The question we hear most often on the phone is a short one: how many birds do I need to sell before I stop losing money? It sounds like a single number. It is not, and the people who treat it as one usually find the difference out at the sale.
Break-even for a broiler batch is the price per bird at which sales cover everything the batch cost. The catch sits in the word bird. Costs are paid on every chick you place. Income only comes from the birds you sell. Mortality sits between those two numbers, and each bird that dies leaves its share of the cost to be carried by the survivors.
Break-even is a count of birds, not a feeling
So the working question is not what did one bird cost me? It is what did each bird I actually sold cost me? In a clean run, those two figures sit close together. In a house that lost a fifth of its birds, they sit far apart, and the second figure is the one that decides whether the batch paid.
This is also why a batch can look fine on paper and still disappoint at the sale. The spreadsheet may use a tidy mortality assumption while the farm delivers something else. Break-even is only as honest as the assumption behind it, so the first thing to test is the mortality number itself.
Building the cost per placed bird
Start with the three lines that make up nearly all of the cost. The day-old chick comes from GH₵20 at Agro Prime. Feed is the largest line, at about 4.2 kg per bird from day-old to market. Everything else, which covers brooding heat, litter, vaccines and vitamins, labour and utilities, comes to roughly GH₵12 per bird.
Feed is where the arithmetic depends on which bag you buy. A 50 kg bag of broiler starter at GAPFA member prices, GH₵400 to GH₵410, works out at GH₵8.00 to GH₵8.20 per kilogram. At De Heus list prices, GH₵451 to GH₵472, the same bag works out at GH₵9.02 to GH₵9.44 per kilogram. Multiply those by 4.2 kg and feed alone runs from about GH₵34 to about GH₵40 per bird. The per-kilogram figures are our own division of the bag prices, shown as an illustration rather than a quote.
Put the lines together and the cost of a placed bird, before any deaths are counted, lands at roughly GH₵66 to GH₵72. That is GH₵20 for the chick, GH₵34 to GH₵40 for feed and about GH₵12 for everything else. Feed comes to more than half the total in both cases, which is why the feed plan carries so much weight. Once the full cycle is allowed for, the capital needed on a 1,000-bird batch falls in the range of GH₵65,000 to GH₵80,000, and that is the real size of the commitment.
Mortality does not change what you paid for each chick. It changes how many birds share that cost.
Think of it this way. Every chick you pay for is a commitment on day one. Every bird you sell is money that arrives weeks later. The gap between those two moments is where a batch can look profitable on a calculator and still run short of cash.
The table shows what each sold bird has to earn to cover the batch, at four mortality levels. The 3% and 5% rows sit in the well-managed range. The 10% and 20% rows reflect poor management or disease.
| Mortality | Break-even per bird sold, placed cost GH₵66 | Break-even per bird sold, placed cost GH₵72 |
|---|---|---|
| 3% | GH₵68 | GH₵74 |
| 5% | GH₵69 | GH₵76 |
| 10% | GH₵73 | GH₵80 |
| 20% | GH₵83 | GH₵90 |
These are illustrative calculations built from the cost lines above, not quotes. They spread the full cost of the chicks placed across the birds that survive, which is the honest way to see what each sold bird had to earn.
Read the 20% row again. Its break-even sits above the GH₵75 to GH₵80 a bird fetches in quiet months. A house that loses a fifth of its birds has to sell at festive prices just to get back its costs, and even then there is little margin for a bad week at the feed store. That is the simplest reason mortality is the first number a serious partner should ask about.
Price decides where you land
Break-even is only half of the picture. The other half is what the bird fetches on the day it leaves the house. In quiet months, live birds sell at around GH₵75 to GH₵80. At Christmas, Easter and Eid, the same bird can sell for GH₵100 or more.
Set the price against the break-even and the margin per bird becomes easy to see. At 10% mortality, break-even runs from GH₵73 to GH₵80. A quiet-month sale at GH₵75 to GH₵80 leaves almost nothing per bird. A festive sale at GH₵100 leaves roughly GH₵20 to GH₵27 per bird before any other deductions. Those margins are illustrative, but they show why a batch sold in the wrong month can look like a different business.
Timing is only partly in your hands. You choose the placement date, and that date decides which sale window the birds land in. A sale in the week before Christmas means placing chicks roughly six to seven weeks earlier, so the placement date is the lever you control. Our 2026 chick price guide is a useful companion when you are choosing that date.
Test your own break-even
The calculator on the partner page works from the same lines used in this article: chick cost, feed, other costs, mortality and sale price. Change one number at a time and watch what moves. If you want to talk through a particular batch, farm visits run Monday to Saturday, 7am to 6pm, and the partner page sets out batches from 500 birds, with 1,000 recommended.
