The broilers that I grow to five-and-a-half to six weeks old are plump and heavy, and my customers like this. The informal market that I supply with live birds and cut-and-cleaned carcasses is very size-conscious. “Through research I settled on the Ross 308 breed for my business, and I buy the day-old chicks from the National Chicks’ hatchery. Gumede currently uses this rondavel to rear 700 broiler chicks until they are 14 days old he then moves them to the adjacent grower house for the rest of the production cycle. So Gumede buys in only 700 day-old chicks at a time, and rears these for two weeks as a single flock in the rondavel while he grows out and markets the other flock of older birds in the broiler house. The rondavel has enough floor space to rear 1 500 broiler chicks, but the 98m² grower house has capacity for no more than 700 fully-grown birds at about seven birds per square metre.
They could then be transferred to the grower house for finishing. Scraping together every cent of cash he could spare, Gumede bought materials and built himself a simple 7m x 14m broiler grower house comprising corrugated iron sheets, wooden poles and planks, and an earthen floor.Ī bonus was that his family’s property, situated in KwaZulu-Natal’s (KZN) Upper Buffelsdraai area just north of Durban, had an empty rondavel within which he could rear his day-old broiler chicks until they were 14 days old. My mother,Įrnestina Gugu, also taught me some lessons from her younger years when she raised small flocks of free-range chickens in the backyard.” “The information I read and YouTube videos I watched were very helpful. “At the beginning of 2019, before I bought the New Hampshire chicks, I’d started to search the Internet for as much information as I could find about growing broilers in the backyard,” says Gumede. Through determination and strategic expansion, Emmanuel Gumede aims to be a large-scale broiler farmer by the time he turns 35.
#BROILER POULTRY FARM HOW TO#
These were the only chicks left when he arrived at the shop that day, and despite New Hampshire chickens having been bred primarily for egg production, he learnt a number of valuable lessons about how to take chickens to maturity.
#BROILER POULTRY FARM TRIAL#
It was only in March 2019 that Gumede began a small production trial in his family’sīackyard with 10-day-old New Hampshire chicks he had bought in a Durban pet shop. He is currently employed full- time as a call-centre supervisor, but his heart lies in fulfilling the big dreams that he has for his 18-month-old, small-scale broiler farming business.
Emmanuel Gumede (26) is a determined young man.
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