For the smart Nigerian poultry farmer, this is the time to rake in millions of Naira every month however comatose the economy may be… and put more Protein on millions of dinning-tables nationwide. I am looking at a population of 230 million Nigerians, 200 million of them eating one egg or 6.6 million crates daily. At an all-time low price of N2,000 a crate, the association should earn N6,600,000,000 x N2,000 or N13,200,000,000,000. Please, forgive me. I am not a money man and I have no head for figures. Nevertheless, I reckon that every day, poultry farmers can earn N13.2 billion from egg alone through better farm management, halving current price of N4,000 per crate and improving marketing. Unfortunately, half of the members of the Nigerian Poultry Association (NPA) have closed shop because of ineptitude! Food is the fastest moving commodity toady. With beef and fish out of reach, and about 200 million Nigerians wishing to eat at least one egg every day to beef up their recommended daily allowance (RDA) of protein, egg price should fall by half to under N100 if poultry farmers were dynamic.
However, the average poultry farmer is uninventive, mentally lazy and still mentally colonised by Europeans and Americans. The colonial master is wise. He takes away your taste and lifestyle and implants his own in your brain. You no longer can be yourself. You think and act like him and become dependent upon him until your spirit wakes up and can engage in a bitter struggle to tear yourself away from his stranglehold. Nigerian poultry farmers, caught in this colonial mentality web, have been uninventive since the prices of poultry inputs started rising. They slam the back of their palm on their lap, telling us they cannot find American Dollar to import soya beans and fish meal for the protein input of poultry feed. They repetitiously keep lamenting. How sad! Whoever tells them that only fish meal and soy beans wired into their brains by Euro-Americans are the only protein sources for animal feed?
I know they are not, from my experience as a lay farmer in the 1990s when I reared about 30 local and poultry chickens along with some rabbits in the backyard of my residence. None of these animals died. I neither fed them poultry feed nor gave them pharmaceutical drugs. Simultaneously, I raised about 300 pigs and piglets in one year from three sows (female pigs) and one boar (male). At today’s average price of N100,000 per table size pig, that could be N30 million. Were age and I on the same page, and I could push out that number every month, would I today not live in my dream house where I designed a fish pond in the backyard to run from one end of a perimeter fence to another? Young people should not throw away their country with all its wonderful opportunities, and should learn to make ways out of cul de sacs. I strayed into the poultry pen and into the pig farm in the late 1990s when Nigeria’s military strong man, Gen. Abacha, shut some newspapers, including The Guardian, in which I worked. For one year, my salary was gone! So was my wife’s. She was a Political Science lecturer at Lagos State University ( LASU). The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the lecturers’ trade union, was on a nation-wide strike and Gen. Abacha suspended salaries. In this circumstance, one of our children scored over 90 per cent in Lagos State Common Entrance Examination to Secondary School and was offered admission to the prestigious MODEL COLLEGE, KANKON near Badagry, at that time and for several years running, the best Secondary School in Lagos State. We were to secure the admission with N5,000, which we did not have!. Luckily, a family friend, Mr. Akin Soname, visited us. Two of his daughters were in the school. He knew we had no money and that I do not beg for money. He returned the following day with cash gift of N5,000 for our son. Next day, we were in Kankon to pay the acceptance fee. Before the start of school, I found myself in the first poultry ever. I had tried to sell vegetable before then, but market women doscouraged me with under pricing. Mrs.Beatrice Oloyede gave me the first 20 crates of egg, deeply moved that I had so easily dropped down the social ladder. I would later also receive egg for sale from Mrs. Ihegboro of Ajuwon, another border area, and from Mrs. Mudashiru, wife of former Lagos State Governor, Air Commodore Gbolahan Mudashiru, at their farm depot at GRA, Ikeja, Lagos. I earned much more money every week than I earned at work every month! Within months, I was selling about 300 crates a week.
A crates cost N200 then and we added N50 profit. Soon, I added ice block in paint-buckets, chewing stick, palm oil (thanks to Prof. Rafiu Akindele, formerly at University of Ife and later at the NIIA in Lagos, who had connections with Apoje Oil Palm Factory). I sold egg to market women, mallams, food vendors, mai-tea and even helped to establish unemployed mallams in mai-tea business. I gave them egg in the morning and collected the proceeds in the evening. What did I not sell? I sold Ijebu chewing stick, coconut, ice block, herbs, rice etc. Mrs. Oloyede and her friend Mrs. Monisola Aiyesimoju exposed me to pig farming at Oke-Aro, a border area of Ogun State with Lagos State. I returned home from school ran to sell ice blocks and, then, egg, followed by raw rice or any other business. After a bath and breakfast, I headed to the Lagos State Secretariat, Alausa, Ikeja, to sell herbs, starting with the Ministry of Education where my high school classmate, Mr. Adekunle Onifade, was Assistant Director. In the evening, I collected proceeds of sales I made in the morning. I immediately separated capital from profit and shared profit into various envelopes such as school fees, housekeeping, electricity, water, petrol and car servicing, building materials etc. This was a new life of a newspaper Editor-in-Chief who did not subscribe to the culture of Ebi n pa mi or Ebi n pa wa. I knew that man is meant to create and rule his environment. And guess what? I began to build a house during the adversity.
