Kuroiler chicken brooder finds fortunes from in-demand breed

An en­ter­pris­ing farmer is cash­ing in on the pent up de­mand for su­per­ior chicken vari­ety, Kur­oiler, in Uganda to brood eggs for farm­ers with poor brood­ing prac­tices ham­per­ing avail­ab­il­ity of chicks.

Des­pite the fact that the rare bird has be­come more pop­u­lar among wealth seek­ing farm­ers and youths, there is major set­back sur­round­ing the breed. Ac­cord­ing to Na­kalema Hadija a Kur­oiler farmer from En­tebbe, Kur­oiler hens can lay over 200 eggs per year which com­pared to a paltry 40 eggs per year from local breeds.

Most farm­ers have been fa­cing the chal­lenge of the breed not being able to brood and hatch chicks des­pite the good re­cord of eggs per year. There­fore, in their quest to mul­tiply their brood nat­ur­ally as is the case with the local breeds, these farm­ers hit a dead end. But Kiwa­nuka Wil­liam a vet­eran poultry with about two dec­ades ex­per­i­ence has wit­tingly cap­it­al­ized on this gap di­ver­si­fy­ing his poultry in­vest­ment to offer brood­ing ser­vices to farm­ers at a mod­est fee.

“Many people es­pe­cially the youth are em­bra­cing poultry farm­ing and as a res­ult there are sev­eral knock on ef­fect op­por­tun­it­ies that are mush­room­ing right from feed pro­duc­tion to the end mar­ket tail of the busi­ness’ sup­ply chain. 

here­fore hav­ing been in the trade for two dec­ades I have widely in­ter­ac­ted with the farm­ers and know most of the chal­lenges fa­cing them and cre­ated vi­able solu­tions for these gaps,” ex­plained Kiwa­nuka. Apart from the brood­ing ser­vice, the skill­ful farmer is also of­fer­ing to most first time farm­ers ‘poultry chicks nurs­ery ser­vice’ where he helps in rear­ing the del­ic­ate chicks of Kur­oiler and Quails to a less dan­ger­ous stage.

In order to get more mar­ket for these ser­vices, Kiwa­nuka cre­ated de­mand using his net­work of over 5000 poultry farm­ers whom he has dir­ectly im­pacted on their trade. “I knew that it was feas­ible to add the ser­vice into my line of busi­ness and that de­cision has never dis­ap­poin­ted,” he added.

The ac­com­plished poultry farmer does brood­ing and hatch­ing ser­vices as well as rear­ing the now pop­u­lar Kur­oiler, Quails and lay­ers. On av­er­age, his hatch­ery pro­duces about 14000 Kur­oiler chicks and 4000 quail chicks. De­pend­ing on the needs of the cli­ents, some of the chicks are sold right away. However, there are a cat­egory of emer­ging farm­ers either fist time or those who dread losses. “These farm­ers buy the one day old chicks but re­tain them with me in order for them to de­velop into less risky stages prefer­ably after ad­min­is­tra­tion of the first im­port­ant vac­cin­a­tions.”

Kiwa­nuka has a wealth of ex­per­i­ence and there­fore gladly of­fers these ser­vices.

“Quails are more fra­gile than the Kur­oil­ers hence the vari­ant costs. On av­er­age, I re­ceive about 200 farm­ers per month who re­quire this ser­vice. But at peak peri­ods like the time lead­ing to fest­ive sea­sons like Easter and Decem­ber hol­i­days, the fig­ure can even triple and a times am forced to turn down the or­ders if the avail­able space is filled up,” noted Kiwa­nuka.

In order to over­see the ven­ture, Kiwa­nuka has em­ployed about four work­ers who con­stantly check on the vari­ous birds on the farm. Al­though he ac­know­ledges that the chick nurs­ery ser­vice offered is not his main line of busi­ness, it has proved to be an in­nov­at­ive ven­ture that has seen him reap big. “The ser­vice alone can al­most pay all the op­er­a­tion costs on my farm and dur­ing some period still real­ize profits from it. This is a sus­tain­able model that has seen me scale up my busi­ness to not only hatch­ery ser­vices but also shap­ing and giv­ing hope to first time farm­ers into the del­ic­ate poultry rear­ing trade. In fact they (farm­ers) are lucky be­cause when I took into poultry farm­ing, there were no one to offer me such a soft land­ing and there­fore in­creased the risk of the trade more.”