Success tips for aspiring Snail farmers…

Success tips for aspiring Snail farmers…
As a Smallstarter, your primary goal should be to take advantage
of the seasonality of this market in order to gain premium prices
for your snails. Target the high-end customers (hotels, restaurants
and households) who can afford to pay a premium for a steady
supply of the product.
If you supply all year round, you are likely to earn lesser during the
rainy seasons (when supply is in abundance) and more in the dry
seasons (when the product is scarce). You could buy cheaply from
the villages and other remote areas while the supply is up during
the rainy season and maintain a healthy stock of large snails that
you can unleash on your customers when supply falls in the dry
season.
But to achieve this, there is a very important condition. The size
of your snails must be large and 'intimidating' enough to
command a premium (high) price. For this to happen, you must
start your snail farm with the right species (the Giant African
type) and ensure that you apply proper breeding, stocking and
feeding practices to achieve the huge sizes that will make you a
highly sought after supplier. If your snails are bred well, they
should start to reach market size from six to twelve months,
although some farmers like to leave theirs for much longer.
(photo credit: msn.com)
Presently, more than 90 percent of the snails supplied to our
local markets are picked from the forests. While this has been the
traditional supply source, our growing population and rising rural to
urban migration rates make it unsustainable. An artificial
intervention like snail farming is the only way to satisfy the
growing demand. And as long as a huge chunk of the market
depends on snails captured in the wild, nobody can assure a
steady and consistent supply of large snails like a farmer who
breeds snails in his/her backyard!