Starting up Your Dream Gamefowl Farm

Introduction

Start the gamefowl farm in the right manner. A great starting point is to view the establishment of the gamefowl farm in an analyst perspective, we plan the project as an analyst.

Requirements Planning

To plan the gamefowl farm first you must obtain the requirements of the project farm. And the design will be based on the requirements plan, continued on the farms development and implementation in an executive manager’s perspective.

One important thing with the above approach is you will understand the risk just in the planning phase before you even design the project farm.

Evaluation

Evaluations are conducted to every phase of the project. After evaluating a phase one may revise the whole or part of the project. These phases mentioned will guide you in a more effective and efficient way.

Do not rush it out, setting up your dream gamefowl farm is far from easy. With such expensive project, in fact any expensive project, many could not afford to throw away a good amount of resources (time, money and labor) just because of a minor error but would have chain reactions resulting to a major lose of resources.

Requirements Planning Phase

We start our farm with a study of the quality of being doable and attainable. The study is aimed to evaluate the farm project feasibility. Anticipate costs of the farm as well as its benefits and evaluate them. After evaluating the cost and benefits, you may decide what course of action you will do based on time, technical, economic and operational factors. Adjust your target values vis a vis with your available resources. Available resources will be your limiting factor. Parameters of feasibility are purpose of the project, scope of the farm project, time, costings, size, manpower, technical knowledge and skills, and of course the benefits if attainable.

Activities

Usually your series of actions will be

Understand the Opportunity and Farm’s Objective

There are instances that what the current demand is different than your farms objective. You will also want all the succeeding activities kept in line with your objective. Otherwise what you do will make you astray with the objective.

Observe Farm Operations

Visit and observe several farms, you may interview the workers with any issues of their farm, working, cultural, financial and even ethical issues.

Below are the basic questions, but will make you strongly knowledgeable about the activities in the farm. The following analyst questions is one of the tools that made us conclude what we do on our farm. Analysts Questions

Study the designs of the facilities, costs, benefits, schedules of production, manpower. Effectiveness and efficiency of the facilities, manpower, costs and schedules must be observed.

Evaluate Feasibility

Operational, technical, economic and schedule. Determine and evaluate the operational requirements. you should look for areas that might present problems for all farm workers and how they might be resolved. Also be ready about technical stuff with animal health, this includes include tools. Take a deep look to your cost-benefit analysis and your total cost estimate.

Define the Scope of the Farm

Breeding, brooding, ranging, hardening, cording and maintenance together with other integrated activities of the farm. At this point you must stablish your project scope.

Example Costing – Relate to the Figures Below

Gamefowl Population

1 Year Costing excusive of land rental

Initial investments for facilities, tools and machineries would be 300,000 – exclusive of land procurement.

List of farm machineries and tools

With the above costing you may adjust your project specification.

Analysis

You will stablish the specific requirements of the farm and the objective is to make a logical model. The first step is requirements modeling, where you investigate any farm processes and document what are needed in order to satisfy your objectives.

Analysis maybe painful and fun

Here you continue what you have done in the feasibility study. To understand the whole farm operation, you perform fact-finding using techniques such as interviews and observation. You use the fact finding results to build your process and object models with descriptions.

Factors to Consider when Making Your Specific Requirements

Easy to Operate

The farm must be easy to operate. Your farmhands must be on ease as possible. Avoid or minimize unnecessary effort. Things like unsystematic and improper design and location of facilities. Example is you could design your conditioning area in a systematic way with rotating the birds. At the teepees the flying-pens are near as it will be the next place where you put the chickens. Another is scratch-pens are near to what place will you put the birds next, such as the pit or your limbering area. Or put a slot for feeders (feeding cups) on the door of your pens to make it easier to feed and water them (getting the feeders in and out). Such things will minimize time and effort.

Minimizing time and effort will help you to maximize their work, you can add other task to the farmhands. Another is the location of the feeding storage and the water source, these must be constructed as near to all concerned (flock and people) as possible.

Visit other farms and observe their facilities and how they operate. Better if technicalities will be explained. Then enhance or incorporate their ideas.

Cost Effectiveness

Cost effectiveness must be considered. A cheap facilities made from local materials is not really cheap as yearly you would have to make another. If you’re farm has lots of local materials you will only need labor and time of construction, but then again a computation of cost of time and labor repairing this is needed to see which one is better (against constructing long-term facilities), only use strong local materials if ever. Some facilities are cheaper than the other farms but works more than the expensive ones (depends on the design).

