Grow Emus, Young Man

Australia’s national bird is making babies in Indian poultry. And they are not here to be slaughtered. Yet.

With the big toe of his right leg, Suresh Kumar draws a square on the ground. It comes out clear because the soil in his one-and-a-half acres of land in Songaon, a village 100 km from Mumbai, is damp from unseasonal rains. “See, you can have square enclosures but then she will be here,” his toe edges to one corner of the square. “And as he comes from behind, she will move sideways out of his reach,” his toe runs along a side of the square to an adjacent corner. Suresh then draws a triangle. “But if the enclosure is like this and she is here,” his toe now at one end of the triangle, “then she can’t go anywhere. She will be forced to mate.”

He and she in this case are emus. Just a couple of metres from where Suresh is toe-diagramming, they are cooped inside in pairs in an array of square and triangular enclosures. There are 25 pairs and Suresh is describing the many ways in which he is getting them to lay more eggs. This particular experiment has been designed by Suresh because of a character flaw of the emu. Unlike humans, they don’t need institutions to force them into monogamy. Once an emu chooses its mate, it remains true. When a bird dies, emu farmers have a problem: the monogamous emu often just does not like his or her new mate. Hence triangular enclosures and some prodding.

Usually, the objective of emu farming is to profit from the bird’s body. From its fat, oil is produced—one lanky bird can give as much as 5 litres. Pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries are keen to buy it because it is said to alleviate joint pains. An average emu would also give 20 kg of meat, which is 98 per cent fat-free. Then there is emu leather (it’s similar to crocodile leather) which has tiny pores, so that shoes and belts made out of it can breathe. The fashion industry uses emu feathers. The emu, farmers say, is the coconut tree of the bird kingdom. Not one part of it—even the toenails can be used as a fashion accessory—goes waste. But the emu is not exploited in these ways in India.

Here, the bird is put to only one use: to lay eggs. Emu eggs look like very large green oval stones. An omelette could feed a big family. But at a going rate of around Rs 2,000 per egg in Maharashtra, you would need to be really rich to want to eat them. “Ande ka funda hai,” says Sami Tambatkar, president of the National Emu Association, sitting in a cubicle-size shop in Fort, Mumbai.

A farmer buys pairs of emus, they lay eggs, these eggs are sold, from these eggs emus emerge, they grow up, lay eggs which are sold, more emus, more eggs and so on. Bottle green eggs pass on from hand to hand and hatchery to hatchery, increasing emu numbers. If the Indian emu industry were a stock market, it would be called a bubble. The livestock multiplication would go on till large scale slaughtering is possible.

“This ande ka funda will continue for ten more years. After ten years, commercial slaughtering will begin. Even today, pharmaceutical companies say that they are ready to buy emu oil but they want constant flow. I am not able to supply that. From the Gulf, there are export orders for meat but [currently we have nothing],” says Tambatkar. He is an emu consultant. When someone—farmer, businessman, diamond merchant—wants to get into the business of proliferating emus in India, they knock on his door.

To start an emu farm, the first requisite is procuring emus in pairs. Usually, that means two options. A three-month-old pair costs Rs 18,000. But that means feeding them for 15 months before they start laying eggs. And in India the business is about eggs. The alternative therefore is to buy emus which are 15-month-old, at Rs 40,000. Then the eggs come in three months.

Along with the emus, you need land. Emus are a large flightless bird with long legs. And they put the legs to good use. Every morning and evening they start running at speeds of 40-50 km per hour. They do not run to get anywhere. They need to run to remain healthy. Ten emu pairs, the minimum needed for a feasible project, therefore need about 5,000 sq ft.

Emu farmers have many tricks up their sleeves. A female emu can lay an egg every three days. But after she lays it, it is the male of the pair who hatches it. Once he sits on top of the egg, he is no longer interested in sex for the 52 days that it takes the egg to hatch. And with monogamy thrown in, that means no more eggs for the season. So farmers remove the egg almost as soon as it is dropped and let a hatchery do the hatching.

An egg’s price changes from season to season. In Maharashtra and Gujarat, last season it was Rs 1,800, the year before it was Rs 1,500. Now it is Rs 2,200. Out of every 100 eggs, 70 are fertile. But because this is a coconut-tree bird, even the infertile eggs are useful. They can, for example, become works of art. Just an empty shell can fetch Rs 200. Sami Tambatkar has one with Amitabh Bachchan carved on it in his office.

The egg economy swings into action once the emu becomes 18-month-old. From then, for the next 25 to 30 years, every six months, the emu just keeps laying its golden eggs. In the first laying season you get about 10-15, then every year the count goes up and by the fifth laying season, a pair can produce 30 eggs on an average. That’s between Rs 40,000 and Rs 60,000 per year from a pair of birds that cost you Rs 18,000. Even feeding them is cheap. A cow eats food worth Rs 150 a day. For the emu, the figure can be as low as Rs 8 to 9.

Golden Emu Farms, 60 km from Hyderabad, spans 35 acres and has 1,000 breeder pairs to lay eggs, plus another 1,000 making a total of 3,000 emus. Nakkala Laxma Reddy, one of its four directors, says that it is the biggest emu farm in India. It is certainly one of the oldest. In 1998, Reddy heard that an NRI had imported 600 to 800 emu chicks. Reddy, a poultry farmer then, bought 350 chicks from him. “That was the last time, because importing of chicks was stopped after that,” he says. By 2000, he had a line of friends who too wanted to get on the gravy train. “So many people were waiting for our eggs and chicks,” he says.

Golden Eggs today is trying to move out of the egg economy. Its 1,000 chicks and birds are set aside not just to be sold off but also for slaughter. “I have started supplying meat to some companies,” he says. “Also, even though we don’t advertise, people come daily to buy meat and 50 to 60 kg for events like marriage and reception parties. I have made a slaughter house. To slaughter, one has to wait for 14 months after the chicks are born. Then you have to go to the trouble of processing the fat, meat and leather. Ordinarily, these are not things which a farmer should be doing. It’s much more easy to sell the eggs or chicks.”

Much of the leather of Reddy’s emus lies unused because existing leather processing units are tailored for existing livestock like sheep (emu leather is thinner). However, he has exported meat to Maldives (Rs 250 per kg, boneless) and oil to the Japanese. But all the other emu farmers in India are still in the egg phase. “A farmer running a 100-pair emu farm with his own hatchery, can earn over Rs 10 lakh a year,” says Tambatkar.

Within the egg industry, there are ancillary businesses that are mushrooming. Also, an increasing understanding of the emus. Suresh, for instance, has a hypothesis that Indian emus don’t give more than 30 eggs a season because a large number of the mating pairs are siblings. So, he now keeps track of which chicks are born from whose eggs and only sells pairs with a certificate from a doctor which says that they are not genetically too closely related.

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