Where I am heading is the experiments I carried out with chickens and pigs that may help today’s lamenting poultry farmers. This could reduce egg price, promote volume sales, bring more profit and provide more protein on the dining table.
CHICKENS
I hardly realised I was practising organic poultry farming which is a money spinner globally, today. Rather than give those birds pharmaceutical antibiotics, I ground to paste a basketful of garlic bulbs which I mixed with their drinking water. Sometimes, I interchanged with lime or lemon and their ground peels. Lime and lemon were inexpensive in those days because their nutritional and health value were not well exposed to the human health market. Another great one was CHRISTMAS CANTALOUPE or CHRISTMAS MELON which Yoruba call TAGIRI. This may be ground to paste and fermented in livestock drinking water. It has been shown to prevent and cure New Castle and Gomboro diseases which sometimes devastated livestock population. For human and livestock, Christmas melon provides vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, anti-inflammatory, immune boosters and probably anti-cancer agent. None of my chickens died. I used their fecal waste mixed with saw dust as manure for pineapples, sugar cane, parminger, vervain, scent leaf etc. I harvested lots of egg from the native chickens which I s old in the open market from where herbalists purchased them. For their feed, I obtained the waste from the processing of maize to pap and mixed with protein sources from plants, maggots and chicken feathers.
I produced or obtained maggots from the poultries, cleaned them up and roasted them with leaf powder. The process may have been alright for a small holding, but can it not be improved upon for larger stocks? Poultry farmers can grow SPIRULINA in small ponds on their farms. It is probably the plant with the biggest source of chlorophyll and beta carotene in the plant kingdom. Its proteins are complete and between 60 to 70 per cent absorbable. It comes with minerals, vitamins, plant sterols and other factors. The more beta carotene a chicken consumes, the more yellow the yolk of its egg. Poultry chickens are not fed plant feed and so do not have access to adequate beta carotene. To make the egg yolk yellow, therefore, the farmer adds dyes which may be carcinogenic to the chicken and humans. All the injections the chicken is given for Gomboro, New Castle diseases end up in their flesh and egg. This is why some of them have to be discontinued one month or 14 days before slaughter. However, who in the face of business, keeps to these rules? How do we know how chemically safe the egg and chicken we are eating are? Everything is made so easy for the chicken farmer of today in the INFORMATION AGE only if he or she is not mentally lazy and living in the past. Many plants are proteinous.
Jatropha Tanjorensis Ellis, called IYANA IPAJA in Lagos or HOSPITAL TOO FAR in Akwa Ibom or Catholic Vegetable by other persons, is a remarkable plant. It is a popular vegetable in Asia. It grows rapidly, especially if well tended. It only requires cooking or roasting for about 20 minutes to neutralise the anti-nutrients. According to a study published in https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043933917000824, Jatropha seed bears 35 to 50 per cent crude protein which may replace soya bean as a protein source in livestock feeds when they are treated with heat or chemical to neutralise anti-nutrient inhibitors present in them. Such treatment releases several other nutrients such as antioxidants, immune modulators and anti-inflammatories etc. Can the poultry association not set up Jatropha plantations and a Jatropha seed mill factory for livestock feed? This import substitution will lower poultry cost, increase profit, make poultry products more organic and health friendly and create jobs. What about SORGHUM BICOLOR stalk which cost next to nothing but provides 85 to 87 per centcrude protein? We should not be throwing away maize covers, they can be used for many purposes, including manure. What about those reddish leaves, the FRUIT (or Almond) tree sheds regularly?
Can the poultry farmers not grow other ornamental but nutritious plants on the farm and mill them to powder? I once solved the question of BONE MEAL by gathering the shells of egg from mai-teas and grinding them to powder for calcium. Those leaf powders provided the counterpart magnesium. For more protein, I collected chicken feathers from the then Onipanu chicken market by the FirstBank branch, and roasted them to powder in a mixed of palm kernel cake, maggots and other protein sources. Onipanu Chicken Market was an eye sore but thriving “wait-and-get” chicken market were chicken was slaughtered, cured, dressed and bagged within minutes. The women threw away the feathers, unknown to them it was money and nutritious for the chicken. So, they gladly gave it to me to dispose of for them. Google says feathers present between 75 and 80 per cent crude protein, in particular amino acids such as arginine, cystine, glycine and phenylalanine.
