Loadshedding has negatively impacted the poultry industry so much that there is a looming shortage of chicken. Poultry suppliers around the country are now running low on chicken and eggs due to high mortality rate, not being able to slaughter chicken on time, rising feeds and fuel costs as they need it to generate power during outages.

SHORTAGE OFCHICKEN LOOMING

The South African Poultry Association (SAPA) said that loadshedding severely impacted its process to slaughter chickens and produce eggs which will cause a shortage in the country. In the past weeks, producers were forced to slaughter more than 10 million day-old chicks as they didn't have anywhere to raise them. This is because of the disruption in slaughtering grown chicken, leaving no space chicken house to raise them as those are occupied by big birds.  SAPA General Manager, Izaak Breytenbach said:  " We go up 10-20% above normal demand and when you then have six hours of loadshedding from Monday, then by Friday we've got a serious shortage of chicken because abbatoirs have limited time to slaughter,'

PRICE INCREASE INEVITABLE

Breytanbach said farmers lose a number of times in this production process. "Firstly, we don't get the chickens slaughtered. Then we're now slaughtering chickens that are too big for the market preference. We've calculated that we are now paying 75c per kilo of chicken for loadshedding only,' Breytenbach said. Price increases would also become a reality the chicken prices being high because of raw material price increases. "We haven't really seen the impact of load shedding yet on the price.Unfortunately, we are incurring the costs at present as producers and in times to come, we'll have to give that through to the consumer,' he said in an interview with Cape Talk radio.

IMPACT ON SMALL-SCALEFARMERS

Patricia Mantsho(35) a poultry farmer from Moletjie in Limpopo has felt the impact of loadshedding. Just recently she lost over 500 chicks due to the blackouts. An engineer by profession, Patricia went into poultry farming in 2021 as she has always been passionate about farming. She told ZiMoja her business needs electricity all the time to survive. "I have an incubator where I hatch day old chicks and the power needs to be on all the time for the fertile eggs to hatch. The more lights go off the more my business suffers,' she said. When she raises day old chicks, she has to put on the heat lights for 24 hours in a day to keep them warm to ensure good growth. "Chicks under three weeks cannot produce their own heat, so they are fully dependent on the heat. When they are not warm, they get frustrated and squeeze themselves into the corner to keep each other warm and as a result some die because of the stampede,'she said.

THE LOSSES

Patricia recently lost 50% of her fertile eggs which didn't hatch because of lack of power. "We've a 5000-capacity incubator and a generator but it's heavy on the pockets imagine using petrol for more than eight hours during stage 6 loadshedding, it's just too much. What's was worse is that if the eggs don't get the heat that's required, some suffer a great deal and by the time, they hatch they are deformed, and we are forced to curl them" she added. She said one can have good fertile eggs but the instability in the temperatures due to loadshedding affects the whole growth process. "Not only do we lose out money, but we've got clients buying day old chicks, they pay and you can't deliver in full capacity because some may have died. They give a deposit and you spend it not anticipating a disaster, now you have to refund them," she concludes.