Starting Poultry on a Small Plot in Ghana

Three hundred square metres is smaller than it sounds

A plot of 15 by 20 metres is 300 square metres. Most people who own one imagine room for a flock, a yard and a garden. Then they draw the house, the feed store, the walkway, the tank and the compost pit on paper, and the plot shrinks in a hurry. What is left after that is the real plot, and every decision about birds has to fit inside it.

We are not against small plots. Many of the farms we talk to start on one, and a well-planned plot can carry a useful batch of broilers or a small layer flock without any trouble. The problem is never the size. The problem is planning the land as if it were twice as big, and finding out in the second month that the house sits where the rain runs in.

Draw the plot to scale before you buy a single chick

Take a tape and measure the plot yourself, even if you have a survey plan. Measure each side twice and write the figures down. Then draw the outline on squared paper, with one square for every half metre, and mark the things that do not move: the boundary wall, the mango tree, the drain, the path you use every day, and the nearest neighbour's wall.

Next, mark the things that do move. The house is the largest, so start there. Put a rectangle for the house, a rectangle for the run, a small square for the feed store and a line for the walkway. Try three or four versions before you settle. Each version takes five minutes on paper and can save you a rebuild later.

Draw the shadow lines as well. Sketch where the sun falls at ten in the morning and at three in the afternoon, and where the wall of the next building throws shade. A house that sits in full afternoon sun on its long side will run hot in the dry season, and no amount of fan work fixes a house that is in the wrong place.

Splitting 300 square metres into the jobs it has to do

Once the plot is drawn, split it into jobs and give each job a fixed area. On a small plot, the areas that matter are the house, the outdoor run, the feed store, the walkways, the litter pit and the rest ground that you leave alone for a few weeks. The table below is one way to split a 15 by 20 metre plot. Change the numbers to match your own land, but keep the total honest.

Read the table as a warning as well as a plan. Eighty square metres of rest ground looks wasteful until the run turns to dust in the dry season, and then it is the only green patch you have for rotating birds out and feeding the grass back. Keep the spare area too. Every small plot finds a use for it, usually a month after you have sold the land on paper.

Where the house sits: the boundary, the shade and the wind

Put the house along the long side of the plot, with its length running east to west where the plot allows. That keeps the hot sun off the long walls for most of the day, and the walls that take the sun are the short ones, where a shade tree or a wall can help. A house pushed sideways into the morning and afternoon sun heats up before the birds have eaten anything.

Open the house to the prevailing breeze, not to the road. In most of the Central Region the afternoon wind comes in from the south-west in the rains and from the north-east when the harmattan dust is up. Ask a neighbour who has lived on the plot for years which way the wind comes in the worst month, and believe the answer over the weather app. Put the open side facing the breeze and keep the back of the house against the dust.

Keep the house at least a few metres from the boundary wall, so that the rain running off the wall does not wash into the litter. On a small plot, the boundary is always closer than you would like. Plan for it anyway, and put the drain on the far side of the walkway.

How many birds a small house can hold without going soft

Take the 4 by 5 metre house, which is 20 square metres of floor. Many Ghanaian broiler houses are planned around 10 to 12 birds for each square metre when the birds go to market at about 2.3 kilograms, and fewer in the hot months. On a small plot, we plan at the lower end, because a small house has less air for each bird and less room to recover from a bad week. For this house we would plan 150 birds, which is about 7.5 per square metre.

The reason to go lighter is not only comfort. A small house with 150 birds at 2.3 kilograms each carries about 345 kilograms of live bird on 20 square metres. If the weather turns for a week and the birds stop eating, the litter goes wet quickly, the ammonia rises, and a house that looked fine on paper becomes a problem. Our stocking density guide explains how to plan the floor by weight, and the same logic holds on a small plot.

If you are not sure whether your house is the right size for your flock, our house size calculator guide walks through the sum step by step.

One batch at a time, because two overlapping batches fight over the plot

On a large farm, two batches in two houses can overlap without much trouble. On a small plot, a second batch in the same yard turns into a second problem on the same ground. The birds of the older batch are in the run, the younger ones need the brooding corner, and the cleaning crew has no room to turn around. Most small plots do better with one batch at a time.

A broiler batch on a small plot runs about eight weeks, and the clean-out takes another week or two. Plan for ten weeks from chick to clean house. That gives you about five cycles a year at best, and four once you count the weeks of holiday, rain and a delayed chick order. Work the calendar backwards from the dates you want to sell, not forwards from the day the chicks arrive.

1. Clean and dry the house, and leave it empty for at least a week before the chicks arrive.
2. Set up the brooder corner and check the heat before the box lands.
3. Move the birds out to market at the planned week, and clean the litter out the same week.
4. Rest the run and the house for a week, and only then order the next batch.

The point is not that a small plot can never run two batches. It is that the second batch should be a decision you make on purpose once the first batch is sold and the ground has rested, not a habit that slides into place because the chicks arrived early.

Water from the roof, counted in litres

Most small plots cannot afford a borehole and do not need one. A roof is a catchment, and the sum is simple. Each millimetre of rain that falls on a square metre of roof is about a litre in the tank. A house with a roof of 30 square metres, including the overhang, gives you 30 litres for every millimetre of rain. A 20 millimetre storm gives you about 600 litres before losses.

Plan for less than the full figure. Gutters leak, the first flush carries dirt, and some water runs off the edges. Count on about three-quarters of the theoretical total reaching the tank. That still gives a useful supply in the rains, and it is the water you will be counting on in the first dry weeks, when the tank is the only supply you have.

