The Avian Plague (Copy)

[Update Spring 2023. While nobody is going to admit that locking 10,000 chickens up in a building that will asphyxiate them if the fans stop running is demonically stupid, there appears to be some sign that the government is backing away from the policy of euthanizing entire flocks based on a single PCR test — mostly because enough people pointed out how obviously insane this policy is. We hope for some positive change by next year. Maybe?]

[Update Fall 2024. Nope. Government still as monumentally stupid as ever. Essentially ALL chickens deliberately destroyed by our government have zero symptoms of Avian Influenza, meaning that these were exactly the chickens that had developed immunity in any flock where it was found. It’s almost like the government is paid by veterinary pharmaceutical companies which sell drugs and desperately don’t want flocks to develop natural immunity…It’s disappointing to see one of our local farm advocacy nonprofits, Friends of Family Farmers, promoting the USDA’s obviously bought-and-paid for lies totally innocent absolutely backwards read of the empirical data on this matter. Shameful.]

Originally published June 2022:

Government policy suggests insanity

We are increasing our deposit per chicken to twenty dollars in 2023. This is because of the risk from the Federal Government’s response to Avian Influenza. Avian influenza is not a meaningful health risk to people, only to birds.

Nevertheless, for some unexplained reason (no corporate funding to explain it, likely), respiratory ailments such as avian influenza are dangerous to the profit margins of agribusiness corporations running huge, confined poultry flocks. It appears to be, in practice, U.S. government policy that commercial flocks kept in such close confinement that ventilation systems are required to filter out the aerosolized chicken manure (if they have access to the outdoors some of these birds may be sold as “free range”) could not possibly be a cause of respiratory ailments in said birds. Also, it appears that farmers are being told that it is a good idea to destroy wetlands habitat and other surface water sources on their farms to ensure the farm ecology is not shared with wild birds.

They don’t make insane, dictatorial bureaucracies like they used to

In a disappointingly weak and lackluster attempt to copy the illustrious Mao Zhuxi who, unlike the clownish erasthaipaeds in charge of the U.S. government*, had the knack of putting the “total” into “itarian”, the government (and big ag) blames wild birds for spreading avian influenza, and is particularly concerned that wild birds might breathe the same fresh, open air as domesticated poultry flocks. Fresh air is dangerous! To big ag profits?  

This story is not reminiscent of anything

To determine if a poultry flock is infected with the dreaded avian plague, the government uses a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, which has become the go-to test to detect something that isn’t there, since the PCR test, on its own, has always been and will always be invalid as a tool for diagnosis of any kind and was never intended for such a purpose, as stated explicitly by the man awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of said test.  But if you’re wondering why you aren’t seeing flocks of wild geese dropping out of the sky with the sniffles, but almost all poultry lost from “avian influenza” have been part of huge commercial CAFO flocks, you’re clearly a misinformation spreader, so stop asking such questions and be thankful that you live in a free country.

(There are occasional media reports of nameless “hunters” seeing unexplained dead wild birds. A flock of more than 50 wild turkeys mate and nest on the farm and the surrounding area and hundreds of wild geese and ducks come to the farm every year. If there were anything at all to see, we would know.)

Following any positive test result, regardless of how apparently specious, the typical government response is to immediately destroy all birds in the flock, similar to the typical government response to children in Yemen, wedding parties in Iraq, or democratically-elected leaders in Africa or South America. Note that even if the entire flock were to be infected, the birds could be quarantined, processed, cooked, and eaten in complete safety, if the purpose of government policy was to benefit the public, but this is not allowed. 

Why we’re raising our deposit on chickens

Unlike the corporate CAFO factory farms and their absentee investor owners, we can’t afford to cover the loss of an entire flock of poultry so that we can profit by raising the price on you next time while driving our smaller competitors out of business. Thus, we have increased the deposit amount on bulk chicken pre-orders, which is not refundable in the event we have chickens but are prevented by law or regulatory action from selling them to you.

Do you believe drug companies care about people over profits?

The good news is that while “leaky” avian influenza vaccines have been largely banned in the U.S. and Europe due to the risks and side effects of the vaccines being deemed worse than the disease, international veterinary pharmaceutical conglomerates have for years selflessly pawned off these potentially dangerous vaccines onto politically and economically disadvantaged farmers in the “global South”, and are ready to charitably sell their vaccines in the affluent U.S. and European markets just as soon as government policy creates a sufficient demand.

Let’s Recapitulate

Avian influenza is not significantly harmful to humans but is potentially detrimental to debt-leveraged corporate agriculture confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) poultry business profits. In contrast, healthy birds raised outdoors appear to be less susceptible to the disease. Also, decentralized and distributed small scale outdoor flocks are logically more likely to experience a self-contained outbreak in contrast with huge confined flocks which are served by delivery trucks and machinery going between multiple buildings every day and thus spreading potentially contaminated litter. However, the U.S. government blames migratory wild birds for spreading avian flu, not Big Chicken warehouses full of aerosolized manure and the industrial supply chains which serve them. The solution promoted by the U.S. government is to destroy any chicken flock in which avian influenza is suspected, regardless of how many birds actually have symptoms, and to promote CAFO poultry as the safest way of raising chickens. The net result is the deliberate destruction of small, less capitalized poultry farms and thus decreased competition for the major corporations which fund agribusiness lobbying. As a (very) small producer, we can’t afford to cover the cost of having the government come and kill all our chickens, so we’re raising our deposit per chicken.

