Alirajpur Women Poultry Producer Company

Our group is based at the Kesla Poultry Sahakari Society in the village and post of Sukhtawa, which is in the Itarsi Tehsil of Hoshangabad. It’s a bit of a trek to get out here, but this is where the work happens. The Alirajpur Women Poultry Producer Company is all about local women coming together to run a poultry business. We aren't some fancy corporate setup; we are just a bunch of people from the village working with chickens. The society has been around for a while, and we use this space to manage everything from feed to selling the birds. It’s loud, and it definitely smells like a farm, but that’s the reality of poultry. We spend our mornings checking on the flocks and our afternoons dealing with the logistics of getting the eggs and meat to the markets. It’s a lot of manual labor and keeping track of health charts for the birds. Being a women-led producer company means we also spend a lot of time supporting each other through the ups and downs of the business. Sometimes the prices for feed go up and it gets stressful, or the weather gets too hot for the birds. We just work through it together in Sukhtawa. It’s a community effort more than anything else. We don’t have a marketing department; we just rely on the quality of what we raise and the word of mouth in the local area to keep us going.