The Improved Kienyeji Chicken Intervention

An Opportunity for Small Scale Farmers to Build Sustainable Livelihoods

Farmers in rural Kenya are grappling with a dangerous sense of resignation that they will be unable to break away from poverty and build wealth into the future. This is more so due to challenges such as weather patterns and falling prices of commodities in the marketplace. Every year, many low income Kenyan families wind up another year without significant savings or growth in wealth.  It is difficult to improve your earnings by doing the same thing each and every year but with certain interventions, it is possible for farmers to generate wealth and increase value significantly without massive capital investments. Such is the case with the improved kienyeji chicken rearing and management techniques.

By incorporating certain ideas and low cost technologies in the house construction and feeding as well as overall poultry management practices, many Kenyan farmers could be on the road to wealth through kienyeji chicken rearing.  One of the ubiquitous sights in many rural households in Kenya and indeed much of Africa and the developing world is the roaming or free range chicken.  It is a symbol of poverty as much as a small safety net for the poor rural families.

The chicken will be slaughtered during special occasions such as when a visitor comes to the home or to celebrate the success of a family member. It is usually a small brood, typically no more than 20 hens. They rarely multiply past this. Apart from domestic consumption and the occasional sale to offset small emergencies, the growth of the flock is limited by many other factors such diseases, theft, and chicken which wander away from home never to return.  Even the hawks and other predators take a huge toll on the flock numbers. As a result, the rural farmer hits a plateau every year when it comes to multiplying their flock with the growth being limited by factors seemingly beyond their control.

Hidden wealth
But the roaming indigenous or kienyeji chicken is a potential goldmine that could potentially make farmers exceedingly rich when proper management practices are put in place. Unlike the exotic breeds in the market, the indigenous breeds or kienyeji chicken breeds offer certain advantages that make them ideally suited for the poor resource-starved rural farmers.

For example, unlike the exotic breeds, they are well adapted to the local rearing conditions and are very disease resistant so the farmer is unlikely to face massive losses from a disease epidemic.  They consume less and eat a variety of locally available food thus significantly lower the feeding costs for the low-income rural families looking to invest in profitable poultry farming.

Also, they do not require very “sophisticated” housing and poultry management and farmers can even rear them in houses made of mud as long as there is an allowance for proper aeration of the building.  Poor farmers can easily rear them in small pieces of land as they take very little space. A little strip of land measuring 40 feet by 20feet can accommodate up to 800-850 kienyeji hens if you adopt innovative and low-cost building approaches.Such are discussed in our poultry rearing manual.

In Kenya, rural farmers can now get an even better deal through the KARI Improved Kienyeji chicken which are even more disease resistant, consume less and produce eggs and meat on a level almost comparable to the exotic breeds. This combined with the fact that the kienyeji chicken, even without interventions, always fetch a premium price in the marketplace make this one of the surest ways for poor/economically depressed farmers to grow their wealth through low cost poultry rearing techniques that they can incorporate at very minimal cost.

The KARI improved kienyeji chicken breeds along with an exotic breed from India called Kuroiler are already changing the fortunes of many small scale or low income farmers in both rural and urban Kenya who are seeing their fortunes grow tremendously through proper poultry rearing and management techniques.

We have covered all this in great detail in our comprehensive but easy to follow Improved Kienyeji Chicken Farming Manual which is now available at only Ksh.1000. Give us a call today 0717444786 or email us at to place your order on improvedkienyeji[at]gmail[dot]com.

This comprehensive kienyeji chicken manual comes with all the information that you would need to turn a small scale poultry farming business into a success including the information on how to choose your poultry breeds,  how to carry out brood management, how to build a kienyeji chicken house, how to feed your kienyeji chicken, managing the health and diseases in your flock, farm management and record keeping amongst others