AGRICULTURAL NEWS - When Marco Torsius launched his El-Azaar poultry farm 25 years ago, he had only 300 hens and a permit to expand.
Today, he owns 150 000 point-of-lay hens, and is a director of TopLay, South Africa’s largest egg supplier.
Marco arrived in Bloemfontein in the Free State from Steynsrus in 1986 with his first few birds transported in his old Ford truck. At that stage, he had secured a permit to farm 15 000 hens, but he had a long way to go before arriving at this number.
“I was handyman, production manager, mechanic, marketer. My wife did the administration. We’d been farming and so we carried on,” he says.
His gradual growth can be seen in the various shapes and sizes of the henhouses, which were added on whenever possible.
