Coordinator of natnuPreneur Broiler Outgrower Scheme called natnuPreneur Farmer, Mr. Gbolade Adewole, who disclosed this in an interview, said using the same piloting model and testing, they have designed and tested their system over the past seven months and set to launch.
“For natnuPreneur seller scheme, we noticed that we are okay on the supply side, at least for now. Currently, if we want to do 50,000 chickens daily, there are farms to do it, there are processing plants to process it and there are storage rooms to keep them. With the experiment cum pilot completed, we are confident that the natnuPreneur seller scheme will also record successes similar to those achieved with the farming side of the business, thereby completing our loop.”
He analysed that 1.5m metric tons of chicken is 1.5b kilograms of chicken. “The average breast chicken is 1.4 kg, so that gives us 1, 071,428,000. That is the amount of chicken that we consume every year. Give or take, plus or minus 25 per cent depends on the statistics you are looking at.
“So, revenue on input alone will be about N900b if we were producing 100 per cent of what we consume, since we are producing 30 per cent of N900b; that means we are losing N600b that cannot be done here. For example, people are opening feed-mills all over Nigeria, which has brought about competitiveness among market forces, which is good for the farmers. However, it also means that some people will be knocked out of the feed market despite all the investments they have made. The ripple effect is what is more dangerous like job loss.
“If Nigerian farmers are allowed to produce what we consume (1.5 million tons of chicken) this will translate into a lot of job opportunities. For instance, we should have well over one million attendants working on different farms. That is what we meant when we said across the value chain; our natnuPreneur scheme alone has the capacity to employ well over two million people. If we are to produce approximately, 1,071,428,000 chickens, you can imagine the number of people that we will need to produce them – the number of people we will need at the hatcheries, the feed-mills, in logistics, laboratories, extension officers, veterinary doctors and others can only be imagined.
Adewole, while highlighting some of the challenge faced by the natnuPreneur scheme said: “Our farmers’ state of happiness ranges from between reasonably happy to ecstatic.
“It’s not a perfect system yet. Hence, as expected, there will be hiccups from time to time as we learn more about the farmers and general operating environment. A case in point is the smuggled chickens saga currently creating a glut in the market. We have been a bit slack in keeping with our five working days post-delivery payment agreement due to slow sales. This we have started working upon by recalibrating our system to adjust to the market forces and we should be back on track with reasonable adjustment to our agreements by January 2018.”
“Furthermore, some of our farmers used to have issues of buy back pricing, but because we developed what we call a “buy-back price equation,” the process is now transparent enough to them that they can put in the variables into the equation and the buy-back price will be computed automatically.”
