How to judge land for a poultry farm in Ghana: drainage, wind, distance from other farms and homes, water supply, wet-season access, power and land papers.
Halaal Farms Ghana team4 October 2026 · 13 min read
The best day to inspect land for a poultry farm is the morning after a heavy downpour in June, or in August and September if you are in the north. Dry-season visits flatter every plot. Come back when it has rained for three days and you will see where the water stands, which way it runs and whether a loaded feed truck could reach the gate.
The site is the one decision on a poultry farm that you cannot correct later. You can change breed, feed supplier, worker and buyer within a batch or two, but you cannot move a concrete floor. The checks below follow the things that most often ruin a farm, ending with the one underneath all the others: whether the land is truly yours to build on.
Wet ground damages a poultry house in three ways. Rainwater runs in across the floor, moisture rises through a thin slab, or water stands around the building for weeks and breeds flies. Damp litter is where coccidiosis, ammonia and breast blisters begin, so a wet site charges you in every batch for as long as you farm there.
Look for ground with a gentle fall, something like one to three metres of drop over every hundred metres. Avoid valley bottoms, the flat land beside streams, and any plot that sits lower than the road next to it. A raised road acts as a dam and tips its runoff straight into the lower plot.
The land itself records its history:
Ask the oldest residents where the water reached in the worst year they remember. Then do a simple soak test. Dig a hole about 30 centimetres deep, fill it with water and let it drain, then fill it again. If the second filling is still there the next morning, the soil drains badly.
Some wetness can be engineered away. A floor raised 30 to 45 centimetres above the highest ground beside the house, a wide roof overhang and open drains will keep a house dry on ordinary sloping land. Count the cost first: raising a 100 square metre floor by 40 centimetres takes around 50 cubic metres of loose laterite once you allow for compaction, so ask a tipper driver what his truck carries and what a load costs delivered. Nothing will save a house that stands in the path of a seasonal flood.
An open-sided house is cooled by wind that costs you nothing, so the site has to let the wind arrive. In southern Ghana the prevailing wind for most of the year comes from the south-west, off the sea. During the harmattan, roughly December to February, it swings round to the north-east and turns dry and dusty, most strongly in the north. Stand on the plot in mid-afternoon with a strip of cloth tied to a stick and see what actually moves.
Open, slightly raised ground catches the breeze. Hollows, plots boxed in by storey buildings or high walls, and land crowded by thick bush hold still air, and still air in March means panting birds and losses among heavy broilers.
The sun matters as much. Houses in our climate are set with the long side running east to west, so that the low morning and evening sun strikes the end walls instead of shining through the open sides onto the birds. Take a phone compass to the site and check that the plot is long enough in that direction. A narrow plot running north to south forces a bad choice between a wrongly turned house and a very short one. The dimensions are covered in our guide to poultry house design for Ghana's climate.
Wind also carries smell and dust. Work out who is downwind of the plot in both seasons, and what lies upwind of it: a plot downwind of another poultry farm, a piggery or a refuse dump receives their flies and dust.
Disease reaches a farm on shoes, vehicles, crates, rats and wild birds, and over short distances on the wind. Space between you and the next flock is protection you pay for only once. Common advice is to stay at least 500 metres from the nearest poultry farm and a kilometre or more where land allows. Close to the big towns few farmers can manage that, so know exactly what is nearby.
Walk and drive a circle around the plot and note:
If distance is short, the farm must make up for it with the fence, gate and visitor rules in our list of cheap biosecurity measures for small farms.
People object to three things: the smell when litter is damp or manure is being moved, flies, and noise before dawn. Complaints normally go to the district assembly, whose environmental health officers can act on a nuisance. No single distance guarantees peace. A few hundred birds on dry litter can live fifty metres from a neighbour without trouble. Several thousand layers will be smelt some hundreds of metres away on the day the manure is bagged.
Think ten years ahead as well. Land that is bush today on the edge of Accra, Kasoa, Kumasi or Tamale can be surrounded by houses within a few years. Ask the Physical Planning Department of the district assembly whether a planning scheme exists for the area and what your plot is zoned for. If the plots around you are being sold in residential sizes, you will become the nuisance in time.
