Farmers in Katete District Zambia rely on their crops to feed their families and livestock, but Climate change has changed the only rainy season in Zambia into a guessing game. This season again a lot of seedings were lost, because after a promising start the rains stopped short. With the increasing heat, yields are also lower than before. One easy source of high protein food is keeping chicken. But the factors above even make keeping healthy chicken a real challenge. Tiko wants to change this.
Many subsistence farmers keep a few chickens which lay few eggs and have a high death rate. This situation could be improved if they kept Village chickens, but it is impossible for subsistence farmers to feed them, with the additional factor of inflation driving up the price of crops and thus of chickenfeed the challenge is to produce a sufficient volume of affordable chicken feed for Tiko's chickens and cheap feed for sale to the many farmers surrounding and those further afield.
Our chickenfeed shall save land, water, labour and energy and includes the water plant Azolla and the maggots of the black soldier fly that thrive on chicken manure and maize bran or decaying food waste. Chickens thrive on these and hydroponically produced fodder derived from sprouted grain crops which also provide excellent feed for various other farm animals. We have some 1000 hens to feed and there are many potential buyers of feed. For chopping, mixing and pellets making we need 3 machines.
The machines with the new methods will help Tiko to produce chickenfeed that is much cheaper than the commercial feeds and Tiko, with its 75 volunteer workers will survive the loss of income from its lodge due to covid and get closer to sustainability. Tiko will also be able to teach interested farmers. Both activities will lead to better nutrition especially for children and provide a relief from poverty and malnutrition in the country and further away from climate change. Please help us!
