Irvine's pours $6m into stockfeed processing plant

Published: 26 May 2014

The country's largest chicken breeder, Irvine's Zimbabwe has invested $6 million towards the construction of silos and a stockfeed processing plant which will push production capacity to 25 tonnes per hour.

Currently Irvine's Zimbabwe has a 5-tonne per hour capacity. The three silos have a combined holding capacity of 9,000 tonnes of maize and soya beans.

The stockfeed plant will be commissioned in September this year. In an interview with our Harare Bureau yesterday, Irvine's Zimbabwe chairman David Irvine said the investment is part of the company's plans to expand its chicken business.

"We managed to get funding from a Scandinavian based financial institution, Norsad Finance Limited and the funding has gone towards the setting up of this state-of-the-art stockfeed plant.

"Our old plant does not have the capacity to enable us to fulfil demand hence we ended up buying some of our feed from other sources," said Irvine.

"We still have the capacity to add two more silos but at the moment our focus is on finishing the main plant."

He said the silos that have been supplied by an American based company, GSI (Pvt) Limited will be commissioned at the end of this month.

All the civil work at the construction site is being done by local companies. Irvine said the stockfeed plant is going to have two lines that produce pellets for broiler chickens. Through this initiative Irvine's Zimbabwe will be able to increase the pellets production by 87 percent.

"The introduction of the lines is going to improve our capacity. Our old pellet line currently produces 8 tonnes of pellets per hour and the new line will produce 15 tonnes per hour," he said.

Irvine said this investment was in line with the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation cluster of infrastructure development.

The company is currently producing an average of 600,000 chicks per week. The company has also extended its focus towards empowering small scale producers through its contract grower programme.

Recruitment of contract growers has aided in meeting consumer demand of chicken and also contributed to economic growth and employment creation.
- chronicle