Seventy two-year-old Philip Gichohi is busy making money ‘restoring’ men’s vitality via sale of quail eggs — a rare venture licensed by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) to help farmers earn handsomely from the wild birds.

Mr Gichohi’s project — the first in Kenya’s Nyandarua County — has won him orders from four-star hotels in the capital Nairobi, which have been receiving eight egg trays every week form his farm.

Further, he has also been giving lectures on the benefit of eating quail eggs by men keen on boosting their vitality within and without his home county.

“Age is just but a number as all we need is to eat the right food like the Japanese, Chinese and Indians have done for ages. They prefer eating wild fruits, animals and drinking water from springs thereby avoiding highly-processed foods and drinks,” he says.

His venture into quail farming was motivated by a visit to a quail farm in Kiambu County where he saw a farmer rearing the wild birds as a commercial enterprise and was surprised at the low input and maintenance cost required.

While a mature hen consumes an average of 150 grammes of food per day and requires a regular administration of drugs, a quail eats 20 grammes per day and hardly requires any drugs.

Additionally, while a kilo of poultry meat goes for Sh280 ($3.30) on average, quail, which hardly weighs half-a-kilo at maturity attracts, Sh500 (about $6).

“A quail lays an egg daily which costs Sh15 ($0.18) and the demand is so high that I am unable to meet it both here at home and in Nairobi where my eggs are sold to tourists at exorbitant prices,” he says.

More profitable

While addressing a group of forest edge communities in his county recently, Mr Gichohi noted that quails take about eight weeks to mature and their meat is highly recommended for people keen on boosting their immunity against many diseases.

Waving a consumption dose for eggs by people wishing to treat various ailments, he said it is more profitable to keep quails as they are less demanding than chicken.