Irvine’s pumps in P200m into local poultry industry

Lewanika Timothy | Tuesday May 20, 2025 13:52

Speaking at a recent Poultry Expo in Gaborone, the company’s executives stated that Botswana’s poultry market is a blue ocean with room for expansion and new entrants. Irvine’s Group CEO, Craig Irvine, said they are changing lives in Africa by producing affordable poultry products and creating mass jobs. “To date we have invested over P200 million in the local poultry market while creating jobs and opportunities for many Batswana,” he told the Expo. Since establishing a small hatchery in Francistown in 2001, the company has built a fully integrated operation in Botswana. By 2021, it had added a modern breeder farm and opened a state-of-the-art feed mill in Mmamashia with a capacity of approximately 90,000 tonnes per year. Currently, Irvine’s Botswana produces around 18 million broiler chicks and 48,000 tonnes of feed annually, with about 60% of that output going to small-scale poultry farmers, with the rest sold into the commercial sector.

The company runs a training centre and weekly seminars, and by 2022 it had trained over 2,000 growers, many of them women and youth, in modern poultry husbandry. “We are here to change lives and produce affordable protein,” Craig Irvine added, noting that nearly two-thirds of Irvine’s production is absorbed by small farmers and contributes an estimated P678 million per year in local revenues. The group’s rapid expansion has made it the dominant player in Botswana’s poultry sector. Industry sources and government officials estimate that Irvine’s now supplies roughly half of all chicken consumed in the country. That share is largely driven by its control over the upstream supply of breeder chicks and feed. Other domestic processors, such as Ross Breeders and Richmark Poultry, operate at a much smaller scale. A key part of Irvine’s strategy has been integrating small-scale producers into its supply network. The company collaborates with hundreds of cooperatives and retail outlets, delivering chicks, feed, vaccines, and technical support through distributors like Agrifeed and Big Group.