One of the problems hindering the growth and development of poultry farming business in Nigeria is funding.

 

Lots of farmers need money to expand their current operations and many people thinking of starting an agricultural business need money to kick start their operations.

 

There is a lot of money out there from public and private institutions available to back agriculture businesses but many people aren’t able to access these funds. The major reason why people can’t access these funds is because they aren’t able to convince lenders (public and private lenders) that their money will be put to good use.

 

This inability to convince lenders is because farmers and entrepreneurs aren’t able to properly articulate why they need the money and how they intend to use the money once they get it. You can only convince lenders that you will put their money to good use via a well-written business plan. With a well-written business plan, your chances of accessing the billions in the coffers of private and public institutions is greatly improved.

 

This post will help you access the money you need for your agriculture business by showing you how to write an agribusiness plan. We will use a poultry farming business has the template for writing our business plan and you’ll be walked through the key components of a business plan that receives funding.

 

The 12 key parts of a good poultry farming business plan are:

Poultry Farming Business Plan

1. Company name and logo (optional)

Your company name should appear at the top of your business plan pitch or proposal. Also, get a good graphic designer to design a nice logo for your company. Doing this will give your business plan a professional look and it will immediately make it stand out from the crowd.

 

For our sample poultry farming business plan, the company name is Rayfield Poulry Farms Limited

2. Headline

The next step is to describe your company and the business opportunity it will be taking advantage of. Make sure you use strong, compelling and graphic words to describe your company and its business opportunity. Include in your headline the things that will make your company successful (e.g. innovative products, industry experience etc.)

 

For our sample poultry farming business plan, the headline will be: Rayfield Poultry Farms Limited is a full service poultry farming business setup to provide quality and affordable poultry eggs and meat products to the millions of Nigerians earning less than the minimum wage. This will be achieved through our unique and proprietary methods of raising poultry gained from over 20 years of experience in the poultry farming industry.

 

3. Problem(s) your company will solve

Here you have to state the problem(s) that your company intends to solve for your target customers. These problems can be unmet needs or wants in the market or a unique and different method of solving the present needs and wants in your target market.

 

For our sample poultry farming business plan, the problems we intend to solve will be expressed as follows:

Rayfield Poultry Farm Ltd intends to address the following problems/pain points in the market:

• Making poultry products affordable to low-earning workers who only eat poultry on special occasions (Christmas, birthdays etc.)
• Ensuring that poultry products are well packed and prepared hygienically
  

4. Your company’s solution

In this section you must explain how your company intends to solve the problems your target customers face. The lenders must see clearly what your company offers and how your solution provides a different and unique alternative to what is presently in the market place.

 

 For our sample poultry farming business plan, the solutions we will bring will be expressed as follows:

Rayfield Poultry Farms Ltd will make poultry affordable to the masses by

• Drastically reducing the cost of raising poultry by using new feeding methods, practices and feed materials
• Eliminate the middle men in product distribution by supplying directly to the consumers through use of e-commerce and community peer sales outlets

5. Explain your target market

You must be crystal clear about the type of people your agriculture business intends to serve. Your business plan must be clear on the customers you want to concentrate on, the segment of the populace who will represent your primary market, the segment of the populace your business will actively ignore etc. As you identify the potential customers for your agriculture business, ensure to get figure and statistics about them. You need to know the number of people who make up your target market and how much they averagely spend each year to address the problem you intend to solve. Some market research will be needed for this aspect and you can get market data from sources like the United Nations, World Bank, and National Bureau of Statistics.

 

For our sample poultry farming business plan, the target market are the low-income earners in Nigeria. Some facts and figures about this segment of the population can be seen below:

6. Your competitive landscape

A key feature or component that defeats most business plan in real life is not taking competition into consideration. To prevent this from happening to your business, you need to have a good grasp of your competitive landscape. In this section, you will make a short list of your competitors. Your competitors are divided into two categories: direct and indirect. Direct competitors are those businesses that already exist in your intended market or industry space and who are producing similar products and services. Your indirect competitors are those businesses who aren’t producing similar or the same products and services like you intend to but who are still competing for money your target customers could have spent with you.

