Our company has been in the poultry business for 44 years as a hatchery producing day-old broilers, layers and turkeys. During that time, we have built up experience in recognizing trends and challenges in the industry, finding solutions for those challenges to assist our customers in maintaining a successful farm, and sourcing the farm products that our customers need.

COVID-19 Impact On Poultry In Barbados
The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on our industry, putting some farmers out of business and impacting the reliability of the supply of live slaughter-weight broilers for several poultry processors. Contract farming is the most prevalent supply arrangement for Barbadian processors, in which the chicks are purchased from the hatchery and sent to the farmer. Then, six weeks later, the chickens are returned to the processing plant. The processor pays the agreed live weight price minus the cost of the chicks and feed, and the farmer collects a cheque for the difference.
Two of our farm customers that went out of business during the pandemic left a gap in the supply to their processors. Recognizing the opportunity to support these processors while keeping our sale of baby chicks to them, we decided to lease the now unused pens and enter into contract farming agreements. Since August 2022, we have grown and supplied over 200,000 live-weight broilers into the industry without directly competing against our small farmer customers within the ‘finished product’ segment – an important consideration when evaluating whether to contract farm broilers ourselves.

Additional Benefits
Apart from the financial gain of contract farming, we have also had the opportunity to experience – first-hand – many of the daily challenges that our broiler farming customers face. The knowledge we are gaining from our farms is beginning to drive our choices of support products for resale, as well as helping to develop strategies that we can share with all of our customers to assist in better, more profitable broiler farming.
We look forward to learning more with each batch of chickens that moves through our farm, whether that is equipment, nutrition or farm management practice; we aim to become a better source of helpful information to our customers!