One thousand birds on paper
Take a 1,000-bird batch placed at GH₵66 to GH₵72 per bird, which means GH₵66,000 to GH₵72,000 in total. Assume 4% mortality, so 960 birds reach market. At a quiet-month price of GH₵80, sales come to GH₵76,800. Taking the placed cost away leaves roughly GH₵4,800 to GH₵10,800 before any other deductions.
Now move the same 960 birds into a festive sale at GH₵100. Sales come to GH₵96,000, which leaves roughly GH₵24,000 to GH₵30,000. The birds, the feed and the house are identical in both cases. Only the calendar has changed.
Run the same batch at 20% mortality and only 800 birds are left to sell. At GH₵80 they bring in GH₵64,000, which does not cover the placed cost of GH₵66,000 to GH₵72,000. Even at GH₵100, the margin shrinks to roughly GH₵8,000 to GH₵14,000. These are illustrations, not a forecast, but they show how far losses can move the result on a batch of this size.
The costs that break-even leaves out
A break-even figure is a snapshot of one batch. It does not show the cash you had to find before the first sale, and it does not show how long that cash stayed in the house. A batch takes about eight weeks from placement to payout, clean-out included, so the money is committed for the whole cycle before any of it returns. The cash side is covered in our guide to poultry cash flow and break-even, and it is worth reading alongside this one.
Break-even also assumes the batch you planned is the batch you get. Feed prices move between suppliers and seasons, so a bag bought in one month can cost more than the bag your plan assumed. A run of hot days or a disease outbreak changes mortality without checking your spreadsheet first. None of this makes break-even useless. It makes it a number to revisit every week, using the reports that come in, rather than a figure you calculate once and file away.
Think too about a house that runs five or six batches a year. One batch that breaks even tells you little about the year. The question that matters is whether a house placing again and again on an eight-week cycle keeps enough after each sale to cover the clean-out, the next placement and the gap between one payout and the next.
Cost of money is easy to forget. Eight weeks of capital tied up in a batch is eight weeks it is not earning anywhere else. Before deciding a batch is worth the risk, compare what the same money could do over the same period, including simply keeping it in a bank account.
Check what the GH₵12 other-costs line leaves out for your own set-up. If your own transport, fuel for a generator or your own time for daily checks are not in that figure, add them. A break-even that leaves them out will look better than the batch really is.
No honest offer promises a fixed return
Ghana's Securities and Exchange Commission has warned the public against schemes that promise fixed or guaranteed returns. A broiler batch cannot promise a fixed monthly percentage, because feed, mortality and sale prices change from one batch to the next. Any offer that quotes a set monthly percentage on birds should be questioned before money moves. Our partnership is a profit share: capital comes back first, and the profit is split as the written agreement says. Payments go only to the Agro Prime Ghana Limited company account.
Re-running the numbers mid-batch
The break-even you work out on placement day is a forecast. By the middle of the batch you have real facts to replace some of the assumptions: feed used to date, deaths to date and the weight line from the weekly reports. Put those into the calculator and the figure becomes more honest, even if it moves.
Feed is the easiest place to start. Divide the kilograms used so far by the birds still alive, and compare the result with the 4.2 kg per bird planning figure. If the batch is eating more than planned, the cost per bird is rising, and break-even rises with it. If it is eating less, check that the birds are not simply struggling to reach the feeder.
Mortality is the second check. Compare deaths to date with the 3% to 5% range a well-managed house works within. A batch sitting above that range in week three is telling you something, and the earlier you act on it, the more of the plan you can still protect.
Questions to answer before you sign
Before you commit to any batch, including ours, ask the person offering it to show the arithmetic. Ask which mortality figure they assume, which feed price they use, what sale price they expect and in which month, and how the capital and the profit are paid back. A straight answer will name its assumptions. If the answer is a percentage with no assumptions behind it, you have learned what you needed to know.
Partners should also see the written agreement before placement, because that is the point at which the profit split and the repayment order are fixed. Once the chicks are in the house, the batch runs on the plan you signed. The weekly reports that arrive each Thursday should match the numbers that plan was built on, and when they do not, that gap is the thing to ask about first.
For a partner, break-even has a specific meaning inside the agreement. Capital is returned first, so the early sales money covers the batch's costs before any profit is counted. Profit only begins once those costs are covered. If sales fall short of cost, there is no profit to split, which is why the break-even figure matters to a partner in the same way it matters to the farm.
Set the break-even before you set the date
Break-even is most useful before the chicks arrive. Work out the placed cost per bird, choose a mortality figure you can defend, and pick a sale price from the calendar rather than from hope. Write the figure down with the date you calculated it, so you can see how it changes as the facts come in. Then compare the result with the batch you are considering. If the price needed to break even is higher than the price you realistically expect, the batch needs a different size or a different month, not a more hopeful number.
For the wider picture of whether a broiler house pays in Ghana, our guide to whether broiler farming is profitable in Ghana covers the same costs from start to finish.
