...but managing the process has been tough
Poultry production is very serious business. So, better start out very small and learn as much as you can before investing considerable funds if and when you get such opportunity.
That goes for even graduates of agriculture from college, polytechnic or university including me.
Those experienced farmers that are not lettered that people call illiterates are very highly intelligent when it comes to agriculture. Book knowledge is good, it has it's importance but when it comes to the nitty-gritty of agriculture i.e. farming you gotta DO IT, to really KNOW IT.
Apart from being a graduate of agriculture and working for about a decade as an agriculture journalist, I have attended many agriculture-related conferences and trainings. One of the trainings I have attended is on poultry production business - this three-day training on a leading farm was about N25,000 - 10 years ago - now it would be over N100,000.
In spite of all those knowledge acquisition, you need to DO IT, to really KNOW IT.
So whether well-educated or not, farming especially for someone who has never really practised it is best started with whatever you have - I just got out baskets I have at home to house two chickens.
After a few weeks, the basket I started with became too small for the two chickens as they were growing bigger.
I looked within the house and emptied a bigger basket I had been using to store coconut shells.
This current basket doesn't have a proper cover, so the chickens would sometimes escape. Apart from littering the premises with their poops, they would feast on my garden plants, making my heart ache. Why? because some of the plants are so very precious as health food and some I am still researching on for curative and disease-prevention purposes.
When I try to re-capture them, the chickens would run helter-skelter, making me run after them helplessly - rather than cry, I just laugh.
. It's until nigttime when they calm down to rest that I would grab them and put them back in the improvised chicken coop. So I have had to get very big stones and put on the cover of the coop.
Even when the hen started laying, due to lack of experience I didn't realise it would have to finish laying all its eggs before it would start brooding - sitting over the eggs. That is if it is willing to brood. So I may need to go to market to purchase a brooding hen to hatch the eggs.
Yesterday afternoon when I tried to get the hen I have to start brooding, it showed me weehn! by getting up every time I turned to leave. I kept checking on it and making it sit on the eggs. After I left at a certain time, the hen escaped and started running around the garden feasting on my precious plants.
How and why I started chicken rearing
Due to space constraints and lack of proper facilities in my mini-garden, I had initially decided to put off chicken production.
But about three months ago I went to the market to buy chicken to cook. Like so many of us, getting used to the skyrocketing prices of foodstuffs is tough. Almost every time you go to buy something, the price would have increased considerably.
Realising how much more the price of chicken had increased from the last time, I diffused the annoyance by purchasing a local female and male chicken to start producing my own chickens - isn't that better than going to buy hemp to smoke out the frustration or buying weapon to attack or threaten fellow citizens or doing some nasty things to others like some idiots do in response to the economic challenges?
When you diffuse the tension in you due to the challenges or difficulties, then you can think straight to assess clearly what is happening, understand that everyone is facing challenges in some ways and think constructively on what you need to do - past government administrations have gone, current government will someday go, another government will come and also go, but what should remain? - our country. So how are we going to have our country to live in peacefully if some people go crazy due to hunger and come at fellow citizens?
Anyone who is challenged can at least do something to minimise the hunger challenge, reduce the madness that hunger can cause so they can deal with any unsatisfactory government with sanity, not with insanity destroying the country that belongs to every citizen, not only the relatively small number in government