Birds drink roughly twice the weight of the feed they eat, and far more in heat. A broiler in its last weeks takes about a third of a litre a day in mild weather. A laying hen takes about a quarter of a litre. On a hot afternoon either figure can nearly double. For planning, allow half a litre per grown bird per day, then add water for washing and for the people living on the farm.
For 1,000 birds that is 500 litres a day in the hot season before any washing. Storage should cover at least two days, so a 2,000 litre tank is the starting point at that size, raised on a stand so that water flows by gravity when the power is off.
| Source | What to check first |
|---|---|
| Borehole | Yield from a pumping test, taste, salt and iron. Ask neighbours whether theirs fall off in February and March. |
| Hand-dug well | Whether it dries up late in the dry season, and how close it is to latrines and manure heaps. |
| Pipe-borne supply | How many days a week it flows and the monthly bill at your volume. |
| Tanker delivery | The price per trip and where the tanker fills. As the only source it is costly for layers. |
| Rainwater from the roof | Gutters and a covered tank. One millimetre of rain on one square metre of roof gives one litre. It is a supplement, since it fails when you need water most. |
Have water from any borehole or well tested before you rely on it. In parts of the coastal belt groundwater can be salty, and iron-rich water is common in many districts. Salty water causes wet droppings and poor growth, and iron clogs nipple lines. Ask the district water and sanitation office to point you to a recognised laboratory, and request tests for bacteria, salinity, hardness and iron. Daily water management is explained in our article on water for poultry.
Feed is the heaviest thing a poultry farm handles, and every bag arrives by road. A thousand broilers eat roughly four kilograms each over a batch, which is about four tonnes, or eighty 50 kg bags. A thousand layers eat a little over two bags every day of the year. Eggs leave in crates that crack on a rough track, and day-old chicks arrive after a long journey that should not end with a slow, hot last stretch.
So drive the full route in the rains, in the kind of vehicle that will serve the farm. Note every stream crossing, steep clay hill and stretch that floods. Ask the taxi and tricycle drivers who use the road daily which months it closes and for how long. At the plot, check that a truck can turn without reversing blind onto the road.
Then put a price on distance. As an example, if a tricycle charges GH₵ 5 a bag for the last stretch from the junction and a batch uses 80 bags, the road costs you GH₵ 400 per batch before you count your own trips. Replace those figures with what drivers quote you, and enter the result in the poultry profit calculator alongside your other costs. Cheap remote land often turns out dearer than a higher-priced plot near a good road, and a site more than an hour from your home will be visited less often than you intend.
Access affects your chicks too. Halaal Farms delivers to all 16 regions, and we confirm the hatch date and delivery cost before you pay. The quote is more exact when you describe the last stretch of road on the order form.
Find the nearest low-voltage electricity line and measure the distance to your plot. Where the line is far away, the customer often bears much of the cost of poles and cable, so ask the district office of the electricity company for an estimate before you buy and treat it as part of the price of the land.
How much the grid matters depends on what you keep. A small broiler farm can run without it, brooding with charcoal or gas and lighting with solar lamps. Layers gain more from dependable light, and any farm with a borehole needs power for the pump.
Check the mobile signal while you are standing on the plot, on the networks you and your worker use. Daily reports, mobile money payments to suppliers and a call to the vet when birds fall sick all depend on it.
Birds are worth most, and tempt thieves most, in the weeks before Christmas, Easter and Eid. An isolated plot with nobody sleeping on it is easy to empty in one night. Plan from the start for a worker's room on the site, with water and a toilet. A farm within sight of an occupied house is harder to rob than one hidden in bush.
Price the fence before you commit. The cost follows the perimeter: a 70 by 100 foot plot has about 104 metres of boundary, while a square acre has about 255 metres. Multiply by your local cost per metre of chain-link or block wall, and add a gate wide enough for a truck.
Two other risks belong to the site. Where cattle are herded through the area, a weak fence will be pushed over. Where bush burns every dry season, as it does across the north and the transition zone, you will need a strip of cleared ground around the farm each November.
A land dispute can take a farm away more completely than any disease. Most land in Ghana is held under customary ownership by stools, skins, clans and families. The rest is state land or land in private hands. Paying the wrong person gives you nothing.
