Ama Serwaa Anim, a nurse and customer at Trisores Farms, holds snail shells in Accra, Ghana.Photo credit: Ama Serwaa
Ama Serwaa Enin is crouched in a greenhouse, her hands full, proudly showing off her produce. What she sees is a source of pride and future income. But this is not the kind of grains and pulses that are often featured in African agricultural success stories. Instead, she holds two snails in her hands, a giant African snail to be exact.
“Snail farming is a good business, but it takes time to harvest, so you need patience if you really want to try it.” [it]. People often encourage me on social media, and some of them are unintentionally funny. “Someone asked why he would do that when his colleague was leaving for Canada for a nursing internship,” Ennin said.
Snails are a delicacy and a source of protein for Ghanaians. Popular dishes such as jollof rice with snails, banku with snail stew, yam chips with snails with pepper, snail meat pie and snail meat kebabs can be found in most urban eateries. This is also a great opportunity for farmers.
“Snails are the most profitable animal per square meter,” says Felix Appia Nyarko, co-founder of Trisolase, a company that helps small farmers like Enin grow snails organically in urban and rural areas. He explains.
Over the past eight years, Nyarko has quickly built Trisolace into a well-known company in Ghana, establishing over 200 large greenhouses dedicated to growing snails.
“Greenhouse packages cost between 36,000 cedis (approx. $3,000) and 200,000 cedis (approx. $17,000), small boxes start at 700 cedis (approx. $58), while a pack of snails costs 150 cedis (approx. $12.50) ” said Nyarko. He said.
Snail farming was a far cry from Ennin's original career plans. But after qualifying for his dream nursing job, he waited in vain for a placement at a medical center in the country.
“I realized that even after completing my national service, I would not be posted immediately. [were] I decided to do something because I was still at home and the opportunity I had here was land so I started farming,” she said.
In 2022, Ennin's father tells her about snail farming. Shortly after, she went to Trisores Snail Farm in Accra for training, after which she started a project on her parents' land in Mampong City, Ashanti Region.
“I sell snails online, buy from local pickers, and wait for the snails in my greenhouse to fully mature before selling them on the open market,” she said.
Enin's parents helped her buy her first greenhouse, which cost about 24,000 cedis (about $2,000). There she grows vegetables such as carrots, cabbage, lettuce and cucumbers. She sells some of her harvest, but most is used to feed the approximately 1,700 edible giant African snails. Lissachatina fulica.
“It's a long-term investment, so you need patience,” Henin said. “Snail farming doesn't require a lot of space. You can get training and start small, not necessarily in a greenhouse way.”
The idea to commercialize snail farming came to Nyarko during his job search when he met other friends and civil engineering colleagues who were also looking for work but were unsuccessful. Nyarko participated in various start-up and entrepreneurship programs and realized the huge potential that the snail industry offers in terms of job creation.
“We started with a small box of snails and handed them out to friends and colleagues, asking them to report on what they liked and disliked and their mortality rate. That's how our study started. I did,” Nyarko said.
With savings from Nyarko's National Service Allowance and support from his co-founders, they raised 5,000 cedis to start raising snails on a commercial scale using boxes.
“In 2018, we started constructing greenhouses on a larger scale. This was after completing intensive training in snail farming techniques at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research at the Ghana Forest Institute, a state-owned institution. did.”
Their snail farming has become so popular that in 2019, Nyarko won a $5,000 grant from the United Nations Development Program and the National Youth Authority under the Ghana Youth Connect Platform.
Trisolace has grown over the past seven years and now employs 22 full-time staff, partly due to the application of a variety of innovative methods such as the use of greenhouses and sprinklers.
“I saw that farming had a lot of potential. But we didn't have a place of our own. I was still with my parents, so I didn't have anything like chicken or anything that smelled or made noise. Nothing could be done. That's when we started studying snails,” Nyarko said.
Difficulties and risks still exist in snail farming, including relatively high mortality during hatching if conditions are not carefully monitored.
But Elvis E. Nkrumah, a former Ghanaian engineer who previously specialized in snail farming techniques, advises young people to be patient and ensure they follow best practices that will reap long-term benefits.
“We recommend selling the second generation instead of the first generation, so you have a series of price points that you can sell in subsequent years, and you get big enough to get higher prices, and you sell more. You can get “Profit.'' The first generation will give you a large population of snails.
“They lay a lot of eggs, averaging 400 to 500 eggs a year, and the hatching rate is 95 to 100 percent,” he says.
Another unexplored area in the value chain is the growing demand for snail slime by the cosmetics industry worldwide.
“Many people are getting interested in this field not for physical reasons, but because of the cosmetics industry,” Nkrumah said. “Few people in Ghana extract and export snail slime, but many sell the fresh meat.Profitability [of meat] The price is quite high, especially during the dry season when there are few snails.
“We can only address 18% of the total market demand, which is why we are offering free training to encourage more people to invest in this space,” Nyarko said. I did. Ennin hopes to start selling snails in 2025. bird story agency