By Serlom Kobby
I can’t sleep so let me share this, and more when the beer kicks in.
You’ve heard the President talk about #nkokornkitinkiti, right?
Ever wondered what it would take for Ghana to produce all its own chicken instead of importing most of it?
I have been looking at the numbers and it’s very eye-opening.
We have an estimated population of 33 million people, with a per capita consumption of about 13.7 kg of chicken annually. That adds up to a whopping 452,100 tonnes of chicken every year.
Ghana currently produces only 60,000 tonnes domestically. That means we’re importing 392,100 tonnes (about 87% of what we eat)!
If the average chicken weighs 2 kg when ready for market, Ghana needs 226 million birds annually to feed everyone. Right now, we’re only raising about 30 million locally – just 13% of what we need. This is less than one chicken per Ghanaian…sad huh?
To raise 226 million birds, we’d need some serious amounts of feed:
– 488,268 tonnes of maize (nearly 10 million bags)
– 203,445 tonnes of soybean meal (over 4 million bags)
– 81,378 tonnes of wheat bran (about 1.6 million bags)
That’s a total of 813,780 tonnes of feed annually.
To handle all these chickens, Ghana would need processing facilities that can slaughter and prepare 904,200 birds every working day – that’s over 113,000 birds every hour in an 8-hour workday. You may do your own maths to fit the 24 hour economy.
A self-sufficient chicken industry would create approximately:
– 15,000 farm workers
– 1000 processing plant workers
– 4,000 workers in related industries (feed, transport, etc.)
That’s almost 20,000 direct jobs across the country.
To keep this system running, we’d need a constant supply of baby chicks.
Accounting for a 5% mortality rate, Ghana would require about 238 million day-old chicks every year – that’s 652,000 #nkokonkitinkiti every single day.
At 12 cedis per chick, this represents a 2.86 billion cedi industry (about $184 million) just for the day-old chicks alone.
At current prices (65 cedis per kg. I sell mine at 80 cedis per kilo), Ghana’s chicken industry could be worth:
– 29.4 billion cedis ($1.9 billion) in direct chicken sales
– 11.8 billion cedis ($758 million) in related industries
– 2.9 billion cedis ($184 million) in day-old chick production
That’s a total potential of over 44 billion cedis (about $2.8 billion)
What Would It Take?
Ghana currently produces only 13% of its chicken needs domestically. To achieve self-sufficiency, we’d need to:
1. Increase production by 6.5 times what we do now
2. Build massive feed production capacity
3. Develop large-scale hatchery operations
4. Construct modern processing facilities
5. Train thousands of workers
Is it possible? Absolutely!
Would it be easy? On paper, yes. Practically, it go harder than making Afenyo praise the SONA or getting Adongo off the BOG board.
But the economic potential is enormous, and it will take more than a slogan, hashtags, fora and dreams to get us there.
Happy independence day.
God bless our homeland Ghana.
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As a young farmer, providing housing for my chicken and my staff has been part of my biggest startup costs.
Another surprising challenge has been quality sawdust/wood shavings for poultry.
If we want to meet the targets based on my analysis of the industry, we should have patient and cheap capital.
We also need lots of sawdust to keep the industry going.
To produce the over 200 million chickens annually, Ghana requires about 21 million m² of floor space. Let us assume the current infrastructure available is 40% of what we need. This leaves a need for constructing additional facilities covering 12 million m², almost 3000 acres, of floor space.
The floor space required is over 200 times the size of the area for the National Cathedral and approximately the size of the University of Ghana + GIMPA + UPSA + PRESEC.
At a cost of 500 cedis per square meter for construction, the total investment would be approximately 6.41 billion Ghanaian cedis for housing.
Let’s forget about land cost for now.
Let’s look at the sawdust requirements.
For a deep litter system, Ghana needs about 4 million m³ of sawdust annually. However, Ghana’s current sawdust production is insufficient to meet this demand. I estimate our sawdust production to be around 200,000 m³ annually based on our timber harvest and processing numbers.
This presents a big challenge to the industry. We may have to invest in battery cages or largescale free range systems.
Alternatively, we can grow bamboo and pawlonia for more wood and sawdust. When the beer kicks in, we can do the numbers for sawdust alternatives properly.
Interestingly, if we are able to do this, we can generate 1.5 million tonnes of poultry manure and an additional 1 million tonnes of used sawdust. This will make available about 2 million tonnes of organic fertilizer for plant nutrition across the country.
To put things in perspective, our highest ever fertilizer import has been 600,000 tonnes.
The manure from an optimised poultry industry could be the game-changer for crop production and better yields.
Maybe we should start ‘youth in sawdust aggregation and supply’ and ‘youth in manure/compost processing and supply’.
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If we get our 23 commercial banks to support the poultry industry through their CSR budgets, we can close the gap small small in the industry. Let each of the 23 banks contributes 1.5 million cedis annually for five years, a total of 172.5 million cedis, into what I call the Accelerated Poultry Infrastructure Fund.
With our earlier construction cost of 500 cedis per square meter, this investment can create approximately 345,000 square meters of additional floor space for poultry farming.
Using an 8-week cycle, the additional floor space can support the production of about 22,278,000 chickens or 44,500 tonnes annually. Currnetly, we produce an estimated 60,000 tonnes annually.
Assuming each chicken weighs 2 kg and sells for 65 cedis per kilogram, the revenue generated would be around GHS 2,896,140,000.
The additional floor space can generate about GHS 2.9 billion cedis in revenue annually, contributing significantly to Ghana’s agricultural GDP and supporting local economic growth.
What would it take to do this? A word by the President, incentives by BoG and a structure to ensure contributing banks get the accounts of the farms and the value chain actors.
My poultry structure is about 500 square meters. It can grow approximately 5000 birds per cycle. Using it as the baseline, we can support 690 farmers with infrastructure like that. But to make it better, practical and functional, Give each farmer infrastructure support for 2000 square meters. That brings us to 175 or so farmers.
It will not be difficult to find 175 poultry farmers who can really do the work and can be monitored as well. We can also strategically support fresh graduates who haveve finished their national service at the NSS farms to set up businesses and get this support.
With this infrastructure grant or patient capital, leave us to raise money via crowdfunding and other means to run our farms.