* Of course there may be many well-meaning employees of the Government. All of our interactions with such employees have been cordial. Most Federal employees probably mean well and are trying to do the right thing. None of these people has any real power to set policy. Perhaps if the hard working government employees who actually want to do the right thing were put in charge, things would be different.

Chicken and Dumplings

We’ll all have chicken and dumplings when she comes…

Materials

One or two whole pasture-raised chickens. Giblets optional.

A large pot

Onion, carrot, celery (amount depends on what flavor you want)

Salt, whole peppercorns, herbs de Provence or some other mixture of herbs including thyme and marjoram. (Or…not, if you don’t like thyme and marjoram with chicken. You do what you want.) A few bay leaves, and or some dried mushrooms or mushroom powder would go well. Maybe soy sauce? Something for umami flavor is the idea.

Other vegetables (canned or frozen corn or peas work well)

Dumplings (see below)

Optional: grass-fed butter, green onion, parsley

Method

Put the chicken(s) in the pot and cover it with plenty of water. Simmer the chicken for several hours. A lid helps. Do not boil the chicken, this can make it tough.

Remove the chicken from the pot. Reserve the broth (which you have just made) in the pot. Let the chicken cool.

Vegetables and Broth. (Heirloom carrots, some are yellow.)

Chop onion, carrot, and celery and add to the pot with the broth. Add salt. Add a small handful of peppercorns. Add herbs or herb mix. Add bay leaves. Turn up the heat to a slow boil.

Shredded Chicken separated from bones

When the chicken is cool enough to handle, pull off the meat. Discard the bones, and the skin unless you want to eat it; optionally, save the largest, thickest bones.

Taste the broth, add salt if needed. Optionally, add the largest chicken bones back to the stock for more flavor. (You will need to remove these eventually.) Continue boiling the soup for 10-15 minutes, then reduce to a simmer.

When the carrot and celery are soft, add back in the chicken meat and any extra vegetables. We like to use sweet corn. You can cut the kernels off the cob when corn is in season and freeze it for use over the winter.

A chicken in every pot

Taste for seasoning one last time. Optionally, add in a few tablespoons of butter.

Drop dumpling batter, mixed

Add the dumplings. There are a lot of different dumpling recipes. You can use a biscuit mix from the store, you can make spaetzle, you have a lot of options. A simple drop dumpling recipe is as follows: Combine 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 2 teaspoons sugar, salt, and seasonings (we use a seasoning salt). Mix together 1 cup of whole milk, a few tablespoons of melted butter, and a dash of apple cider vinegar. Fold the wet ingredients into the dry. Don’t overmix. Make sure the soup is simmering enough to create steam. Use 2 spoons to drop (thus the name) large spoonfuls of dumpling batter onto the top of the soup. Cover with a lid and simmer the dumplings 15 minutes.

Serve the dumplings right away, or they’ll begin to disintegrate into the soup (not the end of the world). Consider garnishing with green onion and fresh parsley.

How to start a farm business as an 18-year-old with a vehicle and a part time job

If you want to get started farming, I recommend selling chickens.  First, go get a job in retail or sales or something that has regular hours and isn't a big mental commitment for you so you can spend all your time thinking about farming.  You'll make way more money than you're going to as a farmer any time soon, so you will learn if you really want to farm or not.  Find someone who will let you use their land for free.  You don't need all that much land to raise a single batch 25 Cornish Cross chickens.  A large backyard would do.  Do not pay rent.  You are going to be depositing valuable chicken manure on that property.  People pay very good money for this stuff.  Assume a 4x feed conversion ratio and set your price at 2x your variable costs, not counting labor.  If you don't understand variable cost, get a book on financial accounting and use it.  Pre-sell your chickens before you order chicks from the hatchery, move them at least once a day once they're in the coop, and figure out before you start how you're going to handle processing. You can brood your first birds indoors in a modified cardboard box.  

I think meat chickens are the single best way to get started farming.  Once you've raised some chickens, you can scale up or branch out into something else.  Try to build mobile coops that are versatile so you can use them for other things.  I strongly advise against starting out a farm business by growing vegetables.  You need your own land or a multi-year lease to farm vegetables, otherwise you are just spending a lot of money improving someone else's garden.  Vegetable farming is also not a sustainable business model.  Only rich people buy vegetables.  Poor people grow their own.  No offense to our vegetable farmer friends, but Americans have the illusion that we are rich.  That is changing.

I am also against working for other farmers when you first start out.  Working for a successful, knowledgeable, established farmer is a great way to learn how all of that works on their farm.  It may have absolutely nothing to do with what works for you in your situation.  Either you will figure out how to be successful, or you will fail. Either result has value. You will learn way more by fixing your own problems or failing than by having someone else teach you how to avoid failure.  Whatever you do, don't be an intern.  If you are going to work for another farmer, do it for the money.  This is another reason to start out on your own at first.  Once you have some experience overcoming farming catastrophes of your own, you are worth more and can negotiate a higher wage, which will help you save up to invest in your own farm business. You will also know enough to know what you don’t know, which helps a lot in learning from someone else.

