Day-Old Chicks for Sale in Gweru: Buyer’s Guide
Written by Kudakwashe Masuka, GreenField Broilers, Gweru. Last reviewed [Month Year]. Prices and disease guidance change — check with your veterinary officer before acting on health advice.
If you are looking for day old chicks for sale in Gweru, you are probably buying your first batch. This guide covers what to buy, what moves the price, what to check in the box before you accept it, and how to avoid the mistakes that cost first-time buyers half their birds.
Zimbabwe’s poultry industry is overwhelmingly a smallholder industry. The Zimbabwe Poultry Association has estimated that the smallholder sector accounts for more than 70% of total chick sales in the country, and national production has run at roughly 7 to 8 million broiler day-old chicks a month in recent years. You are not doing something unusual. You are joining the largest livestock enterprise in the country.
What kind of chick should you buy?
Three types cover almost every order placed in the Midlands.
Broilers are meat birds, ready in about six weeks at roughly 2kg live weight. The strains sold locally are Cobb 500, Hubbard, Ross and Arbor Acres. They grow fast, but they need bought feed throughout and tight brooding.
Layers are egg birds. They cost more per chick, come into lay at 18 to 20 weeks, then lay for a year or more. Hy-Line, Lohmann, ISA Brown and Amberlink are the common commercial strains.
Road runners are indigenous free-range birds, along with improved types such as Boschveld, Sasso and Potchefstroom Koekoek. They take months rather than weeks, but forage for much of their own food and sell at a premium.
Undecided? Compare the economics in broilers vs road runners, or read about broiler chicks, layer chicks and road runner chicks in detail.
What changes the price of day-old chicks?
Chick prices in Zimbabwe move for reasons that have nothing to do with any individual seller.
- Feed and breeder costs. Producing a day-old chick takes roughly 1.5 hatching eggs, and every one of those eggs came from a breeder flock that had to be fed.
- Hatchability. The national broiler industry runs at around 66% hatchability. When that slips, supply tightens.
- Import duty and exchange rates. Hatching egg import quotas have repeatedly shifted Zimbabwean chick supply. Statutory Instrument 245 of 2020 suspended duty on imported hatching eggs, and its expiry in March 2021 immediately tightened supply again.
- Season. Prices firm from about September as growers position for December, and soften after January.
For a current national price picture across breeds and provinces, ChickenPrices.co.zw publishes a regularly updated day-old chick price guide.
When comparing two quotes, compare delivered prices. A cheaper chick collected from Harare, about 275km away, is usually not cheaper once transport and the extra journey stress are counted.
How do you tell a good chick from a poor one?
You are entitled to open the box and look. Do it before you pay.
The Cobb management guide sets out what a quality chick looks like, and it is a useful checklist whatever strain you are buying:
- Well-dried, long-fluffed down
- Bright, round, active eyes
- Alert and moving, not sitting still
- Completely healed navels
- Legs bright and waxy to the touch, free of red hocks
- No deformities such as crooked legs, twisted necks or cross beaks
Uniformity matters as much as any individual bird. A box with obvious runts will grow out unevenly, and uneven birds are hard to sell as a batch.
Ask which vaccinations were given at the hatchery. Marek’s disease vaccine is normally administered on day one before the chicks leave, because it has to be in the bird before exposure. Newcastle and Gumboro are usually yours to give over the first three weeks. See our chick vaccination schedule.
Collection or delivery?
Collecting from Gweru is cheapest and gives you control of the journey.
Come early in the morning. Chicks travel better in the cool, and an early collection means they reach a warm brooder with daylight left for you to watch them settle.
In the vehicle:
- Carry the box on a seat, never in a sealed boot
- Do not stop for other errands
- Never leave chicks in a parked car in the sun
Overheating in a stationary vehicle kills more chicks on collection day than anything else.
Outside Gweru, we deliver across the province. Shurugwi is about 33km away, Kwekwe around 65km, Mvuma roughly 75km, Zvishavane about 100km and Gokwe further still. See Midlands delivery routes and charges.
What must be ready before the chicks arrive?
