The Poultry Farmers' Losses

Abstract

The financial losses incurred by poultry farmers are normally much higher than is generally realized, and at intervals may reach such proportions that not only do running expenses show a deficit, but large inroads are made into working capital through the decimation of flocks by disease. Even on farms that show a profit, such losses are often considered unavoidable and incidental to the business of breeding, hatching, rearing,and maintaining flocks of high egg-laying strains. I hope in this article to focus the attention of East African poultry keepers on some of their main sources of loss, and, by doing so, to indicate where a greater concentration of effort is most likely to be repaid.