The Ekiti State government has declared its readiness to become the best broilers producing state in the country, just as it is targeting 5000 youth employment in the broiler production value chain.

The Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Security, Mr Ebenezer Boluwade disclosed this in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State, at the opening ceremony of the training of Ekiti youth in broiler production scheme and other stakeholders’ on good animal husbandry practices in poultry production.

According to him, the Ekiti State Broiler Production Scheme (EBOPS) started in 2023 with 20 participants at the livestock development centre (LDC), Erifun in Ado-Ekiti with stock population of 10,000 birds.

“The state government carried out massive renovation of the rearing pens, warehouse, offices and residential buildings at LDC and made available to the participants feed, DOC, drugs and vaccine, anti-stress to promote independent indigenous entrepreneurs in poultry business.

“Today through the intervention, more six rearing centres have sprung up at different locations in the state and the scheme had graduated over 200 participants in four sets of cohorts.

“Over 150,000 birds had been raised and sold within and outside the state, Exifi Broiler Production Scheme (EBOPS) has engaged our teeming youths profitably in broiler production, hence the need to build the capacity of the youths in the production value chain in order to minimise cost and maximise profits.”

Boluwade stated that the Livestock Productivity and Resilience Support Project (L-PRES) is already making tremendous progress as the state, and has been positioned as a hub for poultry production in Nigeria, adding that it has been given clearance to establish broiler processing plant that would eliminate the transportation of live matured birds out of the state for processing, which has its own business risk.

“The youth in EBOPS will be able to process their birds for value addition and thereby increase their profit margin. Also, three farmer field schools across the three senatorial districts had been established to give our farmers on-field new innovation and training.”

He added: “In this training, we are targeting about 500 youths. But in total, our objective in the next three years, we want to have more than 5,000 of these youths. So the whole focus is on the management, we have the producer; we have the midstream and the downstream.

In his welcome address, the Permanent Secretary, Ojo Ebenezer Babatope said the training on poultry-focused GAHP is designed to strengthen the technical capacity of farmers, with particular emphasis on participants in the Ekiti Youth in Broiler Production Scheme.

He noted that government is implementing a 50 per cent subsidy on agro-inputs and land preparation activities, as well as strategic partnerships with private sector players such as Agbeyewa and YSJ Farms to drive investment and innovation

In his remarks the lead consultant of the Synergy Impact Consultant Ltd, Mr Abiola Salako who partners the government on the training programme, said it is expected that participants would be able to develop their own farm.

He added that participants are also being trained on the use of antibiotics because if they produce unhealthy birds, it could affect human beings, saying farmers could use organic acid and micro biotic.