We finally got the prize money for the duck business on January 8 and at this point we have 120 ducks fattening in our corrals. In case you’re interested in a couple, I happen to know that they travel well. We bought 80 from Patos del Norte, an outfit near Lima, and they shipped the ducklings to us by airplane. The tickets were really expensive, they were heard to say when they arrived, and the seatbelts way too big. Actually, they came in a cardboard carton 80 cm x 40 x 12 with holes punched in the lid and sides. It was small enough that I could carry it with me on the combi. (This is one of the great things about Peace Corps—no longer are you a tourist observing the poor campesino who brings his pig or chicken with him on the bus, you yourself are the campesino with the duck.)
We’d previously bought 40 ducks at a livestock market in Chiclayo but they turned out to be of unidentifiable ages and of dubious genetic purity to say the least. Some of them were sick and infected others in the flock so it cost us time and money to get them all healthy again and growing fat at a steady rate.
Meanwhile we bought these 80 genetically selected critters from Patos del Norte and so far they’re responding in a manner befitting their bloodlines. They were just days old when they arrived and therefore somewhat delicate. They needed to be kept warm at night so we installed lightbulbs for that purpose. The light also keeps them active and eating so that they recover quickly from the trauma of the airplane ride. They’ve doubled in weight since their arrival, which is not saying a whole lot since they only weighed 100 grams, but at least it’s a sign that they’re healthy. Patos del Norte warned us that almost surely some would die but so far they’re all alive except for one—that one the nightwatchman accidentally stepped on.
Which is something of a potent metaphor for this entire business operation: the principals in the enterprise, Erick, Jesús and Jesús’s mother, Iris, cause most of their own problems, undoubtedly with some considerable amount of assistance from their advisor, yours truly. The guys and Iris sometimes forget to give the ducks food or water, separate the sick ducks from the healthy ducks, mix the new ration before the old ration runs out or construct pens large enough to accommodate all the ducks we’ve ordered or plan to order. But now that the new ducks have arrived and are properly housed and reacting well to their surroundings, Jesús, Erick and Iris are beginning to see that good planning and proper attention to the animals’ needs pay off—the first flock of forty may turn out to be “a learning experiece” as we in the U.S. say of utter or near disasters.
The ducklings will need 10 weeks (females) and 12 weeks (males) to reach an optimal weight and at that point we hope to sell them “vivo”—still alive and with all their feathers. Otherwise we’re in for a lot of work slaughtering and plucking 80 ducks. The market for live animals is rumored to be good. A neighbor already offered to buy fifty from us for his niece’s wedding. That might sound like an excessive number of fowl but if you’d ever been to a wedding in Callanca you’d understand. They last three days and 150–500 people show up to eat and drink and dance. They usually slaughter one or two steers, several goats, ten turkeys and around fifty ducks in order to feed all the guests, many of whom don’t even bother to come to the wedding or the reception, they show up in shorts, a T-shirt and thongs and wait to be handed their arroz con pato in a styrofoam take-out container.
If we don’t end up selling them to the father of the bride, pickup trucks from Chiclayo come through Callanca every few weeks as well looking for criollo (free-range) ducks to buy. Callanca is known for breeding tasty specimens of this hardy breed, that can survive and thrive in extremely rustic conditions, fed on just about any form of ration, from grated sweet potatoes, lettuce and alfalfa to scientifically formulated feed like the mixture we’re employing. It’s a combination of coarsely ground corn, wheat and soybeans, soybean oil and powdered vitamins and minerals. We mix the ingredients on a tarp, shovel it into feed sacks, store it and dispense it daily to the animals. In 12 weeks a male duck will eat 13 kg (28 lbs) of feed. That’s 866 kilos of feed (just short of a ton) for a flock of 80 males and females at a cost of around 1,100 soles or $400. The ducklings cost 4 soles apiece ($1.25 or $100 for 80). We can sell the 80 fully grown ducks for an average of 35 soles apiece ($13) or $1000 and change so our profit margin can approach 50% if we manage our other (non-feed) costs well. “Other costs” will or might include: vaccinations, other medicines, transportation of the animals and their feed, electricity for those night lights, etc.
Will we manage those other costs well? Your guess is as good as mine. The prize money we won should cover all of our infrastructure costs—the cost of corrals, a scales, troughs and tubs for food and water, electrical materials, etc.—plus the cost of ducklings and feed for 12 weeks, at which point we will sell our first flock of fully grown ducks and begin to see our first income. Remember I said: “should cover….”
The concept of a rigorous business plan is a very new one in Callanca and for that matter in most rural areas of Perú. For that reason Jesús and Erick and Iris only half believe that good planning will have any effect whatsover on the fate of their enterprise. While that seems outrageous to me it’s not really that outrageous given what they’ve experienced. You buy good seed, you plow deep, you plant straight and rain from the sierra rampages down the river bed and washes it all away. Your family scrimps and saves to send your sister to the best colegio in Chiclayo and she gets pregnant at fifteen. You invest 5,000 soles in raising a flock of turkeys and the week before you plan to sell them somebody steals them all in the middle of the night while you’re at your cousin’s wedding. Planning doesn’t mean to a rural Peruvian what planning means to a college graduate from a middle-class family in the U.S. So I get very frustrated sometimes. I tell the guys over and over that they have to separate the 3-week-old ducks from the 6-week-old ducks because they eat different amounts and because the older ducks will not allow the younger ducks to eat their share, but they don’t listen and it seems like they have no intention of separating the ducks until finally one day I show up and the ducks are in separate pens. They do things according to their own internal clocks and those clocks certainly are by no means Swiss watches but instead are stamped “Hecho en Perú.” Undoubtedly there will be many more learning experiences; realistically I don’t expect Erick and Jesús to change completely nor do I necessarily believe that they should. We’ll no doubt end up with a business that’s something of a hybrid. Something more than a flock of scrawny yardbirds living in a pen of sticks and eating bugs and table scraps; and something less than a criollo Frank Perdue operation for superducks. Since in the end I’m not sure that either of those extremes represents the best outcome one could hope for, I’ll gladly accept something in the middle.
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