Why Nigerian poultry farmers are abandoning broilers for eggs

When you think of Nigeria’s protein crisis, your mind probably goes straight to the price of beef or goat meat, or the headlines about the shortage of day-old chicks. But quietly, in poultry sheds from Kaduna to Ogun state, a different story has been unfolding. Farmers who once bet everything on broilers – chickens raised purely for meat – are increasingly choosing to raise layers instead: hens kept for their eggs.

The shift has become so pronounced that it is increasingly now reshaping the market itself. Hatcheries cannot keep up with demand for layer chicks (called “pullets”), and the scramble has pushed day-old pullet prices from about ₦1,800 in January 2026 to roughly ₦3,000 by March, a 67% jump in three months. At one point, farmers waited months for bookings placed as far back as November 2025 to be honoured. They still wait.

Point-of-lay birds – pullets aged 14-18 weeks, just weeks away from their first egg – have become the hottest commodity in Nigerian agriculture, commanding premium prices wherever they can be found at all. They can sell up to N20, 000 for one.

At first glance, this looks like a simple taste shift. Pull back the curtain, and it’s really a story about risk, cash flow, and a country where protein has quietly become a luxury good.

Start with what chicken now costs the average Nigerian. A study by the Clayton Christensen Institute found that Nigerians spend about 0.67% of their GDP per capita just to buy a single kilogram of chicken, roughly 52 times more, relative to income, than what an American spends on the same kilogram.

The result: despite having Africa’s second-largest chicken population, Nigerians eat only about 2kg of chicken per person per year, against a global average of 17kg, roughly 40kg in South Africa and nearly 60kg in the United States. The Christensen Institute is emphatic that this is not a demand problem – Nigerians want chicken – but an affordability problem created by the economics of producing it.

Those economics have been brutal. Day-old chick shortages, punishing feed costs, and a naira under pressure have pushed the price of a mature live broiler to about ₦10,000–₦15,000 across most Nigerian markets. In a country where food inflation remains near 20% for extended stretches, a whole chicken has priced itself out of the everyday food basket and become an occasional purchase.

The collapsing margin

For farmers, the input side tells the story of a collapsing margin.

Broiler chick prices that sat around ₦450-₦800 three years ago have climbed steadily; by 2025–26, farmers were routinely paying ₦550–₦900 per broiler chick from reputable hatcheries, and layer chicks surged past ₦1,800 and then ₦3,000 during the 2026 scarcity.

Feed is the killer, accounting for roughly 70% of poultry production costs. A 25kg bag that sold for around ₦6,500 in 2022 climbed to ₦25,000 and beyond by early 2026. The overall surge stood at 164% in three years, driven by maize and soybean prices and the naira’s devaluation.

A broiler eats for six to eight weeks before it can be sold. When feed quadruples but the consumer can no longer afford the finished bird, the arithmetic simply stops working. In 2023–24, the sector saw waves of farm closures.

Eggs have not been immune to cost pressure – crate prices have swung wildly, touching ₦7,000 or more in parts of the country, with single eggs selling for ₦250–₦300 in major cities.

But eggs still sell, and this is the pivot on which everything turns. A crate can be split. A single egg can be dropped into a child’s school bag. A protein fix can be bought for a few hundred naira rather than several thousand.

When Nigerian households are forced to ration protein, beef, chicken and fish are the first to go, the egg is the last thing to leave the plate. In economic terms, egg demand is far less elastic than chicken-meat demand: prices can rise substantially and people keep buying, because there is no cheaper animal protein to substitute.

That single fact rewires the economics of the farm.

Subscription income

A broiler is a one-shot sale: six to eight weeks of feeding, then a single payday, then you start again from zero – exposed every single cycle to a crash in chicken prices or a spike in feed costs, and to festive-season demand swings.

A layer is a different financial instrument entirely. She starts laying at around 18–22 weeks and keeps going for roughly 52–72 weeks or more, producing 250–300 eggs a year at close to one a day. A farmer with 1,000 hens is looking at a steady flow of daily egg income, month after month, for well over a year – before selling the “spent” layer as meat (currently ₦5,000–₦7,000 per old-layer bird) at the end of her working life.

It’s less a single sale and more a subscription. Industry advisories note that once egg production peaks, a mid-sized layer operation can out-earn an equivalent broiler set-up on a monthly basis.

The trade-off is real, though. Layer farming demands a much heavier upfront investment and nerve. The 18-week pullet-rearing phase means capital is deployed for over four months before the first egg. That is four months of feed, vaccines and heating bills with zero revenue, which is why agribusiness cost guides describe layers as higher-capital, higher-complexity, and longer-cycle than broilers, even as they highlight the reward of 365-days-a-year income once the flock matures.

The preference for eggs is now written into national policy, not just farm-level choices. Nigeria’s newly launched $1 billion National Integrated Poultry Project, a joint effort under the Nigeria–China Strategic Partnership (NCSP), now in its pilot phase in Enugu, Kaduna and Oyo states, plans, once fully built out, to house more than 7 million laying birds and over 2 million broilers, and to produce roughly 6 million eggs a day, alongside over 60,000 hectares of maize and soybean cultivation for feed.

That is a deliberate tilt of roughly 3.5 laying birds for every broiler, baked into the country’s biggest poultry investment in decades. Kaduna alone hosts a $200 million component on 10,000 hectares that the state government projects will generate over $450 million annually and more than 350,000 direct and indirect jobs.

The design was directly inspired by China’s industrial layer model. Kaduna’s Gov. Ub Sani toured CP Foods’ Beijing facility, which produces nearly 3 million eggs a day, before the deal was sealed. Under the arrangement described by NCSP director-general Joseph Tegbe, each integrated farm will have its own hatchery, feed mill, power plant and abattoir, with about half of the feedstock produced sold to smaller farmers at subsidised prices  — a direct attack on the feed-cost problem strangling smallholders. (Reported figures for the total investment range from roughly $900 million to $1 billion depending on the source and phase counted, with a 10-year repayment structure and three-year moratorium on the Chinese-financed portion.)

What it means for the agro-investor

For anyone weighing money into Nigerian poultry right now, the shift carries several practical lessons.

The layer opportunity is real, but the entry gate has narrowed. The same logic pulling everyone toward layers has created a bottleneck at the very start of the value chain. Pullets are scarce, booked months ahead, and priced at record highs; PAN’s president Sunday Ezeobiora estimates it will take at least another full production cycle –  roughly a year – for hatcheries to rebuild parent stock and normalise supply. Investors entering now pay a scarcity premium at the door.

The upstream plays may be the smartest money. Scarcity at the pullet level is a flashing signal that the deepest gaps and margins sit upstream: hatcheries, parent-stock and grandparent-stock breeding, pullet-rearing businesses that sell point-of-lay birds to farmers who can’t manage the risky brooding phase, and feed milling.

As one industry figure told Daily Trust, few local hatcheries ever invested in layer parent stock because global capital historically chased broilers; that mismatch is now Nigeria’s most visible agro-investment gap.

Cash-flow structure matters as much as returns. Layers suit investors who can fund a four-to-five-month runway with no revenue and want steady monthly income thereafter. Broilers suit those who want faster capital turnover and can time cycles to festive demand peaks (Christmas, Easter, Eid), accepting boom-bust risk.

Advisories increasingly steer new entrants with limited risk appetite toward layers precisely because the egg market has proven the more stable of the two.

Broilers are not dead. Nigeria remains short of both eggs and meat, imports of table eggs and frozen chicken are prohibited, and the national project still houses over 2 million broilers. Falling feed prices – helped by government grain-import windows – could restore broiler margins faster than expected.