I just read this business plan. I am not a financial expert, but I think the basis document is very good. I decided to read it, because I thought it would be a good and quick introduction into the project (which it turned out to be).

Before you read my remarkes on this document, I want you to know that I am not a financial expert or a farmer (I can see there is a diference between a brioler and a goat; from that point onwards I need to gamble which animal is the goat and which is the brioler). However, in my line of business (making computerprograms), I deal with the feasiblity of investing in a computerprograms, which basicly has some reference to business plans and return on investements (when is it profitable to invest, and when is it not?).

Looking at the document; what I am missing is a detailed calculation of your expected expenses and profits. For instance: How will you generate the money to make the farm part of the project run for group A run for one year (howmuch broilers do you need to sell at what price in order to make the venture sustainable for the next year)? What will happen to that calculation if the price of the broilers drops? What are the historic prices of broilers in the area? Looking at your profitmargin and the amount you can sell, howmuch time will it take to be large enough to incooperate group B into the broiler program(from a financial and a population of animals and number of facilities point of view)?

Or: howmuch money do you need in order to maintain the population of 8 goats on the farm per year? Howmuch goats are you able to sell at what price to maintain this population for the next year? can you bread that much animals form those 8 goats? If you want to let the population grow in order to incooperate Wakitaka group B into the project: How much time will that take you top bread the goats needed whilst maintaining expenses needed for group A? And how much money do you need to expand facilities and animals in order to incooperate Wakitaka group B into the project? Looking at those numbers: how much time will it take you to incooperatie Wakitaka group B at this moment?

I think the document itself is a very good basis, which would benefit from the adding of a calculation of your realistic predictions on the farm/school in financial terms for the next couple of years. It will give the reader of the plan an idea on how feasible/sustainable the plan is, and will give you an idea on, (if you need any) howmuch donations you will need in order to reach the goal set in the business plan.

Having these numbers ready will also help you in your decision making when the prices of your product fluctuate into a certian direction ("looking at the prices and my predictions of the near future sellingprices and maintenance prices (food, accomodation, etc.) of both broilers and goats: is it best now to invest the profit of the broilers I just sold into new goats or new broilers?"). I do not have the farming experience like Ken Hargesheimer or Emmanuel on how these decissions are made in every day farming life. I wonder: are my thoughts (as an outsider) correct that if you/your students have these numbers ready, it would be easier to make the decision on what would be the best thing for your farming operation as a whole?

Kind regards,
Lieuwe

I would really like to chance the training in order to make it work in the field. Therefore: any feedback, especially on things that did not work, or subject which where hard to understand in the current setup of the traing, is very welcome.

Hi Lieuwe,

I think you are right here and that information on the financials would be useful to build. I also believe it would make decision making easier. My suggestion would be to follow this up once the structure of the document is confirmed and now that investment has been placed in the project and we have some cash flow, how this can help with projections.

Emmanuel would you be able to provide the current document structure and will look into whether i can find useful information budget forecasting that would be applicable.

Thanks

Andy

Wasn't Emma's chicken budget.doc a good budget? Only thing I haven't learned is if we can put the electricity on at night for 2-4 hours to increase the birds' eating time to make growth quicker. I don't know how many hours they were using the electricity for @$50 per month - might have been all night or 10 hours and we could cut that back to $10-20 per month if it makes the chickens grow quicker.

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Ginger :)

chicken budget.doc

Hi Ginger,

It is indeed a good document, i did not know it existed! From this document I fabricated a basic cash flow statement and P&L for Wakitaka as for analysis purposes it made it easier to view it this way.

Emma - from completing the document i found some very interesting points and have some key questions that the project should consider.

The expected cash generated from the project actually exceeds the cumulative profit you suggest. (Great news!!) This is because the sale of the chickens exceeds the expected cost for the following project phase, therefore a surplus of cash is generated. Total cash generation from this project by my calculations would be 1250 USD (2438000 Ushs) by the end of the 4th phase.

This means that with all assumptions met in selling all 250 birds per phase at 6000 Ush there would be significant cash generated from this project to be reinvested in a 2nd phase or goat project. However this is a key point to stress. This is assuming the following factors:

1. All birds will live and be sold for 6000Ush.

Should a percentage of the birds die then this will obviously reduce cash generation

The difference between selling the birds for 5000 Ush and 6000 ush is profit of 500 USD. Anything below 5000 USh per bird and the project looks less beneficial (use the highlighted cell on Basic Cash flow to input different sale prices and see impact)

Therefore could the youths be actively looking for selling a percentage of the chickens for a guaranteed price above break even before the chickens reach maturity, therefore locking the profit whilst leaving others to sell at market price?

