One of the so many reasons why poultry farmers struggle is not conducting a feasibility study before starting up. No matter how small it may be, you should try to estimate in terms of potential income expectation, feed cost which takes a large chunk of percentage in the investment as well as farm structures to erect before starting the farm .
That is only how you will know if your monetary resource can sustain 1000 birds before you start up with 2000 birds.
Without the knowledge of all these things, especially your running cost of which the feed cost is the most essential, you may encounter a whole lot of challenges along the way if care is not taken leading to premature closing down of the farm.
Therefore, a basic feasibility study projection is very necessary to make you have an idea of how your financial resource can take you.
Imagine if a newbie is basing his assumption on the notion that his/her bird will lay the same number of eggs throughout its life cycle, then you will definitely start up and end up in the business prematurely.
You should know how these basics work so as not to arrive at a non conclusive end.
The first few weeks is the most important in the life of a chicken. This period calls for proper and knowledgeable care. The brooding stage is the foundation and what occurs at this period can determine the future outcome in terms of birds performance .
A poor brooding management would mar your birds performance as a lot of parameters and indices that would determine your future results would have been compromised.
For example, during the first few days, if the development of your bird is well nurtured , they wont only get good body weight at an older age , but they would also build immunity against diseases and also use their feed efficiently for the rest of their life because the development of body organs like liver, spleen,that are built for immunity have the highest growth within the first seven days .
These immunogenic organs will grows several times their sizes at week one and lay down a good foundation to fight diseases for best performance throughout their life cycle. This is talking from a practical point of view based on past experiences with birds raised when two seperate batches of birds with different body weights (below standard and within standard) were raised till they became spent layers.
The difference in result was wide and clear in terms performance parameters like egg size, egg shell quality, cumulative mortality percentage and cumulative egg production when both batches of birds were sold off as spent flock.
If you can successfully succumb the brooding phase , then the chicken business becomes much easier and less challenging. Reason why some farmers prefer to buy Point-of-lay chicken to avoid the hassles and technicalities that comes with brooding and rearing, but you must buy healthy , uniform weight and completely vaccinated point-of -lay birds from reputable sources ONLY!.
Other basics like not knowing when the chickens are experiencing some form of discomfort , not observing the floor space requirements per chicken, not knowing the gram per bird to be consumed at each stage of its growth , not observing basic bio-security guidelines and so on.
Start on a smaller scale as you will learn a lot along the line and from there you can then expand after an accomplished period of time.
In essence, you need an experienced poultry farmer to assist you with the basics in this business due to the fact that poultry farming business is a sensitive business that doesn’t give any room for trial and error at all costs to prevent your fingers from getting burnt!
If the potential or aspiring poultry farmer can follow due process and get to acquire both theoretical and practical knowledge about poultry farming as a whole, then he should be rest assured of a near successful rearing of chickens for either meat purposes or egg laying purposes.
