Chronicle Editor
Judith Phiri, Sunday News Reporter
A 33-year-old young farmer from Bulawayo has been rated among some of the country’s leading goat breeders at his rural home in Mangwe, 60 kilometres from Bulawayo along Plumtree road.
The farmer, Mr Ayanda Sikhosana Ncube, who recently resigned from full time employment to concentrate fully on his own enterprise despite financial challenges, is involved in a thriving boer goat breeding project deep in rural Mangwe District on 200-hectare land.
“I did some research and realised that goat farming is quite an interesting commercial venture. I had to resign at the farming entity I was working for so that I fully concentrate on my own project as for the past two years it had been lagging behind drastically and further affected by lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I registered a private business corporation called Sikhosana Bucks and Poultry,” said Mr Ncube.
He also noted that after having to sell one of his cattle given to him by his father who was not convinced that the enterprise will yield any results, he bought a pure breed boer buck which he mixed breed with indigenous breeds.
Boer goats were developed in South Africa in the 1900s from a cross of indigenous goats and Indian or European goats and are bred mainly for meat.
Mr Ncube added: “For my farming model I sell 50 percent boer bucks breed to those who wish to breed and infiltrate the market and improve the quality of their flock. For the breeder stock I can sell them for a range of US$150 to US$200 and on a good month I can sell about 20 of those.”
He said growing up in a farming family, with his father an agriculture teacher at High School and a rancher, Mr Ncube said he was more inclined to the academic side and less on farming. However, after having attended various goat farming workshops his passion to commercialise the venture grew. Being part of the Young Farmers Collective, he said he was also working on expanding his poultry project he started in 2018.
“Most of the plans are underway to resuscitate my poultry project and clients have been reaching out to say I need to get back into the game. I intend to introduce a new spin to it as I want to import some new incubators, get some solar panels, and introduce a new sector whereby I have hens that will be laying eggs so that I can incubate and sell chicks and as well as sell the birds as meat,” he said.
Mr Ncube also highlighted that he sells most of his roadrunners as live birds because most of the customers prefer to get the extras as well such as feet, necks, gizzards and chicken livers.
“As you are aware these days people are now health conscious about what they put in their mouths, so for my roadrunners I try to make sure they are organic as much as possible. I buy sunflower, maize crashes and then mix it up with some conventional commercial feeds to make sure all the nutrients are there,” he added.
Besides carrying out his goat and poultry projects, Mr Ncube also assists his retired parents with looking after a flock of 100 cattle.
He added: “Though we are mostly into livestock rearing we also intend to set up a small horticultural garden.
Cropping farming is done on a small scale this side so that most of the land is used for grazing.”
Mr Ncube advised youths to also consider farming as well as most of them are unemployed in the crippling Zimbabwean economy that has further been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I sustained a few fatalities, but I never stopped the business. In farming there are other avenues out there which are equally profitable if not more when they are explored. Youths using new technologies and techniques can also venture into farming as agriculture is the backbone of economies in countries around the world. Agriculture takes natural resources and turns them into wealth,” he said.
Goat farming business has become profitable business with the demand for goat meat increasing. Experts say people want to try a different type of meat which is not chicken, beef or pork, hence there has been a lot of potential for growth of the goat meat market.
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