Business Partners

Over about the last nine months we have had a recurring problem with our neighbours' chickens trespassing on our farm. The chickens are attracted by the prospect of free food. For a number of years the chickens had been quite scrawny and had only been able to eat the relatively small amount of scraps left over from lunch. The new 'invaders' are a completely different proposition. Since we started developing our farm we have opened up a whole new world of possibilities for foraging chickens. In addition to the leftovers from lunch (which have increased as we have added to the number of children in school) there is a farm full of green shoots and crops to feed on. Since January these fowl (sorry) pests have managed to eat all of the water melon seedlings that we planted and have made inroads on our kale crop and other seedlings. Because of the rich pickings the chickens are now huge. The mother hens range over our land with chicks in tow, no doubt teaching them all the prime spots for food.

The problem has now become so serious that we have had to have a word with the neighbours who own the chickens. Duncan, our farm manager, told me that one of our neighbours no longer has any chickens. They had been causing another neighbour the same problems so Duncan reckons the other neighbour poisoned all of them. Not the most neighbourly way to deal with the issue but now no longer a problem for us. Our other neighbour was a bit harder to track down but we managed to speak t her this morning.

We had, at one point, thought we might 'impound' the chickens if they strayed onto our land then take them up to the Agriculture Officer's office up the road in Kosele where the neighbour would have had to pay to have them returned to her. Until this morning this seemed the best option. At the start of our meeting a chance remark about the value of chickens once full grown got me thinking about another solution.

The most common way to restrict the movement of chickens and other livestock around here is to tether them. It's quite effective but tedious for the owner of the animals so it's not really very effective. Our neighbour offered to tether her chickens for a month "until they learn not to come on the land", but none of us thought this was at all feasible. I'm sure even chickens would remember where the food is for some time. The best solution would be to put them in a chicken coop. The only problem is that the neighbour a) hasn't really considered this and b) couldn't afford it anyway.

To create a more permanent solution to the problem we have gone into a business partnership with her. We'll build a fairly small chicken coop and supply her with scraps and greens from from our kitchen so that she can feed the chickens. In return she will give us two of the chicks from each brood once they are full grown (which takes six to eight months). We should be able to sell them for about three to four hundred shillings each. The neighbour keeps up to five hens at a time so it could be a nice little earner. Plus we won't have chickens destroying valuable crops by eating the seedlings.

Duncan was given the job of writing up the contract for the arrangement and we will invite our local chief to witness the transaction. The agreement will be reviewed annually. We will almost certainly start rearing our own chickens this year and would not want to give away too much free food to our neighbour. If she is able to make a success of her end of the business she should be able to buy her own feed from the profit she makes. Each hen hatches about a dozen chicks at the moment but the number reduces in the course of their growing up because of the natural hazards and predators they encounter in their wanderings. We will have to see how it works out but at the moment it looks like a fairly 'cheep' solution to what had been a costly problem.