Rethinking the Chicken Market

Let’s raise chickens to support our association. Well that sounds like a wonderful and sustainable idea.

 Little did I know as an unseasoned volunteer in my first year that like 98.9% of community organizations have chicken projects. Organizations often begin such projects, not really because they have done a thorough analysis of the market for live chicken sales, but because they are unoriginal and that is what everyone else does.

It is like when I assigned my 12th grade students a business proposal project. They had to develop a basic business idea, analyse the market for their project in Chidenguele, and create a simple budget in English. About 75% of the students were completely lacking in any hint of creativity and were planning on selling coconuts right next to the 245245 other women that sell coconuts for the exact same price.

Also, little did I know, raising and selling chickens is a whole heck of a lot of work with a very low profit margin. For example, you can spend something like 1,500 USD producing the poultry, which involves daily care, cleaning, feeding, heating, transporting materials, etc only to make about 140USD of profit. Not worth the hassle if you ask me.

But of course, my wizened realizations that chicken projects are not, in fact, all that wonderful have come only after 1.5 years of project prep, 6 months of attempted implementation, 2 rounds of chicken sales and two horrible weeks of chasing, corralling, carrying and cursing chickens from Chidenguele to Kingdom Come.

Word to the wise. Don’t do it.

The project was a headache from the beginning.

We applied and were approved for a VAST grant. How exciting!

But between the time we wrote the proposal, the time it was approved and the time we actually received the money and could begin implementing the project, about a year had passed, price inflation went crazy, our carefully planned budget was unfortunately quite irrelevant and our aid award was insufficient. This was not totally our fault and more had to do with the grant provider’s lack of timeliness. But even despite these downer elements, I, ever the optimist, maintained my high hopes and busied myself trying to get creative with the little money we had available to us (A skill of mine that was well nurtured by my time as a teacher in a cheapskate, zero resources school).

I mean what was I expecting while planning the project? Smooth sailing? Let’s be honest, not a single thing I have ever tried to do in Mozambique ever ran according to plan or schedule.

In an attempt to stretch our funding, we made cuts every which way in our budget, inching towards that ever illusive balance in our account, trying to cut out materials for chicken coop construction without compromising the end product’s quality, lowering our first batch of chicks from 800 to 500 and just generally cutting corners. Somehow, we managed to get about 500USD within range and just borrowed the rest in somewhat desperate hopes that our business would be a success.

But, of course, on top of our no money mo’ problems, other challenges came one after another. The carpenter, as Mozambican carpenters tend to be, was late, lazy and lugubrious in his work, which delayed the coop construction. Our chicken care-givers were also slightly less than dedicated and gave sub-par care. Well, except when they were accidentally over feeding the chickens – resulting in extra-large poultry, which was delicious for consumption but painful for the pocket-book because it demanded a few thousand extra meticais in feed funds that we most certainly didn’t have.

However, despite the setbacks, the headaches and the discouraging feeling that my entire life revolved around some crazy chickens, sales of our first batch was slightly successful. We had a low death rate, big fat juicy chickens and our customers were enthusiastic. Within six days, we sold all 488 chickens.

And they were tasty.

Oh, but then the Mr. Trouble reared his head again. We (and by we I mean my counterpart) waited too long to request more chickens from the producers, and there weren’t enough chickens in the Xai-Xai/Maputo area for us to grow and sell our product in November, December, OR January, which are all prime party, poultry selling, profitable months.

In this gap, between sales of our first batch in October and our acquisition of the second batch in February, the chicken market in Chidenguele changed dramatically. Chicken producers sprung up every which way and product prices soared even higher making community members less likely to buy expensive meat products like chickens. Thos e who did buy, tended to purchase 1-3 chickens rather than 5-10. On top of it all, there was a feed shortage ( and my counterpart wasn’t takin care a bidness) and our chickens were skinny and underfed.

These factors compounded with the continued lack of dedication of the care-givers/sellers (why we didn’t just find new care-givers is beyong me… some things make too much sense), explains why I, the little white girl in her sundress, spent hours upon hours coopin it up. For two weeks, my life revolved around a coop and its inhabitants. Once again, I had to get down, dirty and creative to start moving some product out of the coop if for no other reason than to make own my life more pleasant.

I don’t mean to sound selfish, but go smother your feet and hands with chicken shit and spend 8 hours a day trying to sell skinny, over-priced chickens with little or no help from your partners and tell me what you think. At one point I was carrying massive rice sacks of saw-dust on my head uphill for 2k and walking over an hour to personally hand deliver 6 chickens at a time to clients. Damn the chickens.

I am usually not a complainer, but I was just not born to hang out down-wind of the chicken coop sniffing its wafting poo and gleefully frolicking in the dirty saw-dust and scooping salmonella with my bare hands… neither is that the reason I joined the Peace Corps.

So, two weeks and lots of product pushing later, the chickens are gone, thank goodness… and I am moving on. Bye bye Chidenguele and your unfavorable chicken market. I am getting an office job in the big city.