A flock of 150 broilers drinks a good deal of water in the hot months, and the figure rises with the heat. Measure what the tank gives you each week, and write it on the wall. A tank that empties on a Thursday tells you the batch has outgrown the roof, long before the birds show it. Our water supply and storage guide covers tanks, lines and the cleaning schedule in more detail.

A feed store the size of a cupboard, kept off the floor

A two by two and a half metre store is enough for a single batch of feed if you buy in bags and rotate them. That is the whole point of a small store. Keep it small enough that you cannot let bags pile up for months, and dry enough that the feed does not turn in the damp.

Put the bags on pallets or bricks, away from the wall, and never directly on the floor. Keep a lid on every open bag and close the door at night. Rats and mice find a small store faster than a large one, because a small store has fewer places to hide the bait. For traps and bait around the store, our rodent and snake control guide is the place to look.

Use the oldest bag first, and write the date on the bag with a marker when you open it. A small plot runs out of feed on the wrong day more often than a large farm, because there is less space to hold a spare week. Keep one bag in reserve, and count the bags every Friday.

The litter has to go somewhere: planning for the manure before the first batch

The manure from a 150-bird batch does not disappear. On a small plot it either stays in the litter pit and gets composted, or it leaves the plot in bags. A small plot that has not planned for the litter ends up with a heap by the fence that draws flies and smells in the rain.

Give the litter a designated pit, roughly 10 square metres as in the table, and turn it every week or two. Let it heat up and dry before you use it on crops. The pit is also the place to put the old litter when the batch goes out, so that the house is empty and clean at the start of the next cycle.

If you want to sell some of it, the value depends on how dry and how well composted it is. Our guide to using and selling poultry manure sets out the drying and the uses. On a small plot, a clear plan for the litter is worth more than a good price for it.

Planting the fence line for shade and a little green feed

A small plot gets hot quickly, and the outdoor run is where the birds spend the day if they go out at all. Plant along the north and west edges, where the afternoon sun is strongest, and leave the breeze side open. Fast-growing trees take a few years to give real shade, so start them the day you fence the plot, not the year you decide you need them.

Moringa grows well along a fence in most of Ghana, gives shade and provides leaves that many farmers use as a supplement. Keep the planting out of the run itself, or the birds will strip it bare in a week. Plant it along the boundary, and cut the leaves for the birds rather than letting them reach the trunk. Our note on moringa leaf meal for poultry covers how to use the leaves without upsetting the ration.

Keep the grass in the rest ground cut short when you rotate the birds onto it. Long grass hides worms and bugs, which is useful, and also hides the droppings and the wet patches, which is not. Cut it, let it dry and move the birds back on only when the ground has recovered.

What a small plot can turn over a year, before the feed bill

Put the numbers on one page. The house holds 150 broilers per batch. At our starting price for Ross 308 chicks, GH₵20 each in a box of 50, three boxes cost GH₵3,000. Our listed price for a live broiler of about 2.5 kilograms is GH₵110, so 150 birds at that weight would bring in GH₵16,500 gross. Those are gross figures. Feed, medicine, transport and the bird that dies on day nine all come out of them.

Feed is the big line. A broiler at typical feed conversion eats around four kilograms of feed to reach market weight, so one batch of 150 birds takes roughly 650 kilograms of feed. That is where most of the cash goes, and it is why the small plot has to be run tightly. A miscount on feed in the second week is a cost you cannot easily claw back.

Multiply by four batches a year and the gross comes to about GH₵66,000 from a single house, with GH₵12,000 in chicks. The feed bill for those four batches will be large, and it is the figure to work out properly before the first chick is ordered. Our guide to starting with little money shows how to build the cash plan around the batches, and our feed conversion guide explains why the ratio matters so much.

Where small plots go wrong, in the order we see it

The first mistake is building the house before drawing the plot. A house sited to suit the first idea rarely suits the second. Move it on paper before you move a brick, and the plot will work for you for years.

The second mistake is buying chicks for the plot you wish you had. A small yard cannot carry a flock sized for a large one. Count the birds from the house, not from the chick order, and ask the chick supplier to match the box to the house.

The third is letting the run become the litter pit. The birds scratch the same ground every day, and in a small yard that ground turns into a mess within a fortnight if nobody moves it. Rotate, rake and keep the run dry.

The fourth is no water plan for the dry weeks. The rains fill the tank, and the harmattan empties it. Measure the tank every week from the first day of the batch.

The fifth is running two batches to fill a gap in the calendar. On a small plot, that gap is better used for rest, for cleaning and for planning the next cash cycle.

A setup checklist for the plot

• Measure the plot twice and draw it to scale on squared paper.
• Split the plot into house, run, rest ground, walkways, store, litter pit and tank.
• Set the long side of the house east to west, with the open side facing the breeze.
• Size the batch to the house floor, and plan for the lower density in the hot months.
• Work out the roof catchment in litres for each millimetre of rain.
• Put the feed store on pallets, with a lid on every bag and a door that closes.
• Designate a litter pit before the first batch arrives.
• Plant the fence line and keep the birds out of the young trees.
• Plan one batch at a time, and leave a week empty between batches.
• Write the cash plan for each batch, including feed, before you order chicks.

When the plan is on paper and the plot is drawn, you are ready to order. You can start with a broiler day-old chick order, check our current starting prices, or place your first order through our order form.

Questions farmers ask