Over half of people in Cambodia live in rural areas and farm for a living. Surprisingly, Cambodian farmers provide only about 10 percent of the overall demand. Helping the country’s small-scale farmers work together to meet the need for their goods is a major focus area of our work in Cambodia.
After years of struggle, Ti and Ein now preside over a thriving farm. With the training they received from Heifer, they now know how to properly care for their chickens -- all 1,400 of them!
They earn enough from chicken and natural fertilizer sales to pay university fees for their two youngest children (three others have already finished college). They also plan to build a new home to replace the temporary one-room home Ti built 25 years ago.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Both survivors of the Khmer Rouge labor camps, Ti and Ein met and married after the war. They began raising pigs, but attracting buyers to their remote location was difficult, and using a middleman stripped away any profits, so they switched to chicken farming. Without the knowledge of how to keep the chickens healthy, too many died of diseases like fowl cholera and fowl pox.
Our market analysis confirms that chickens raised by Heifer farmers in Cambodia adhere to the national Good Agricultural Practice standard.
Their lives began to change when they joined their local Heifer project in 2017. Through Heifer’s extensive training they learned how to better care for the flock and administer medicine when diseases appeared, keeping the chickens healthy.
Ti was also able to cut out the middleman to the domestic poultry market and access distribution himself. He joined his local self-help group which formed a larger agricultural cooperative that provide loans to help its 93 members improve chicken production. It also supported the creation of poultry distribution centers where all farmers maintain their chickens are the highest quality.
Ti, Ein and other Cambodian small-scale chicken farmers experience the benefits of your monthly support and grace of your generosity every single day. Thank you for making prosperity possible for hard-working families here and all over the world!
