Sheep Farming Botswana, Part One

Sheep farming Botswana, Part one

It was my brother, who the other day started talking about farming sheep, and it got me thinking....would it be worth it or viable to farm sheep in Botswana and what would be involved? When it comes to starting any enterprise the first thing that one needs to do is research. Research allows you to count the cost of an enterprise before you spend anything at all, it is of little use to start a an enterprise before counting the cost!

Counting the cost

1. Find out your Max Gross income. What does this mean? Basically you want to know how much is the max income your sheep will bring in, in one year or season before expenses. To find this answer I had to do some research, first I wanted to know how much could be got for one sheep, for this I went to Facebook and searched all the adverts of people buying and selling sheep in Ngamiland. I soon discovered that a common figure for a sheep was Bwp 1000.00 which was much higher then I imaged. The next bit of research that I did was to find out, how many lambs could a farmer expect to get from ten ewes in one year? Again I went for the max figure, that is saying that each ewe gives birth to twins and that there are no losses. This then leads us to conclude that ten ewes would give us 20 lambs that in 6 too 8 months would be sold for Bwp 1000.00 each, giving us the grand total of Bwp 20000.00.

Now this is a seriously inaccurate figure for the simple reason that its not realistic, lambs will die, you wont always get Bwp 1000.00 per sheep, not every ewe will have twins. However this is our  EMGI (Estimated Max Gross Income) this figure is important because now we know that, if we want too farm ten sheep and max 20 lambs, the seasons expenses  have to be way less then Bwp 20000.00 to make it profitable 

So how much does it cost to keep ten sheep and at max 20 lambs for one season? we will look into that in our next post, so please subscribe and if you have any thoughts or feelings drop us a comment!