Poultry farming has the potential to alleviate rural poverty, eradicate malnutrition, and create employment opportunities too. In Rajasthan, the poultry production output corresponds to the backyard poultry production because people prefer poultry units of small size i.e. 100 to 200 birds each rather than bigger units. In such a poultry business, savings are also less and time is also lost. Due to adverse climatic conditions for crop growing, poultry farming is a substitute for small and marginal farmers as well as youths and a golden opportunity to become an entrepreneur with round-the-year income.
Mr. Ashok Kumar, a small land-holding farmer belongs to the village Raipur Mewan of Alwar. He is 38 years old having 6 members in his family. He studied till class 12. As a youth farmer, he was not satisfied with his conventional agricultural practices and his income from this.
Being a small farmer and having less than 2 ha. of land he was doing conventional farming, he made his income only by cultivation of agronomical crops (wheat, barley, mustard, pearl millet). Due to hard climatic conditions and the low price of his crop produce, he could not meet his family's requirements. Subsequently, his family income does not meet their regular need of life.
For the last 8-10 years KVK doing FLDs of various crops in his village so he knows about Krishi Vigyan Kendra Navgaon. He also came to KVK for seeds and technical knowledge about various crops and advisory. Because he only depended on agronomical crops, he could not meet his family's requirements. He expressed his feelings and interest to the scientist of KVK to start his own business.
Scientists of KVK encouraged him to the ICAR-funded project ARYA (Attracting and Retaining Youth in Agriculture) and the scope, opportunities, and future of poultry farming. They also encouraged and motivated him for poultry farming as a small-scale business.
So, in the year 2019, he established his poultry farm (30 x 150 sq. feet) with a capacity of 2500 chicks per batch. In the beginning, he has less knowledge of the management of chicks, feed, disease, and housing management of the chicks. Due to that management of poultry was very difficult for him and chicks were underweighting which led to a higher mortality rate in chicks. This poultry unit was not remunerative for the farmers at that time.
He has already been in touch with KVK for a long time and he discussed the problem of his poultry management with KVK scientists. In the year 2020, he participated in the training on commercial poultry farming under the ARYA project. In this training period, he learned about different breeds of poultry and chick, grover, layers, and broiler rearing. He also learned about feed management, de-worming, and prevention or treatment of disease in the chicks.
He also trained in medicines, vaccination, temperature regulation, and feed preparation as well as cleaning and housing management. After training his skills improved and he has more information about poultry farming management. This also helped him to prepare chick feed by himself because half of the total expenditure in poultry farming is spent only on feed and he purchased ready-to-feed from the market thing creates higher costs in poultry farming.
He prepares feed with maize, pearl millet, and soybean khal (40:10:30) and gives chicks vitamins and a mineral mixture. He is continuously in touch with the KVK scientist’s team and follows up the suggestions. He gradually increased his unit size over time and now he has the capacity of 4000 chicks per batch and produces a total of 6 batches in a year. He is in collaboration with a company named “Suman Kamal Pvt. Ltd.” He purchases chicks from the company at a rate of 35 Rupees/chick and sells to the company at an average of 85- 115 Rupees/ kg of weight on market demand.
Now, Ashok is scientifically doing poultry farming, getting good profits, and fulfilling his family responsibilities in a better way. Seeing these, many youths from nearby villages saw their future in poultry farming and joined KVK and adopted poultry farming as a permanent business.
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