The Roots Poultry Abattoir is in the process of increasing its slaughtering capacity from two thousand birds per day to ten thousand.

Roots Agricultural Project Manager Jano Rieckert told a group of journalists, who were on a familiarization visit to the project, that the poultry abattoir is striving towards making Namibia self-sufficient in chicken meat.

For now, Rieckert says, the abattoir only supplies the catering industry with chicken meat.

The tour was organized by the Namibia Tourism Board as part of its campaign to boost domestic tourism through partnerships with the local media.

The Roots Agricultural Project also offers overnight accommodation to tourists from where they can view the sunset and connect with the earth by walking through grape vineyards and apple orchards.

"Welcome to our second poultry abattoir. The first one we have, we slaughter about 2000 birds per day; this one, we will start slaughtering 5,000 per day, then scale up to 10,000 a day, and then from there, we will even scale up more, so when we go to, let's say, 10,000 a day, that's about 15 tons of chicken meat that we are processing here," explained Jano Rieckert, the project manager.
  
Rieckert has high hopes for the abattoir. "If we become the second biggest supplier of that and also take part in that, then the imports will be less, and hopefully one day we can totally stop the imports of chicken because it's one of the products the government protects the producers in the country."