An image examples[pic]              

Land Area

Ancipate the needed area with the following figures.

Range

2 quadrants with minimum area each of 600 square meters with 20 square meter per head. Rotated every month not to eliminate the grass and insects that they can preyed upon.

Brood materials need their own range whenever they are not on breeding. They are ranged to exercise, molt and replenish their health naturally.

Cord Area

You will need a minimum of 6’ cord for each gamecock with a space of at least 4.33’ between cords. It would be around 100 heads/ 1/4 hectare of land for the minimum tie cord lengths. It would be better if you make the tie cords longer but refrain from making it shorter. In our farm we use 6’ and 8’ cords as the farm have several trees/plant integrated (5 and 7.5 meters space between trees).

Other Area

Other space you need are for pit, quarters, paths and access way. There will be instances that you may want to have water flush out area.

Additional Area

Area for rotation and extension-ready operation.

Another thing is the farm’s scalability, the farm must be extension ready. If you want to produce more, extending will be easier if there would be area readily available, and the facilities (big ones) are ready to be extended. Also rotation of the land used is very beneficial for the farm. In several years accumulation of pathogens are expected in areas not rotated with conventional gamefowl farming. 

You may read more about effective microorganisms in which rotation of land area for gamefowls are eliminated. Saving you some more land cost.

Farm Integration

You could utilize your farm more if you can integrate it with other production such as mango trees in your cord area, lumber trees in the range or banana areas. There are lots of agri activities to intigrate. We recommend you add organic farm methodologies to the gamefowl farm. You may surf the site for more integrative ideas.

Accessibility

Water and Electricity       

The farm must have water accessible and electricity. As mentioned before don’t waste time and energy for hauling water from a far source.  Electricity. Most farms don’t have electricity as they are located on the far rural side. Solar photovoltaic systems proves to be cost efficient just for lights and radio. Additional electric load for refrigeration will require a bigger system, making it expensive but it will be beneficial in the long run. For a quick electric generation, 3KVA or 5KVA, may look affordable at first, but as expenses on fuel is accumulated you may find it being expensive than the solar ones.

Access Road

A good access road is one of the accessibility feature of the farm. Choose a farm with a good access road. The distance of the farm is a matter of preference. If you prefer a high-altitude area, as it adds to the development of the chicks and the stags to be aged, it will mean that you will be farming in far rural areas.

Environment

The suitable environment for the gamefowls are with trees to fly and roost to, some bushes to play around, and some insect habitat so the chicks would have some to preyed upon. Make sure to add these environment factors to the farm. If you lack the amount of trees, you may plant bananas along with the tree seedlings so while you are waiting for the trees to grow you have your banana as replenishing plant for the trees and gamefowls.

Buffer zones are good addition to the whole farm environment. If maintained properly with beneficial microorganisms, buffer zone is a great help as a biosecurity. Most buffer zones are composed of leguminous trees and plants with 5 meters wide at least to all the perimeter.

Soil Type and Topography

Porous, sandy loam, soil is the best for gamefowls as water will subside easily. Avoid dampy area, specially the soil, it would cause respiratory problems to the whole flock. Create drainage, if the farm gets water logged. Land with a good slope will make the gamefowl stronger compared to the one raised in flat land. Also slopes will route the water in to particular side of the farm creating an easy drainage mechanism.

Security

Security matters must be considered as well. Chickens are warm to the eye of people. Specially the breeding materials must be always secured. Put the breeding pens or ranges for the breeding material near to the quarters. Have a good fence, lots of guard dogs and rotate your farmhands to guard at night. For your neighbors, be nice to them but also you have to make them feel that you are not to be troubled with. You may also want to have a precautionary antibiotic against evil men to defend your investment.

Design and Construction

Design the farm layout and facilities according to the requirements stablished earlier. This way you will have minimal iterations and adjustments. You could draw it on a paper or for more effective drawing on cad. The important thing is that the people who will build your design will understand what you draw, reducing backlogs because of the design misunderstandings.

Implementation

you may operate the farm as soon as you constructed the primary needs for operation, as you go along with construction, you may want to adjust or change a few specifications for more efficient operation. You may find more useful information as you surf along the site, and integrate it with your farm. We wish you all the best with your gamefowl activities, God bless!