- Get your formula:
With the right knowledge of where you want to specialize in, spend some time to learn about the nutritional needs. For eg, the combination for chicken feeds is different from that of catfish, likewise those of other livestock. This is where you need the assistance of an animal nutritionist to help you come up with the right formula.
- Ingredients:
You need to purchase the following ingredients for production. Maize, Corn, Cassava grits for energy, Wheat offal as a source of protein, Noodle wastes for carbohydrate and Proteins, Soybean meal, Fish meals Palm kernel cake, Oyster shells, Bone meals, Minerals and common Salt.
3.Equipment:
These are the equipment you would need to start a full animal feed production on your own. Grinders, wet and dry, Mixers Wet/dry, Pellets, cooker, freezer, crumblier, Elevators, Conveyors, Sifter, Weighing scales, Steam boiler, Sealers and Bag sewers and Packaging bag. If you find this hard to come by, no problem, some effective custom made are readily available to choose from for your business and its size.
4.Packaging:
This is so important because the size of your feeds either hold or scare your customers away. Give them various sizes to choose from and make sure to stick with what you are known for.
- Marketing:
This is an area that every aspiring feed producers fear most and they are right because they can only make money by having their products sold repeatedly.
The only solution to this, is to market, market and market! Have enough samples with you any time you are out there and always leave your means of contacts with your prospective customers.
Get sales representatives and give them enough incentive to keep them motivated to be up and doing.
Warning: Do not put them on a fixed salary. Let their earning be based on commissions because they would be encouraged to work harder for more pay.
Have your own outlets if you can afford that. You can as well supply to livestock feed stores while you leave your contact address with them but do not hope to get a direct referrals from them as that would cut their customers from them, instead, have your contacts discretely inserted into the bag if an end user wishes, he can contact you from there.
Another good idea is to have few trusted farmers in your list and supply them more than enough of what they can use within some stipulated time and be directing customers there, that is another way of indirectly having some outlets for your products.
Online too, is another avenue that you can sell your products. By the time you are through with the necessary inquiries from some livestock farmers during your market surveying, you would have come up with enough strategies to employ and have your productions stand out among the rest as that could as well help you to know the price tags on your products without hurting your investments negatively. Wishing you success as you embark on this interesting endeavor.