Before any money moves, get clear answers to these questions:
If you are renting, the agreement must be written, signed by the true owner and long enough to earn back what you spend on buildings. It should state that you may build, who owns the structures when the term ends and how the rent can be reviewed. Farming on your own family's land needs the same care: get the consent of the family head and principal members in writing.
Pay by a traceable method, obtain a receipt and have a lawyer read the document before you sign. Procedures change, so confirm the current steps at the Lands Commission office for your region. The business side of setting up is covered in our article on registering a poultry farm in Ghana.
A plot can pass every test above and still be too small, so draw it to scale on paper. Start with the birds: open-sided broiler houses here are usually stocked at about ten birds per square metre, so 1,000 broilers need roughly 100 square metres, for instance 8 metres by 12.5 metres. Layers on deep litter need close to double the floor area per bird. The figures for each type and age are in our stocking density guide.
Keep each house to about 8 to 10 metres wide so that the wind can cross it. If you will ever hold two ages at once, leave at least 15 to 20 metres between houses, and more if you can. Then add a feed store, the worker's room, the water tank, a manure area, a disposal pit and room for a truck to turn.
Put the houses on the highest part of the plot. Put the manure area and the disposal pit at the lowest corner, downwind of the houses and at least 30 metres from any well or borehole, on the downhill side. Place the gate and feed store near the road so that delivery vehicles do not drive past the birds.
Laid out like this, a common building plot of 70 by 100 feet, which is about 650 square metres, takes one 1,000-bird broiler house, a store and a worker's room with little to spare. That is enough to learn on with a few boxes of broiler day-old chicks. If your plan is several thousand birds within three years, you are looking for acres, not plots.
You will rarely find a perfect site, so visit each candidate at least twice, once in the rains, and write down how it does on every heading above.
Most weaknesses on that list can be bought off with money: a fence, a tank, a solar pump, a raised floor. Three cannot. Land that floods, land without dependable water and land with unclear ownership should be refused however cheap they are. Among the sites that pass those three, choose the one that a truck and you yourself can reach most easily, because a farm that is easy to reach gets supervised.
If you would like a second opinion on what a particular plot can carry, call Halaal Farms on 024 915 1503 or send the order form. Advice before an order is free, and the day-old chick price list gives current starting prices for working out your first budget.
The house itself needs about 100 square metres, since open-sided houses in our heat are usually stocked at around ten broilers per square metre. Add a feed store, a worker's room, space for a truck to turn, a manure area and a disposal pit, and a common 70 by 100 foot plot is nearly full. If you intend to add a second house, look for at least double that.
It depends on how the district assembly has zoned the area and on local bye-laws, so ask the Physical Planning Department before you build. Even where it is allowed, smell, flies and noise bring complaints once the flock grows beyond a few hundred birds. A small backyard flock with dry litter is usually tolerated. A commercial farm is better placed on land zoned or commonly used for farming.
Often, but not always. Borehole water can carry too much salt or iron, especially in parts of the coastal belt, and a badly sealed borehole can be contaminated by nearby latrines. Have a sample tested by a recognised water laboratory for bacteria, salinity, hardness and iron before you depend on it. Also ask for a pumping test so you know the yield in the dry season.
Renting keeps your capital free for birds and feed, and suits a first farm while you learn. The risk is building on land you can be asked to leave, so get a written agreement that runs long enough to recover the cost of the house and states who owns the structures. Buying gives security but only if ownership is verified through an official search and proper documents.
Written by the Halaal Farms Ghana team. We hatch and import day-old chicks at Opeikuma, Kasoa, and deliver to all 16 regions. This article is general guidance for farmers. For diagnosis and treatment of sick birds, speak to a vet or your district veterinary office.
A plain map of the offices a growing poultry farm meets in Ghana, what each one is concerned with, the order to approach them in and how to deal with them without wasting time or money.
Fifteen concrete mistakes that cost new poultry farmers their first batches, set out in the order you meet them, each with the reason it hurts and a fix you can apply before your chicks arrive.
A working system for the salaried owner: which birds suit an absent farmer, what the caretaker must report each evening, how to reconcile birds, feed and eggs from a distance, and the signs that it is no longer paying.
