Muranga farmer finds lucrative opportunity in turkey farming

6 min read

Despite the promising rosy returns, the birds also have their fair share of challenges with Mwangi noting that the most challenging part of them is dealing with the young birds which are sensitive to cold temperatures. photo/roysfarm

Patrick Mwangi an en­ter­pris­ing farmer from Muranga County is re­writ­ing the rules of ag­ribusi­ness in poultry farm­ing hav­ing shrugged off tempta­tions of join­ing the quail craze but fo­cus­ing on the more neg­lected tur­key.

Hav­ing grown up in a home where tur­key was a sig­ni­fic­ant part of the farm­ing busi­ness, Mwangi knew right these rare birds held the key for gain­ing fin­an­cial in­de­pend­ence. “My father reared tur­key when I was still a boy but sud­denly the birds dis­ap­peared from our homestead after a cer­tain Christ­mas period when they were all sold out.” Des­pite this, the now youth­ful farmer had grasped some ba­sics in rear­ing the birds and coupled with his love for farm­ing, he vowed to give it a try in fu­ture.

His child­hood dream star­ted being ful­filled after ac­quir­ing a loan in 2013. ‘’I had ap­plied for the loan to pur­sue other ven­tures but de­cided to take a por­tion of it and gamble into this worth­while ven­ture. It was not easy to settle on the idea as this was also the time that the coun­try was buzz­ing with quail farm­ing which many farm­ers were run­ning into with the hope of being in­stant mil­lion­aires,’’ he said. However, Mwangi man­aged to stay fo­cused and pur­sued his dream start­ing with an ini­tial in­vest­ment of about Sh50, 000.

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As a shrewd farmer, Mwangi first, in­ves­ted his time into re­search of the birds which he mainly did through on­line and farm vis­its to farm­ers who already had tur­key. “I wanted to be sure of what I was in­vest­ing in and as a mat­ter of fact, I could only ac­com­plish this through thor­ough back­ground checks to as­cer­tain their health risks, feed­ing re­gime and even mar­ket for its products like eggs and meat,” ex­plained Mwangi. Hav­ing as­sured him­self that the ven­ture was worth­while, he em­barked on the main pro­ject start­ing off with con­struc­tion of the struc­ture.

This ini­tial cost in­cluded the house struc­tures mainly made from wood and heavy metal on the sides with the nor­mal iron sheets on the roof. He also fenced about half an acre to en­able the mainly free roam­ing birds space to fend for them­selves. In total the con­struc­tion of the struc­ture and the fen­cing cost was about Sh25000. He then star­ted off his trade with seven ma­ture Tur­key six fe­male and a male one.

Ac­cord­ing to him he opted to begin with ma­ture birds be­cause of the high re­turns they prom­ised and the ease of deal­ing with them. “The ma­ture birds were a good bet to begin with be­cause some were already lay­ing eggs and they had fin­ished all the re­quis­ite im­mun­iz­a­tion re­quire­ments. There­fore I learnt on how to man­age the whole flock from the ex­per­i­ence I got from the ini­tial stock.   In ad­di­tion the birds are not heavy feed­ers com­pared to exotic chick­ens. Seven ma­ture birds feeds on a paltry less than 2kilos of com­mer­cial feeds be­cause they sup­ple­ment the feed with their own free range feeds.

The key to keep­ing tur­key is al­low­ing them enough space to fend for them­selves. These birds also feed on and re­quire sun light ex­pos­ure for healthy breed­ing and growth. He noted, “If you deny them that then they may be very weak and de­velop rick­ety tend­en­cies as I wit­nessed a case with one that my brother had kept in door to­gether with quails.” If they are denied the spa­cious en­vir­on­ment, Mwangi warned that even their lay­ing pat­tern is heav­ily hampered.

Cur­rently Mwangi’s farm has over 18 birds. Ac­cord­ing to him, the mar­ket de­mand for the tur­key and its eggs is over­whelm­ing but still un­der­fed. Since start­ing off, I have sold off over 10 tur­keys with some ma­ture male bird able to fetch over Sh9000 es­pe­cially dur­ing the fest­ive sea­son. An egg re­tails at Sh150 and al­though the bird is not a good con­sist­ent layer, Mwangi noted that one bird can lay an av­er­age of four eggs per week. He has an in­cub­ator where he broods the chicks selling a one day old chick at Sh500. “Cur­rently all the eggs in the in­cub­ator are already booked and am forced to turn down other cli­ents with some com­ing as far as from Kissii and Kisumu,” noted Mwangi If slaughtered, a kilo of meat re­tails at Sh900 and some well fed male Tur­keys can weigh up to 24 kilos mak­ing it a vi­able ven­ture. Ac­cord­ing to this bud­ding farmer if the birds are well fed, they start lay­ing eggs at around five months al­though the mal take a longer period of about eight months to ma­ture.

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Des­pite the prom­ising rosy re­turns, the birds also have their fair share of chal­lenges with Mwangi not­ing that the most chal­len­ging part of them is deal­ing with the young birds which are sens­it­ive to cold tem­per­at­ures. “The chicks are more fra­gile than the chicken to cold weather which in­fects them with res­pir­at­ory com­plic­a­tions but the key to this is grant­ing the birds ut­most at­ten­tion, enough warmth and ob­serving all the re­quired im­mun­iz­a­tion against dis­eases like co­ci­di­osis, New­castle, Gum­boro among oth­ers.”  He ad­vised that if one wants to reap from any ag­ribusi­ness ven­ture, then he needs to cre­ate time and phys­ic­ally in­volve him­self in the day to day activ­it­ies. “It’s only through doing this that you even in­spire the work­ers to do the right thing and to take their work ser­i­ously”

As fate would have it, Mwangi was destined for suc­cess and now nine months later he smiles back at the mile­stones he has achieved. I im­plore more ser­i­ous farm­ers who want to reap the gains of agri busi­ness to ventiirre into this noble en­tity be­cause the prob­lem in the vil­lages is that many farm­ers don’t ven­ture into in­come gen­er­at­ing ag­ribusi­ness activ­it­ies just for the sake without a clear vis­ion of busi­ness model and how to reap gains in it. This he sup­ports with the ex­amples of tur­key farm­ers in the coun­try who rare may be two or four and at the peak of fest­ive peri­ods, they sell all the birds and again take long to start off.

“This is a lifelong ven­ture avail­able for any stall­holder farmer in the coun­try and un­like quails which was hyped and faded, the Tur­key birds have been here for ages and only few farm­ers dare go for it and as a res­ult the re­turns are so mouth wa­ter­ing that one will not re­gret”

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