By Joshua Kato
The second phase of the Vision Group-organized Livestock master classes, featuring poultry rearing will run from Tuesday May 2, to Friday May 5th. The televised training will be aired live on Bukedde TV1 from 9:00am to 10:00am, with a repeat on Bukedde TV2 at 9:00pm.
The master classes are organised by Vision Group, with support from sponsors of the best farmers competition. These include the Embassy of the Netherlands, KLM airlines, Koudjis Nutrition BV and dfcu Bank. During the training, Koudjis will provide experts from Netherlands.
“These trainings are part of the best farmer’s competition. This is the second master class this year and it is basically intended to help chicken farmers improve the way they are practicing for better profits,” says James Sserunkuma, Head of the Information and Education hub, which is responsible for organizing the trainings.
Experts from Netherlands
Netherlands is one of the leading breeders of chicken in the world. In fact, many of the popular hybrid varieties kept in Uganda come from the Netherlands. These include the ISABrown and the hubbard.
According to Johan Verhoek, one of the trainers, for most of the Dutch enterprises, big is not the best. It is quality of the size that matters. Of the 67,000 farms in the Netherlands, nearly 2,000 are active in poultry. A limited number of them are involved in breeding parent stock, the ‘genetic raw material’ which ends up going to the 900 businesses that farm layers (which produce eggs for consumption), 650 broiler chicken farms and nearly 200 businesses that produce hatching eggs which will end up becoming either broiler chickens or laying hens.
The actual numbers indicate that there are around 85 million chickens in the Netherlands at any one time for a population of 17million people. This means that even if each of the Dutch citizens ate a whole chicken every day, it would take them over four days to finish them up. In Uganda, there are around 40 million chickens against a population of 35million.
In Uganda according to Uganda Bureau Of Statistics (UBOS) statistics, there are over six million households that keep chicken. However, while these households in Uganda are scattered nearly all over the country, in Netherlands, poultry farmers are found largely in the central region, include Lunteren.
According to Johan Verhoek, who will lead the trainers during the master classes, poultry farming was practically encouraged in these areas by the government many years ago. “A lot of research to improve breeds, nutrition goes on throughout the year and this is why production is always high,” he says. Verhoek will share some of these researches with the participants of the master classes.
What will be trained?
The training will among other key factors handle breed selection, brooding, housing, bio-security, disease control and nutrition of the birds for better yields.
“Generally, we shall focus on helping a chicken keeper earn a good margin from his efforts by adopting practices that improve productivity,” Verhoek says.
Throughout the programme, viewers will send in their questions and these will be answered by the experts. For those who have questions for the experts, please send them to 0789353585 or email jkato@newvision.co.ug
