How to understand and improve your poultry farming business

The foundation to running any business, poultry farming business included, is record keeping.  Business records are fundamental to understanding and improving the performance of your operation over time.

Without poultry farm records, you have no way of determing the perfomance of your poultry farming business. As a result, you cannot improve your farming operation given that you cannot improve what you do not measure.

What is a poultry farming business

What qualifies a poultry farm as a poultry farming business?

From our stance, if you’re a commercial poultry farmer, then your poultry farm qualifies as a farming operation. Moreover, it does not matter if you’ve 50 birds or 5,000 birds.

This is because you’ve several business activities that you must perform on a day to day basis, which take up your resources. Importantly still, you are performing these activities in order to reap financial returns.

If you’re a backyard farmer raising chicken for your kitchen or a hobbyist farmer with a few chicken, your farm may be too small to qualify as a full poultry farming business.

The idea of running a poultry farm as a business is to track these daily operations, including feed purchases, egg sales, birds’ deaths, egg and feed inventory, and so on. 

Poultry farming records 

Once you’ve accepted that yours is a poultry farming business, in its own right, you might be wondering where to start, right?

Essentially, there a number of key aspects of your farming business that you should track. These include:

• Livestock inventory
• Egg production rates and eggs inventory
• Costs and expenses
• Feed inventory
• Flock vaccination schedules
• Bird weight

This list is not in anyway, shape or form complete. In fact we do not intend to list all operational records you can keep. This is because a comprehensive list can be overwhelming especially if you’re just getting started, or are running a small farm. 

In our opinion this is enough to get you started on running your poultry farm as a business.

How to keep poultry farming business records

There are several ways by which you can keep records on your poultry farming business. For instance, you can do this on paper, or use pre-formatted printouts specially made for poultry farming. However, we do not recommend it, since manual records can easily get misplaced or lost.

Moreover, you can use spreadsheet and similar applications. Lastly but not least you can use dedicated poultry farm management mobile apps. Of course if you’re running a large scale poultry farm you could consider dedicated platforms for the purpose.

Kukufarm poultry farm management app might be a good starting point no matter the size of your poultry farming business. With Kukufarm you can

• Manage coops and flocks
• Track and understand flock performance over time
• Track sales and expenses over time
• Add co-farmers
• Track breed batches
• And much more..

The main important thing is to getting into the habit of keeping poultry records, and learning how to keep accurate records.

You may also need to how to keep poultry finance records if you’ve more than one coop.

Benefits of using Kukufarm to keep poultry farm records

One advantage of using poultry farm management mobile apps such as kukufarm – which you can get on Google Play and App Store – is that it is easy to use.

In comparison to using paper or spreadsheet applications, Kukufarm does all the heavy lifting for you. You do not need to set formulas or calculate things by hand. Importantly, poultry data entry is simple but builds an easy to understand data set.

Importantly still, since you’ve mobile phone with you all the time, it is easier to keep poultry records. This is because no extra device or software is required. You simply download the app and start logging poultry business data at your leisure.

Besides being affordable, Kukufarm also lets you add co-farmers to your account. As a result, you do not need to do all the record keeping by yourself. For instance you’re running your poultry farming business with your spouse, partner or with a business manager, you can add them to your account to simplify record keeping and sharing.

Lastly but not least, if you’re running your poultry farming business in partnership with other co-farmers or business partners, you can add them to your farm. Doing so will simply record keeping and sharing since everyone you’ve added can view and add records.

Handling the business end of a poultry farming business

Once you start keeping records on your poultry farming business, it will become easier for you to manage the business as a whole.

You no longer have to guess how much sales you made last month or how much was spent on vaccinations for coop 2.

At this point, it becomes easier to manage all official business. You can even add your farm business manager to your Kukufarm account and further streamline business operations and data sharing.

For instance, they can help you understand what part of your farming operation is losing money. Moreover, they can help you in planning an expansion of your operation and so forth.

However, we think that even if you’re managing your farm for yourself, you will still be able to understand more and more about your farm. Naturally, such understanding will make you into a smart farmer. That is, you will start making business decisions based on actual farm data, not guesswork.

At this point we think you will be running your poultry farming business as a real business.