Introduction & Personal Story

Story My Poultry Farming Journey

As you already know, my name is Adeleye Daniel. I started poultry farming out of passion — out of love. Almost 8+ years back, my girlfriend (now my wife) brought the idea of starting a simple backyard poultry farm & boy oh boy I loved the idea.

Maybe because it gave me the opportunity to build something with the love of my life, or just maybe poultry farming was in my genes 🧬 — I can't quite tell. But what I do remember is that we started. The passion was strong, the will to do was powerful and even the gods were on our side.

We borrowed a friend's cage (no money to build one), gathered all our savings and got our first birds (₦3,500). We bought 4 cartons of cockerels — ₦500/carton at the time. I remember vividly when my babe brought the birds 🐔, I started calculating money.

I said something like: "Baby we are in money o" — 200 birds × ₦2,500 = ₦500k. No be juju be that? See, there were too many questions we didn't ask. Hell, there were too many things we didn't know.

Gaps The Critical Knowledge Gaps We Had

Things we didn't know that cost us dearly:

• The right kind of feed and feed formulation
• How to brood properly
• Adjusting cages according to the weather
• How to reduce feed cost
• Grow-out cage setup and proper spacing requirements
• How to get to market
• Vaccination — organic or synthetic
• Pest management and dealing with foul odor
• Debeaking techniques

Disaster The Disaster: Day 1

Day 1 of our birds being in the cage, the unthinkable happened — WE LOST 10 BIRDS. Just too many things going wrong at once. Unfortunately, we lost 196 birds in 2 weeks.

Lmao 🤣 there was a time, with no money to feed the birds I had to give them garri. The garri decimated my birds by half — I lost more than 100 birds and what saved the rest was that I quickly used a broom to pack garri out of their throats. They couldn't breathe. I almost had to use my mouth to suck the garri out.

Funny times that bring back old wonderful memories. Nothing as good as growing a business with the love of your life.

Mission Why I'm Teaching This

My journey so far has been nothing but awesome. I realized that many people also want to grow birds but they are not sure about:

• How to reduce mortality rate (a serious issue)
• Total cost of starting
• Eliminating foul odor
• Reducing feed cost