 

As you list your competitors, describe or state what makes your solution better or more attractive than theirs.

The competitive landscape for our sample poultry farming business plan is listed below:

Direct Competitors

Roostville	Better packaging, More variety
Chi Farms	Cheaper price, More variety
Zartech	Cheaper price, Better packaging
Fiesta	Cheaper price, Better packaging

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indirect Competitors

 

Pork meat	Mass appeal
Meat sellers	Better hygiene
Fish sellers	Tastier, Better hygiene, Better packaging
Canned  Products	Healthier, Fresher

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. Funding needs

In this section, you state the amount of money you want to raise and how you intend to spend the money on your agriculture business.

For our sample poultry farming business plan, the funding needs can be stated as follows:

Rayfield Poultry Farms Ltd intends to raise N160,200,000 which would be spent as shown below:

• Processing Equipment and Machinery— N105,000,000
• Staff & Personnel— N4,800,000
• Birds— N5,400,000
• Feeding Material— N45,000,000

8. Your sales channels

In this section, you explain and describe how you plan to get your products or services to market. Are you selling and delivering to your target customers directly through a retail store, website, or catalogue? Do you plan to have a sales team? Do you plan to sell through intermediaries — distributors, dealers, resellers, or others? Identifying your sales channels is important to understanding the economics of your business model.

 

For our sample poultry farming business plan, the sales channels will be outlined as follows:

 

Rayfield Poultry Farms Ltd intends to get her poultry products directly to her customers through the following sales channels:

• Online store: where customers can order directly to their homes
• Community peer channels: we will setup clusters of peer sales outlets in densely populated areas where customers can buy poultry products from
• Farm sale shops

9. Marketing activities

In this section, you explain how you plan to attract attention, build interest in your offerings, and convert prospects into customers. Describe your web presence. What sort of online marketing do you do? Do you advertise online, in print, or elsewhere? Do you attend trade shows or sponsor events? If your direct marketing is largely done by resellers or dealers, what kind of marketing will you do to attract and keep those key partners?

 

For our sample poultry farming business plan, the marketing activities will be listed as follows:

• Facebook marketing campaign
• Product flyers and banners
• Radio advert
• Twitter promotion
• Google adword campaign

10. Financial Forecast

When you are confident that you have identified a market with a problem worth solving, it's time to put together a quick financial forecast for your solution. Can you actually turn a profit? Some opportunities look good at a glance, but don't hold up to financial scrutiny.

 

Some of the things you would have to put into consideration when drawing up the financial forecast for your business plan are:

• What does it cost to make what you sell?

You need to know your direct costs. The idea behind direct costs is that every time you make a sale, you incur more costs. Common examples of direct costs (also known as costs of sales, costs of goods sold, or just COGS) are the raw materials you need to manufacture your products, wholesale purchases of products you are reselling, and sales commissions. Where regular expenses like rent, marketing, and insurance may remain steady as your sales fluctuate, making more sales always means incurring more direct costs.

 

For our poultry farming business plan and for your plan, you need to separate direct costs from other expenses because it lets you understand your gross margin. Shown on the profit and loss statement, gross margin shows the portion of your revenue — as a monetary value and a percentage — that is left over after paying your direct costs, but not your other expenses. This gives you a sense of how much potential profit your company has to work with.

 

Who do you need to execute your plan?

This is where you will cover the salaries and related costs paid to yourself, your employees, and any contract workers. Depending on how big your company is, you can list every employee by name or title, or you can group them into common roles or departments if that makes more sense.

 

For our poultry farming business plan and for your own plan, putting together your personnel plan is a valuable opportunity to think through your staffing needs, now and in the future. How much will you pay your staff? When do you need to add new positions? How will those positions be compensated? Does it make more sense to hire full-time employees or use contract resources?

