You Don’t Build a House by Decorating the Rooftop

By Benny Nana Poku | Investment Analyst & Founder, Flowwealt

You don’t build a house by decorating the rooftop, you start with the foundation. The same is true in agriculture investing.

Throughout history, the rise and fall of industries, empires, and fortunes have followed one simple truth: those who understand the underlying economic forces and build strategy around them ascend to dominance. Those who chase surface-level opportunities without grasping the deeper mechanics are inevitably left behind.

As an investment analyst, I believe it’s time Ghanaians stopped viewing poultry farming as a mere hustle or small-scale business, judged by the number of birds in a coop. Poultry is not just a business, it is a potential generational wealth engine.

Why Poultry Hasn’t Scaled in Ghana

Early ventures in Ghana’s poultry sector focused on the end product, chickens, without investing in the foundational elements of the supply chain. They overlooked grain storage, commodity trading systems, and structured finance mechanisms that support upstream resilience.

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Because of this, they couldn’t scale. Unlike integrated giants such as Tyson Foods in the U.S., who control everything from feed production to distribution, most Ghanaian poultry businesses remain fragmented and fragile.

Unfortunately, new entrants are repeating the same mistakes. As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” If we want different outcomes in business, development, or nation-building, we must think differently, act strategically, and invest in root-cause solutions, not just surface-level symptoms.

And the root cause? Feed. More specifically—maize.

Breaking It Down: The Economics of Poultry Start With Feed

Feed accounts for 70–80% of the total cost of poultry farming. And within feed, maize alone can constitute over 50% of the formulation.

If you don’t control maize, you don’t control your feed.
If you don’t control feed, you don’t control your costs.
If you don’t control costs, someone else controls your margins.

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Let’s take a look at how others got it right.
• In the United States, the poultry industry exploded in the 1950s only after maize production became industrialized, supported by grain storage infrastructure and federal subsidies.
• In Brazil, poultry exports grew because of deliberate investments in large-scale maize cultivation, storage systems, and logistical coordination.

Ghana?
We import over $600 million worth of chicken annually, while local poultry farms remain small, unscalable, and undercapitalized, not because we lack talent, but because we lack a maize strategy.

The Flowwealth Mentality: Think Like a Nation Builder

At Flowwealth, we don’t think like smallholders, we think like empire builders. That means laying the groundwork for long-term dominance by controlling the fundamentals.

a) Commodity-First Thinking

Before we talk poultry, we talk maize.

Maize must be treated as a strategic commodity, just like oil in Nigeria or cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire. You don’t scale poultry by focusing on birds. You scale by mastering maize supply chains.

b) Infrastructure Backbone

Flowwealth’s vision includes building grain silos across Ghana, not just as storage units, but as strategic hedges against seasonal price volatility.

This gives farmers and feed producers the power to buy low, store smartly, and sell when prices rise, breaking free from the unpredictability of seasonal markets.

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Most poultry farms don’t die from disease, they die from cash flow droughts and market shocks.

c) Financial Central Nervous System

So rather than diving headfirst into capital-heavy poultry ventures, Flowwealth starts by investing in maize trading as a core foundation.

This early phase helps us:
• Gather market intelligence
• Understand pricing dynamics
• Build nationwide trade networks

We then scale by partnering with thousands of maize farmers, aggregating production, and investing in grain silos.

These silos do two things:

1. Preserve grain and extend its marketability.
2. Enable structured finance, offering working capital to farmers tied to harvest cycles and storage timelines.

Once we control grain storage and feed production, we can enter poultry farming not just as another player, but as the strategic supplier. That means we support others in the ecosystem while setting the pace, and price.

Ask a Better Question

People often ask, “Is poultry profitable?”

That’s the wrong question.

The right question is:
“Can poultry be monopolized over time through control of its most critical input, feed?”

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When you control feed, you:
• Set your own margins
• Outsell the competition
• Expand faster and more profitably
• Eventually supply your competitors, on your terms

This isn’t just poultry farming. It’s economic empire-building.

The Oil of West African Poultry.

Maize is to poultry what oil is to energy. Whoever controls it, controls the market.

Ghana’s maize production is growing at just 1.5% annually, while demand for poultry feed is rising at 4–5%, according to data from ReportLinker.

In the last five years, maize prices have fluctuated wildly between GHS 150–400 per 100kg, making feed costs highly volatile. Add to that, 15–20% of maize output is lost annually due to poor storage infrastructure.

But in every volatility lies opportunity.

If we invest in maize trading, storage, and price-control mechanisms, we can transform Ghana’s poultry sector from a survival-based industry into a generational wealth engine.

By Benny Nana Poku | Investment Analyst & Founder, Flowwealt || Contact: Pokubenny@gmail.com

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