A Hopetown, West Berbice pensioner who invested in 105 baby chicks as well as over $30,000 in feed since April 28, is distressed since she will not be able to recover her cost as the birds have stopped growing.
The confused Brenda Semple, 68, told Stabroek News on Saturday that 10 of the chicks died just after she bought them from a businessman at Bush Lot. Then, after several weeks, she noticed that the remaining birds were not growing as normal.
She kept on feeding them with the five bags of feed she had purchased along with one bag of ‘fine’ rice and two bags of bran hoping that they would eventually reach their normal weight.
However, six weeks later, the time she would normally pluck her birds to supply to a shop owner, the chickens still appeared to be just about two weeks old. By this time, she said sadly, her chickens would normally weigh about eight pounds but “now they have just over one pound”.
Besides, Semple said, she was “throwing away dead chickens every morning”. A few of the chickens appeared to have grown almost to the normal size and she had to separate them, moving the stunted birds to another pen
She is now left with about 70 of the birds and still has to keep investing in feed for them but she is hurt that she would not be able to sell them. She also declared “me aint want them to eat either; I can’t eat them”.
Semple has been rearing poultry for several years now but this is the first time she has encountered such a problem. Semple feels that the chicks were probably not injected before leaving the hatchery. She said an agricultural officer had also told her that “maybe the feed is not good.”
She told this newspaper that other residents also complained about the same problem. One woman bought 200 chickens about two weeks before Semple bought hers and they weigh only three pounds each.
She said the resident “tried plucking them to sell but people complain about the weight” and she had to stop.
“This is not fun to invest so much and you can’t make back yuh money. I would be the loser. It is not easy to find the money for feed and it is heart-rending to see that I am a pensioner and this is what I meet up with.”
