₦airaland Forum

Business plan for cattle ranching and hay making

The idea is to mass a lot of cattle in one place and staff the place with as low a number of workers as possible so that the cost of paying personnel that will be low can be diverted to feed purchases. The standard is a ranch of at least one thousand heads of cattle being permanently staffed by between two and three people while it is supplied hay from all over the country via a hay supply chain bringing hay from hay makers from all over the country to ranches all over the country.

Hay making

Anybody anywhere in the country where grasses grow can set this up and the production steps are

Mowing
Drying
Turning
Baling
Storing

Mowing
You cut the grass or foliage plants at their prime meaning when they begin sprouting seeds

Drying.

You dry it to a moisture content of 15 to 18 percent to remove moisture

Turning.

You turn it to ensure even drying

Baling

You cut it into rectangular shapes

Storing

You find a well ventilated place to store until you are ready to evacuate it. It should be somewhere free of moisture either outside or indoors

It is sold 180 dollars per tonne in the US and 90 dollars per tonne in Ethiopia. It should be sellable at 100 dollars or more per tonne in Nigeria and that is like 140,000 naira per tonne. If you do 50 tonnes a year, it is 7 million naira a year. A village of 5000 people should be able to do at least a few hundreds tonnes a year in any part of the country.

Cattle ranching

If you have at least 1000 heads then you are at an advantage because of scale as you don't need more than three permanent employees.

One mature cow consumes an average of five tonnes of hay per annum and one thousand heads will therefore consume say six thousand tonnes to give allowance for wastage. The total cost of hay if you do not grow any at all in the case of a ranch in an urban area will be like 600,000 dollars if we add some amount for transportation. This in naira is around one billion naira as cost of hay to feed a thousand heads of cattle for a year.

Other expenses will include veterinary expenses, water expenses, taxes and salaries. They can not exceed 200 million naira per annum in total

Total operations expenses per annum will be less than 1.2 billion naira

Inflow

There should be up to 600 dairy cows in the ranch at any time and one dairy cow produces around 20 liters of milk everyday. This totals 12000 liters. A liter of milk is at least 500 naira at the farm gate which brings the inflow to 6 million naira a day from milk and around 2 billion naira per annum.

Up to 300 to 400 heads will be slaughtered every year for beef because the ones reared for meat are sometimes reared for only one year before they go to slaughter. This will bring at least 300 million naira a year.

Estimate Total annual inflow - 2 3 billion naira
Estimate annual Outflow 1 2 billion naira
For 1000 heads of cattle

You can approach any massive ranch you know, advise them to scale down their number of employees or increase their number of cattle heads so that they can afford to buy hay from you at say 120 dollars per tonne etc


Yield of hay per hectare per annum in Southern Nigeria

I love this analysis but reality is in a different color.

As good as this looks, it begs for a lot of questions

Yield of hay per hectare in Southern Nigeria