25/03/2026
MEET MIKE BOSCH, A FARMER WITH A CLEVER VILLAGE CHICKEN CONCEPT
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Mike Bosch runs one of the largest village chicken breeding project in Africa. His farm, Boschveld Farm, is located just outside Bela Bela, a small town in South Africa’s Limpopo Province.
Bosch, one of the best poultry farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, hatched an idea that provides his village chicken breeders with an easy but highly nutritious meal while simultaneously ridding his cattle of tick borne diseases. His chickens feed off his cattle’s ticks. Not only does this provide the chickens with a high protein content meal, it keeps ticks off his livestock.
During the day, when the cattle and sheep go to the water point, he releases the chickens which feed on the ticks. The blood meal from his 1,500 cattle has a high protein content.
Bosch of course supplements his chickens with the usual chicken feeds. He says that this concept has not only helped him reduce of chicken feed quantities, it has also helped him reduce the number of times he dips his cattle, from 26 times to only 12 times a year.
He has a flourishing stock of chickens in the current cycle. Most of his income comes from selling between 150,000 and 200,000 chickens to NGOs and government projects per month, as well as selling fertilsed eggs and chicks. Bosch has sold 12 million chicks into Africa so far. His incubators can hold 30,000 eggs per cycle and he hatches 10,000 chicks per week
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