care is not quickly taken. The earlier the better!
Young chicks are quicker to getting sick because they are not yet strong enough to survive any kind of ill treatment. They haven’t fully developed any kind of immune system that can fight diseases in them.
Giving them their specially provided foods help them to grown faster. In five months they are big enough for selling, while consumable ones that are not well provided for, takes more than seven months to grow to that kind of extent.
There is also risk of losing some of them before the end of the day. So let’s do some calculation. 200 broilers you bought for like N50 each is N10,000 plus cost of feeding of about N50,000 (this is because their food cost almost N2,500 per bag and they can consume like two bags of food in a week) plus other expenses of about N5,000 is all together the sum of N55,000 as their production cost. Let say loss of 50 broilers leaving 150. The cost of selling them can be N2,000 – N4,000. So let’s just calculate it as N2,500 per one which is N375,000. So minus the cost of production which is N65,000. You have the total profit of about N310,000. This really makes a whole lot of sense for business.
These are what we call layers because they are full grown and can lay eggs for you to also sell and make profit or still produce another broiler from them. And as a business farmer, you don’t sell them all at once. This is just an assumption for income calculation. You don’t really need to go and buy broilers again because the ones you breed will lay eggs you will use for breeding another broiler. So that is how the business continues.
This is what is called broiler and layer business. You make money from selling the fully grown chickens or cocks, from selling their eggs, and from selling other broilers that comes from them too. Triple profit zone!
Remember, you need to take proper care of them to be able to make meaningful profit from this business. And do more study on them so as to prosper beyond your imagination.
