feed stands as one of the major factors influencing the profitability of animal production.
Profitable animal production requires that farmers have access to balanced feeds at affordable cost.
Raw materials for feeds formation are locally available, hence farmers can utilize this opportunity to formulate feeds themselves in order to reduce cost of feeds production.
Essence of feeds formulation is to access balanced feeds at the cheapest possible cost of production.
We can therefore summarize reasons for self feeds formulation thus:
1. To reduced our cost of animal production downward by about 30%.
The profit margin of a farmer who buys feeds will be very low.
It will be very wise to start formulating feeds yourself once your birds are up to 100 and above.
You may not necessarily need to own equipment at this stage.
You can take your formula to toll millers and your feed will be prepared for you.
2. To prepare balanced feed at the possible cheapest cost using quality local ingredients.
There are millers who compromised their quality of feeds in term of both crude protein and energy level.
You want to be sure you had adequate and quality feeds for your birds always.
3. Formulating feeds yourself guaranties regular supply.
Running out of feeds could cost great losses especially to layers.
Eggs production will greatly drop, if your birds miss their feeds and that could take up to 2 weeks for any possible rise.
You don’t want any possible disappointment from millers that can cause you these great losses.
4. We formulate feeds because the raw materials are readily available in our local market. All the raw materials can be sought for in our local markets.
We shall see methods of processing for those that needs further processing, e.g. blood meal, bone meal etc.
5. Formulating feeds yourself, gives you access to fresh feeds always.
You may be surprised a time that some bags of feed delivered to your farm are already moldy or weevils infested.
You cannot guaranties the quality of such feeds.
They may cause more harm than good.
6. You will be at a good competitive edge in sale of your products, when you formulate feeds yourself.
Other competitors will find it difficult to compete with you, because you have reduced your cost of production all along.
For example, a farmer who formulates feeds himself could afford to sell his table size broilers at #1,200.00 and still smiles to bank while other farmers who patronized commercial millers will find it difficult to do same.
7. The equipment for milling could be sought for locally and are not expensive as many thought.
As a beginner you could just go for harmer mill and weighing scale.
Harmer mill crushes the raw ingredients. You could mix manually on a well cemented floor with shovel until you can afford to buy a mixer.
