Almost everyone who have tried it says that the snail farming in Nigeria is one of the most profitable business you can start with a little investment. It is a matter of fact that the snail business in Nigeria provides nearly the best opportunities to make a huge profit within a short period of time.
Continue reading to find out how to start snail farming in Nigeria in details!
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1. Advantages of Snail Farming in Nigeria
These are the reasons whysnail farming for beginners is a good chance to start your business and grow it quite fast:
- Snails are highly reproductive and, also, hermaphroditic in nature, so the slugs reproduce extremely fast!
- Each snail is able to lay about 100 egg up to 6 times a year.
- Snail meat is considered a delicacy, that is better than any other type of red meat, because it is dietary and enriched with highly nutrition elements like protein, iron, calcium and phosphorus. On the contrary, the cholesterol-, sodium- and fat levels are very low.
- Being a very delicious food, snail meat is highly demanded not only in Nigeria, but in many countries all over the world. One of the reasons why there is a fantastically huge number of snail meat lovers is that there is no religious taboo consuming this natural product.
- Snail business cover a really great market in whole Nigeria and in the West African regions.
- Starting a prosperous business you can get an extra income.
- The snail farm business requires much lesser investments than lots of other farming businesses, and you get your income really fast! Also, the business running costs are surprisingly low.
- With the snail farm business, risk of capital losses are much lesser compared to other types of livestock farming: People make 10 times more profit from snail farming within one year without any risks.
- You can use every part of slug’s body.
- This type of business is not time-, odor-, noise- or stress consuming.
- You can easily combine snail farming business with your primary occupation!
2. Disadvantages of snail farming
- Snails are pretty slow-growing creatures.
- Some climate zones may require an expensive climate control equipment.
- If your snails will escape from the farm, they can become really dangerous pests for the nearby crops.
3. How to start a snail farming business: finding a perfect location
Find the proper environment that will perfectly fit your snail farm.
The conditions are not that strict: the area must not be windy, and there must enough of water in the area. In order to crate the best conditions for your snails, you have to build snaileries.
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4. How to rear snail in Nigeria: choosing the suitable soil
The soil on your plot should have certain necessary chemical elements that will increase the level of survival of your snails. It’s a good idea to hire an expert to test the soil beforehand.
The snails must derive calcium from the soil, drink water and lay eggs. So if you want to build a successful snail farm, choose the soil with all the necessary facilities.
5. How to farm snails at home: buy the quantity of snails you can manage
You can always try to pick the forest or garden snails that easily adapt to the different environment, but since you can’t pick enough of them for your farming business, then go the easy way and purchase the snails from the farm of from the market.
If you still want to try the first option, then do the following:
- Wait for the rainy season, then sprinkle some spicy fruits to attract snails.
- Do that late in the evening, and check out your bait in the night time – there will be plenty of them.
- Repeat the process every day and at different locations, if you are lucky, you will have enough to start your snail farming business. This is very valuable among snail farming techniques, to gather new snails.
6. How to farm snails: snail farming equipment
As we decided to guide you through the snail rearing business at home, consider a list of equipment used for snail farming in a room:
- 10 cages for young snails;
- 80 aviary for adult snails;
- 10 containers for young snails;
- 10 containers for laying eggs;
- 100 shelving boxes for selling snails;
- 100 air humidifiers thermocouples.
7. How to build a snail farm
First, you have to build a snail pen: you can use tank or even drum: this will help you to watch your snails, prevent them from escaping and protect them from the wild reptiles and big insects.
In order to protect the snails from harm and prevent them from escaping, you can use wire gauze to create a fence. If you want to farm snails at home, build the snail house near your house.
Take a look on how to build snail house:
8. How to farm snails: choose the correct species
There are three snail species that are the best choice for snail farming:
- Achatina Fulica. It is a quite large, air-breathing land snail specie. Adults sometimes exceed 20 cm in shell length but the average is 5-10 cm. The average weight of the adult snail is about 32 grams.
- Achatina Achatina. It’s a giant Ghana snail, also known as the giant tiger land snail. It’s very large, air-breathing land snail specie. Achatina-Achatina is the perfect choice for farming: each sail lays up to 500 eggs at a time, three times a year. It is easy to calculate the success: if you start with 1000 snails, in one year you would be getting about 1.5 million snails!
- Archachatina Marginata is another popular species of air-breathing tropical land snail. Usually, these snails grow up to 20 cm long, and can live up to 10 years.
9. How to feed snails
Feeding snails is not costly at all, even if you rear them on moneymaking scale. Snails eat leaves and common fruits like cucumber, guava, paw paw, banana, cabbage, sweet potatoes, maize chaff, tomatoes, cassava tuber, cocoyam, etc., that you can find everywhere.
10. How to take care of a snail
You can easily manage even the large farm if you perfectly know how to rear snail.
Good management in rearing snails includes:
- feeding them on time;
- providing them with fresh clean water;
- regularly clean the feed/water containers.
If you feed y our snails regularly and provide a suitable environment for them, they won’t get sick, that will lower the risk of loosing them to minimum, unlike the other animal husbandry.
11. How long does it take for snail eggs to hatch?
Sexually matured snails fertilize each other regardless to the fact if it is male or female.
The eggs they have laid hatch between 4 and 6 weeks. You should separate the baby snails from the adults to create some room for them to grow. They reach adulthood in the period of time from 18 months to 2 years.
12. How to rear snail at home: the harvesting
When your snails start maturing, harvest them for sale. You should not harvest all of them: keep some snails for breeding other snails.
13. How to start snail farming: the marketing
Marketing includes all the arrangements you have to make from the moment you have started your snail farming.
On a certain stage, you will have to establish the relations with the hotels, restaurants, eateries and sellers on the market. If you contact them in advance, it would be easier to sell your snails.
Check out how to package snail for export:
14. How lucrative is snail farming in Nigeria?
Of course, if you have a good snail farming business plan, you will be able to calculate all your steps in advance to avoid marketing difficulties and financial troubles.
In a whole, Snail farming in Nigeria is very profitable, because the current price of snail in Nigeria is quite high.
In terms of cost and time, snail farming in Nigeria is considered to be a low risk, but highly profitable unlike many other livestock enterprises, it requires a little investment and operating costs.
The cost of starting a snail farm is not very high: someone can start with N100, 000 or N150, 000 depending on the size of the farm.
The possible gross profit margin is a minimum of 100%. You can purchase snails for N200 and later, after rearing them, sell them between N450 to N1000.
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