Doing so would also stabilise your cash flow

2. Additional costs will not be incurred until the end of phase 4.

From looking at this i would expect some maintenance costs of feeders and drinkers through 4 phases of the project and have therefore challenged the assumption and included some additional costs in phase 3 (see P&L sheet) (If this is wrong please remove them from both the P&L and cash flow)

Also will the project be paying the book keeper for her services?

Are there any tax implications, if so this will also affect the cash and profit of the business

Finally what are business accounting laws in Uganda, am assuming that this won't be affected until it reaches a certain profitability but might be worth researching.

I do hope this helps and am happy to talk this through on skype if you want. I have also included an example 2010 projection, scaling up the costs on the assumption that the project will have 400 birds per phase and adjusting the costs accordingly.

This should by no means be taken as truth as there may be things I am not considering and should be used as an example document

Many thanks

Andy

Wakitaka P&L, Cash Flow.xls

WOW! Andrew, thank you so much - I am so glad I reattached this file - I went ahead and began this project because the boys had already worked this out. I don't think thought that we have a profit budget for pigs and goats, which should be done, as well as veggies, but the boys will have to do some serious research about how many plants per their 1/4 acre - what they're going to plant, and what they can get at the market. I think it will not cost much for the farming, so that we might just let them give it a go and kind of 'learn as they go' as to how much they can make per 1/4 - then expand, etc. The hose i will be providing is to last 3-4 years, maybe more, and I hope we can get a local supplier so that we don't have to ship from the US.
I wonder if you can help on goat projections and pigs? Very nice to meet you!

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Ginger :)

Great job, Andy! You are a wealth of information. The document looks very useful. Thanks for all your knowledge and hard work.
Jen

Thanks Andrew so much for this plan. I think it will be of great help for Emmanuel and the youths.
However, I think the plan has to be adapted to the current prices and provisions.
Emmanuel, you talked about feeds having become more expansive. Could you update us on this? And for electricity and heating; how much did you finally invest in lamps and charcoal? Did it work out with the recharchable lamp? Could you then also update the costs of this in the plan?

I already talked with Emmanuel about the same kind of plan for goats, veggies and pigs, and I think we will get some update on this shortly. This would help a lot, as Andrew said, to preview the prize, at which they should sell their products to be most profitable and in which project to invest most.

Lieuwe, thanks again for the very good booklet about profit calculating. Emmanuel has given it to Richard, who will go through it with the youths. I hope that they can give you then some feedback on how it worked and which parts they did not understand.

Have a good day, everybody,
Maria

Hi everybody,

I shortly talked today with Emmanuel. He reassured me that the spotted goat also was of good quality :)

He sent me the updated poultry budget provisions and asked me to post it here, since his Internet connection is very slow at the moment. (therefore also answers are more rare since access to Nabuur.com seems difficult).

Comparing the costs to the previous one, they were even a bit less than projected, which is great.
Andrew, would you have the time to include the new data in your provision? Thanks.

Maria

Poultry_project_expenses.doc

Looks really good! Were you able to ask Emmanuel about electricity for 4 hrs per night? And I keep forgetting what corn husks are for? Are they like a bedding? i think we will all never stop smiling about the spotted goat - she's a Beauty! What's her name? I'm thinking of writing a poem to her :):):)
Good thing we haven't started on the pigs - I just heard Egypt is killing ALL their pigs. Definitely not a good time to start pig farming.

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Ginger :)

Corn husk are good for leaving on the land. They are poor bedding and never should be fed to livestock. No food value.

Swine flu comes only from the swine factories; not from swine farms. Chicken flu comes from chicken factories; not from chicken farms.

Ken

Hi Neighbors,

The coffee husks for the poultry house are to provide a better thermal comfort for the chicken than they would be on the bare ground that is poorly insulated. For the lighting hours, we thought this would take 12hours at night from 7:00pm to 7:00am to enable the chicken to eat throught the night otherwise the option of 4hrs at night can still serve the purpose only that the birds would take quite longer to acquire the weight for the market than when feeding all night.

Regards,
Emmanuel

HI EMMA, I THINK THOSE VERY BRIGHT IDEAS IN AS FAR AS POULTRY IS CONCERNED.

TONNY.

Hi,

Apologies for not getting to this until now. I will look at including the figures asap however i would still like to run through this with someone in the project as i think these skills would be valuable to transfer for future budgeting etc.

Emmanuel- Would you be able to let me know when a good time is, if you would like to talk these through.

Thanks

Andy

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for all you are doing! Saturday night will be Ok for me perhaps for a chat on skype. My skype ID is EmmanuelMenya.

Regards,
Emmanuel Menya