Fabiola Matuzee, a registered accountant has managed to grow her poultry business from an experimental stage into a fully-fledged business that utilises value addition to its main products at every step of the way.
Although her flagship business has been egg production, Matuzee sells almost anything a chicken can produce: feet, head, livers and whole chickens from her flock of broilers.
The seed that hatched the results the business enjoys today was planted some time ago, and although there were several setbacks along the way, Matuzee said it was a pleasure watching her farming business grow to its current stage.
In 2018, Matuzee took a leap of faith and bought 100-day-old chicks to set off her chicken farming agribusiness. She drew inspiration from training on poultry farming she had attended earlier and decided to take on the challenge. Having grown up more around goats and cattle as opposed to chickens as a business, it was going to be a huge task to grow her business to the levels that ran in her mind. But she was not relenting.
The good results were not immediately forthcoming as she realised she had bitten off a little more than she could chew at the time. But instead of giving up, this made her push harder by finding innovative ways to take on every challenge that presented itself.
“I was very unprepared at that time and had no idea how difficult it was going to be. The chicks I bought were all over the place and providing decent infrastructure for them proved to be a great challenge. I ran around like a headless chicken,” she said.
Taking her passion further, Matuzee had to cancel the rental of tenants in her backyard flats, which she later used for the accommodation of the chicks. It was a daring decision, but one she had to take for the survival and eventual growth of her agribusiness.
Soon, her love for numbers as an accountant made her put figures together and she realised she would not be breaking even with only a hundred chicken. She needed to add more layers to her flock so as to reach desirable figures.
Initially, she increased her chickens to 500 to be able to reach figures that would allow her to break even. Today, her agribusiness boasts more than 1 000 chickens.
“I was lucky to get a one hectare plot of land in Groot Aub from the City of Windhoek, where I rolled out the operation. Soon, we were not farming from our backyards, but now on a more established piece of land,” she said.
Matuzee said more than 60% of her agribusiness is concentrated on egg production, which she gets from the hundreds of layers she has through intensive chicken production where the chickens are housed in batteries.
After realising that some people prefer free-range eggs as opposed to those laid through intensive farming, Matuzee took on a few native chickens – also known as marathon chicken – which she allowed to range freely.
She also holds some broilers which she slaughters for the local market, including all chicken by-products such as livers, gizzards, necks, head and feet, amongst others.
“Our main product is eggs, which we get from our layers, but we sell almost everything that comes from chicken. In fact, the only market that I have not explored so far is that of chicken feathers. Everything else on the chicken I sell,” said Matuzee.
Her prime clients involve home shops and individual customers who continuously place orders for eggs and chicken meat. As a means of expanding her business, the budding entrepreneur has an incubator where she hatches chicks and sells them to others who intend to start up chicken farming.
“I want to sell to retailers on a frequent basis too, but their asking price is too low for me to break even. I would basically be operating at a loss if I follow that route at what they are currently offering,” she said.
If poultry farmers could come together and forge ahead with quality products, perhaps government would be forced to stop importing chicken from afar and instead buy from local producers, Matuzee noted.
For this to happen, however, chicken and egg producers need to up their game. It is doable, she noted. –tjatindi@gmail.com