 

What else do you need to spend money on?

This is where you add all of your company’s regular expenses here — rent, utilities, insurance, marketing costs, office supplies, and so on. If your company is just getting started, be sure to include any one-time or short-term start-up expenses in the early months as you get up and running. For our poultry farming business plan, we must also put this into consideration.

 

 

Do you have any major purchases with long-lasting value?

In business finance, and for our poultry farming business plan, it is customary to treat long-lasting purchases (called “assets”) differently than regular expenses. Take two purchases as an example: a company generator and a tank of fuel to power it. The fuel is a short-lived purchase. Buy it in May, use it in May. It won’t continue powering your generator later in the year. That’s how regular expenses work. The generator itself is different, though. It’s an expensive purchase, and if treated as a one-time expense, it might be a big hit on the company’s profitability. Then again, it won’t be gone at the end of the period. A good generator will deliver value for years to come, so it makes sense to spread out its cost over time. That’s the idea behind asset purchases in our poultry farming business plan.

 

The way that the financial statements handle an asset is by recording its full value on the balance sheet, then calculating the amount of value it will lose each month over its useful life (that’s the idea of “depreciation”), and then expensing only that amount each month until the full value of the asset has been depleted. We will purchase lots of assets like land, machinery, vehicles etc. for our sample poultry farming business plan.

 

What does your tax situation look like?

Taxes are a fact of life in business, so you need to include a reasonable allotment for them. Don't stress too much about this, though. This is business planning, not tax planning. The taxes you have to consider here are theoretical expenses based on theoretical profits. It would be silly to get too specific about the details. Just set your standard rates to make sure that your forecast includes basic tax coverage. This is put into consideration in our poultry farming business plan

 

Do you plan to issue dividends to your shareholders?

Enter any dividends or other distributions of earnings here. Dividends (for corporations) or distributions (for Limited liabilities or partnerships) are a way to pass current or past profits along to the company's owners or shareholders. Companies can issue dividends at any time, but typically do so at the end of the fiscal year. That timing makes sense, given that dividends are based on after-tax profits. Our poultry farming business plan covers this too.

 

Our sample poultry farming business will be selling eggs and poultry parts and after computing all these financial data for our sample poultry farming business plan, the following are the financial projections we arrived at:

 

 

11. Team and key roles

In this section of our sample poultry farming business plan, we identify the key members of our organization, and explain why their involvement is important to our future success. In your plan, ensure you include company owners and members of the management team. You may also want to add key employees with strategically valuable skills or connections, noteworthy roles you plan to fill later, trusted advisors, or other valuable contributors.

 

 

12. Partners and resources

In this last section of the poultry farming business plan, we identify any relationships, equipment, facilities, patents, or other resources that are strategically important to our business model.

 

I hope this post as shown you how to write the type of business plan and proposal that receives funding. I wish you success in getting your agriculture business funded!

 

By the way, if you don't want to go through all the stress and hard work of writing a poultry farming business plan, or if you don't have the time and energy to prepare a poultry farming business plan, we have good news for you. You can get our already-prepared, world-class poultry farming business plan that contains all the elements discussed in this article!

 

You can see a screenshot of our already-prepared, world-class poultry farming business plan below:

 

 All you have to do with our poultry farming business plan is to edit the company name and management team members and replace it with your company name, management team members and submit it to banks and aid agencies to apply for funding.

 

Our poultry farming business plan costs N40,000 and it will show you the latest figures for starting a poultry farming business  with profts, cashflow and balance sheet for 5 years of operations. When you get our poultry farming business plan, we will also send you structural designs and drawings for building a poultry house for 2000 birds.

 

If you're interested in getting it,  you can pay online or call or chat with us on +2348089864121 or send a mail to agsolutions@agricdemy.com

 

Also, if you need a world-class agribusiness plan on pig farming, poultry processing, sorghum farming, palm oil farming, cassava farming etc. and you don't have the time, skill and energy to write one by yourself, click here.