Reading provides information and information converted to action provides power over the economy and environment. It is remarkable that the young microbiology graduates I approached in those days to partner with me in maggots and spirulina farmingjç, considered the job too dirty for their level of education. That is what I believe still holds back the poultry farmers today.
People who know that I stopped eating poultry chicken and egg about 20 years ago may wonder why I have suddenly become an advocate for their production. I still eat egg but from free range chicken and guinea fouls. It is the egg and flesh of the caged, sick and chemicalised birds I despise. I cannot recommend for other persons what I do not eat. That is why I suggested natural materials in the place of pharmaceuticals.
EBI N PA WA
Everywhere, people say they are hungry…”EBI N PA WA”. That statement is even more powerful than merely expressing hunger. Ebi n pa wa means “hunger is killing us”. The tongue is a powerful organ. It forms words. Like thoughts and the physical deed, the spoken word forms the environment of everyone. Thus, no one can rise beyond his or her thoughts, the spoken words and the deed. Is it, therefore, surprising and shameful even as Peter Obi has put it, that Ukraine, a country of 39 million people by United Nation 2024 projection and living under a devastating war for two years running with Russia, is not hungry and making donation of maize and sorghum to a hungry Nigerian population of 228 million people by United Nations projection for this year. More annoying is that Nigeria has an arable land mass of 37 million hectares whereas the arable land mass in Ukraine is eight million from which it provides food for itself and other nations. I subscribed to the conception that the womanhood of a nation is the barometer for measuring the well being of the people.
Currently, many Nigerian women, especially the young ones, are walking half naked on the street and opening their legs just about anywhere for just about anyone. No one is thinking of cultivating the land. The churches and mosques are growing richer but are not investing in agriculture to feed their hungry congregations. The Agriculture Minister, Abubakar Kyari, the 36 agriculture commisioners and the FCT mandate secretary for agriculture appear to have no revolutionary ideas for improving food supply. Is it not enough to say food prices are up because food is being exported for more income to hungrier nations around us. In my FACEBOOK account at (John Olufemi Kusa), I have added my widow’s mite contributions on how to farm 100 trillion rabbits and 100 trillion Papaya in one or two years alone. If 100m Nigerians are led by the Agriculture Minister and Commisioners to plant pawpaw seeds everywhere every day for one month, we may have one billion seedlings on our hands. If we treat them to become female and dwarf by removing the tap root, as Mrs. Shade Kusa has taught many of us, and if each one produces about 50 fruits every year, we can imagine how many pawpaw fruits may be available on the dining table. I imagine everyone eating two free pawpaw fruits for breakfast. There should be no hunger in the land. The rabbit revolution will be a bigger kettle of fish. We have no business with hunger. Pitifully, this generation is thoughtless and bereft of KNOWLEDGE, however ERUDITE it is. With the astral environment heavy with negative vibrations which the populace which planted the seeds must experience, does a government, well meaning as it could be, not labour in vain?
220 MILLION EGGS A DAY
Yes, Nigeria can produce no fewer than 220 million eggs a day, one for everyone. I thought of giving this idea to Mr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the Interior Minister, before Beta Edu’s spanner in the works. He was a dynamic, fast-moving minister. He had sorted out log jams in the Passport Office and got many prisoners money to pay their court fines and return home. Nevertheless, he was still feeding about 80,000 prisoners in 244 prisons nation-wide every day at a cost of about N700 per meal. When the budget got too high and the rations were to be reduced recently, some prisoners violently protested. When I heard that, I thought all of us free citizens were stupid. If 80,000 fellow citizens broke the law which we always stress ourselves to respect, why should they be eating three square meals a day on our bills with nothing in return besides serving their terms when many of us eat only one meal a day or none at all?
Mrs. Beatrice Oloyede, a poultry guru, informed me two farm hands can feed 5,000 birds in one day. From this, I wondered why the prisons cannot deploy five inmates to 5,000 birds and, nationwide, create 5,000 poultries, each of 5,000 birds or 25 million birds. If half of them lay eggs every day, this would mean 12.5 million eggs or 417 crates. If all 80,000 prisoners nationwide eat two eggs a day, this is only 160,000 eggs a day out of 12.5 million. The remainder could be sold. Prisoners can be paid for their labour, while learning a trade. A special fund can be created from which, after their terms, they may be given start-up capital for their own poultries. If other prisoners are engaged in other areas of agriculture, such as rabbit farming and vegetable farming, the government can save a lot of money from prison food budget. If society follows this trend, there should be little or no cry of … EBI N PA WA…