Chicks cannot regulate their own body temperature. For the first three to four weeks you are doing the hen’s job.
Before the box opens you need:
- A cleaned, disinfected space
- A heat source switched on hours beforehand, holding about 30 to 34°C at chick level, depending on humidity
- Bedding several centimetres deep, ideally wood shavings
- Drinkers filled with clean water
- Starter feed on flat trays where chicks will find it
Commercial guidance is to provide 23 to 24 hours of light in the first days, so chicks can locate feed and water easily.
A cold first night costs birds before you have fed them anything. Read brooding day-old chicks, and if your power is unreliable, read brooding without electricity before you commit to a batch size.
Work out the whole cost before you order
The chicks are the cheapest part of a batch. A hundred broilers will eat roughly 350 to 400kg of feed across six weeks, and that feed bill dwarfs the cost of the chicks.
Many people buy a hundred chicks, run short in week four, and sell underweight birds at a loss. Work through the cost of raising 100 broilers first, and if the numbers do not work, order fewer.
Fifty birds fed properly to week six beat a hundred birds half-fed.
How to order day-old chicks for sale in Gweru
Tell us the breed, the quantity and the week you need them, and we will confirm which hatch we can place you on.
Give as much notice as you can. Chicks are hatched to order rather than held in stock, and November hatches for the December market book out first. See timing broilers for the festive season if that is your plan.
What we see on our own farm
[Replace this block with two or three sentences of your own, specific to this article’s topic. Something you have actually observed in your own batches: a figure from your records, a mistake you made and fixed, what a Midlands customer told you, what changed between one batch and the next. Two honest sentences here outweigh five hundred words of general advice, and it is the one part of the page nobody else can copy.]
Frequently asked questions
How much notice do I need to give when ordering day-old chicks?
Give at least a week for ordinary orders, and six to eight weeks if you are targeting December. Chicks are hatched to order rather than held in stock, and November hatches book out first.
Can I buy fewer than 100 day-old chicks?
Yes, though most sellers price in bands, so smaller orders cost more per bird. Chicks also travel better in a full box, because a part-filled crate loses heat faster.
How do I know the chicks are healthy before I accept them?
Open the box and look. Healthy chicks are dry and fluffy, alert, standing squarely, with healed navels and no red hocks. Uniform size across the batch matters as much as any single bird.
Is it cheaper to buy chicks from Harare?
Rarely, once you add transport and the extra journey. A chick travelling about 275km from Harare arrives more stressed than one collected in Gweru, and that shows up as first-week mortality.
Sources and further reading
- ChickenPrices.co.zw — day-old chick price guide — Regularly updated Zimbabwean chick prices by category and province, plus a breeder directory.
- NewsDay — Poultry industry grows 32% — ZPA data on national day-old chick output and the smallholder share of it.
- Cobb Broiler Management Guide — The breeder’s own management guide: chick quality checks, brooding temperatures, stocking density and lighting.
- Poultry industry plunged into crisis — Covers Statutory Instrument 245 of 2020 and how hatching egg import quotas move chick supply.
About the author
Show Image
Kudakwashe Masuka — founder, GreenField Broilers and Midlands Chicks, Gweru
Kudakwashe has run GreenField Broilers, a working poultry operation in Gweru, for [X] years, and supplies day-old chicks to farmers across the Midlands through Midlands Chicks. He has personally brooded and finished [number] batches in Midlands conditions, including through load shedding, the cold months and the December demand peak.
His customers range from backyard keepers in Mkoba running fifty birds to commercial growers in the Kwekwe and Shurugwi farming areas. Everything on this page is written from that experience and checked against the published guidance listed in Sources above — not assembled from general advice.
[Add here: any qualification, training, association membership or industry role that applies — for example an agriculture diploma, a Zimbabwe Poultry Association membership, extension training, or years spent in the trade before starting the farm. If you have none, say so plainly and lead with the batch count instead. A specific, honest line outperforms a vague impressive one.]
Talk to us directly. Call or WhatsApp [your number], visit us in Gweru, or read our frequently asked questions — a hundred answers on ordering, brooding, feed, health and pricing.
