eBusiness Weekly
Tawanda Musarurwa
Poultry producer, Irvines Zimbabwe, says significant benefits can be accrued by fully capacitating rural-communal small-scale poultry producers across the country.
The company says it sees scope for rural small-scale farmer centric value chain development in poultry and how this can boost broad economic growth.
Irvines Zimbabwe chief executive David John Irvines, has roughly estimated that the small-scale poultry producers could currently be earning around $850 million a year from their projects.
Irvine Zimbabwe currently produces over 1,5 million day-old chicks per week across Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Botswana. And the company invests in training programmes to foster entrepreneurship in communal areas.
“In the last four years we have spent around US$4 million in developing rural agriculture. We have a vibrant private sector in this country and we must make use of it.
“We are selling 500 000 day-old chicks a week to small producers; we are training over 25 000 people per year.
“These people are getting world-class results, 5 percent mortality in about five to six weeks, which is comparable to what Irvines or the big guys down in South Africa are getting. We have got these people trained and they are doing exceptionally well,” said Irvines at the launch of the Ease of Doing Business Reform Programme 2019–2020 recently.
“We have estimated that a family buying 100 day-old chicks every cycle (about every seven weeks) will earn $11 000 a year, and if you add it all together, with that 500 000 a week, income from the rural areas can reach $850 million a year, and I would suggest that it is probably higher than income from maize in some of these areas.
“And if we add Command Agriculture and contract growing to this, rural income from poultry production could rise to over $1 billion. This is big business.”
It is estimated that small-scale farmers constitute the large production base of the Zimbabwe poultry industry, but these are largely located mainly in peri-urban areas, around town community markets.
National broiler meat production declined to 7 546 tonnes, in the third quarter of 2017 after an outbreak of AI. This increase was driven mainly by the (largely peri-urban) small holder which almost doubled its production of broiler meat (from 4 715t to 8 163t) during this
period.
During the course of last year, broiler meat production in the country began hitting record production levels, with monthly averages of around 11 600t per month during the second quarter of 2018.
“Command Poultry”, which was launched last year under the Command Livestock initiative, is expected to extend the small-scale poultry business to the rural-communal areas.
