Chicken Run!

JR is coordinating a weekly Poly-wide meeting on the development of a new program in Applied Biology. It’s been a fun but challenging and time-consuming opportunity to interact with the few scientists on campus and to talk about scientific skills that need to be cultivated in Namibia. This week’s topic was research, largely motivated by the fact that the new qualification will entail a research project, and there are more than 20 research-related courses already available at Poly to choose from. In a fortuitous turn of events, I also got a glimpse of scientific preparation by judging 7th and 12th grade chemistry entries in Namibia’s National Science Fair, which was held on the Poly campus in September. There’s an interesting dichotomy of perspective about whether training programs need courses in research (e.g. Research Methodology to define research and walk through the development of questions and research designs; no one debates the importance of separate, detailed statistics courses) or need research embedded in courses. For our part, we’re taking the latter approach with Non-ruminant Husbandry.
With the class, we’ve developed a 2-factor experiment to test how a change in agricultural practice would affect productivity and profit. The largest limitation to growing non-ruminants in Namibia is the feed cost – these feeds have to be nutritionally balanced (not just grass, as in ruminants), and the ingredients are almost all imported. So we asked the question of whether we could use cheaper, local feed ingredients and still get satisfactory performance. We chose to focus on chickens (rather than pigs, horses, or fish, our other non-ruminant options that would be impossible to house on campus) and to compare diets of commercial vs. hotel left-overs, with or without earthworms. A rule of thumb for chicken diets from scratch is 50% grains (bread crusts, rice, pasta, corn flakes), 25% protein sources (meat, egg, nuts, beans), and 25% greens (lettuce, chard, herbs), all chopped finely enough to make it down a small bird’s throat without chewing. The chicks get energy from the grains, proteins for building muscles, and vitamins and minerals from the greens.
There have been a few hurdles to overcome. First, chickens are illegal in Windhoek. Well, we’re only raising chicks, and they’ll be moved elsewhere when the experiment finishes at about 6 weeks. We didn’t even ask about whether it was okay to keep them for the first week in our apartment (we finally found a good use for our space heater!). Second, because the poultry industry is essentially non-existent in Namibia, there are few sources of large numbers of day-old chicks in the region. They must be imported from South Africa or purchased from Mashare Agricultural Development Institute, which is maintaining a line of Potchefstroom koekoek chickens after the end of a large trial comparing productivity of 4 breeds. Third, the veterinary fence was closed to all agricultural products from early August, when FMD broke out in the Kavango region. Chickens don’t carry FMD, but Veterinary Services doesn’t issue permits for anything when the fence is closed – until we called for weeks and finally went straight to the head vet in Namibia to get a special “red cross” permit to bring the chicks from Mashare, north of the red line, to Windhoek. This was our “chicken run.” We left Windhoek after class on Tuesday, traveled 5 hours to Roy’s Camp where we stayed the night, then pushed on to Rundu and Mashare, where we picked up the chicks, got the correct permit, and made the 8-hour drive back south to Windhoek by Wednesday evening. Roy’s Camp deserves a special note because it was one of the funkiest, most restful places we’ve stayed. JR went for a walk (!) in the bush (Roy’s camp doesn’t have any large predators) and was surprised by a LOUD barking snort that turned out to be a male kudu warning his group – I guess he was as surprised as I was! We had a wonderful dinner of kudu pockets (Okay, there are no kangaroos or other pocketed marsupials in Namibia, contrary to a variety of children’s books. These turned out to be pieces of kudu wrapped in bacon) and a half dozen different salads, most involving some sort of creamy dressing. We saw a whole herd of eland come to the waterhole at dusk, just as the “torches” made of wicks in glass bottles were being lit around the camp.
The chicks grew from 50 g at week 1 to 250 g at week 5, but faster on commercial feed than on urban leftovers. Worms helped their growth, too. We suspect that the leftovers were protein-deficient (it was a lot easier to get leftover pasta or porridge than leftover lamb or fish!) and missing some vitamins, because six of the birds began sitting on their haunches with curled toes a few days before the end of the experiment. We immediately took these birds out and put them on commercial feed with extra vitamins and minerals, and they were back to normal within a week! We’re having some feed samples analyzed chemically by the Ministry of Agriculture, so ultimately we’ll have data on what the birds actually received nutritionally.
The experiment has now ended and, despite our interest in giving 100 6-week-old chickens to a student interested in starting a chicken business, no one was able to write a business plan that actually showed a profit. The chickens moved instead to an organic farm in Okahandja – the garden city an hour north of Windhoek, where they’ll do a little grazing on cover crops, get some fishmeal from Walvis Bay, consume vegetable scraps and leftovers, and eat a bit of expensive organic nutritionally-balanced chicken food. We wish them happy (if not long) lives!