Maybe you will decide farming isn't for you after you raise a few batches of chickens.  Having a small business failure could be a major plus in the job market.  Make sure you keep records so you can show what you did and what happened if you decide that farming is not for you and you want to go into the trades or some other productive endeavor.  The number of other 19-year olds who have put together a business plan, produced something with their own labor, and sold it, profit or loss, is basically zero.  So give it a try.  Worst case, you can buy yourself a used chest freezer as long as wherever you're living has a spare electrical circuit, and you'll be able to eat plenty of great chicken for a long time.  

The Avian Plague

[Update Spring 2023. While nobody is going to admit that locking 10,000 chickens up in a building that will asphyxiate them if the fans stop running is demonically stupid, there appears to be some sign that the government is backing away from the policy of euthanizing entire flocks based on a single PCR test — mostly because enough people pointed out how obviously insane this policy is. We hope for some positive change by next year. Maybe?]

[Update Fall 2024. Nope. Government still as monumentally stupid as ever. Essentially ALL chickens deliberately destroyed by our government have zero symptoms of Avian Influenza, meaning that these were exactly the chickens that had developed immunity in any flock where it was found. It’s almost like the government is paid by veterinary pharmaceutical companies which sell drugs and desperately don’t want flocks to develop natural immunity…]

Government policy suggests insanity

We are increasing our deposit per chicken to twenty dollars in 2023. This is because of the risk from the Federal Government’s response to Avian Influenza. Avian influenza is not a meaningful health risk to people, only to birds.

Nevertheless, for some unexplained reason (no corporate funding to explain it, likely), respiratory ailments such as avian influenza are dangerous to the profit margins of agribusiness corporations running huge, confined poultry flocks. It appears to be, in practice, U.S. government policy that commercial flocks kept in such close confinement that ventilation systems are required to filter out the aerosolized chicken manure (if they have access to the outdoors some of these birds may be sold as “free range”) could not possibly be a cause of respiratory ailments in said birds. Also, it appears that farmers are being told that it is a good idea to destroy wetlands habitat and other surface water sources on their farms to ensure the farm ecology is not shared with wild birds.

They don’t make insane, dictatorial bureaucracies like they used to

In a disappointingly weak and lackluster attempt to copy the illustrious Mao Zhuxi who, unlike the clownish erasthaipaeds in charge of the U.S. government*, had the knack of putting the “total” into “itarian”, the government (and big ag) blames wild birds for spreading avian influenza, and is particularly concerned that wild birds might breathe the same fresh, open air as domesticated poultry flocks. Fresh air is dangerous! To big ag profits?  

This story is not reminiscent of anything

To determine if a poultry flock is infected with the dreaded avian plague, the government uses a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, which has become the go-to test to detect something that isn’t there, since the PCR test, on its own, has always been and will always be invalid as a tool for diagnosis of any kind and was never intended for such a purpose, as stated explicitly by the man awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of said test.  But if you’re wondering why you aren’t seeing flocks of wild geese dropping out of the sky with the sniffles, but almost all poultry lost from “avian influenza” have been part of huge commercial CAFO flocks, you’re clearly a misinformation spreader, so stop asking such questions and be thankful that you live in a free country.

(There are occasional media reports of nameless “hunters” seeing unexplained dead wild birds. A flock of more than 50 wild turkeys mate and nest on the farm and the surrounding area and hundreds of wild geese and ducks come to the farm every year. If there were anything at all to see, we would know.)

Following any positive test result, regardless of how apparently specious, the typical government response is to immediately destroy all birds in the flock, similar to the typical government response to children in Yemen, wedding parties in Iraq, or democratically-elected leaders in Africa or South America. Note that even if the entire flock were to be infected, the birds could be quarantined, processed, cooked, and eaten in complete safety, if the purpose of government policy was to benefit the public, but this is not allowed. 

Why we’re raising our deposit on chickens

Unlike the corporate CAFO factory farms and their absentee investor owners, we can’t afford to cover the loss of an entire flock of poultry so that we can profit by raising the price on you next time while driving our smaller competitors out of business. Thus, we have increased the deposit amount on bulk chicken pre-orders, which is not refundable in the event we have chickens but are prevented by law or regulatory action from selling them to you.

Do you believe drug companies care about people over profits?

The good news is that while “leaky” avian influenza vaccines have been largely banned in the U.S. and Europe due to the risks and side effects of the vaccines being deemed worse than the disease, international veterinary pharmaceutical conglomerates have for years selflessly pawned off these potentially dangerous vaccines onto politically and economically disadvantaged farmers in the “global South”, and are ready to charitably sell their vaccines in the affluent U.S. and European markets just as soon as government policy creates a sufficient demand.

Let’s Recapitulate

Avian influenza is not significantly harmful to humans but is potentially detrimental to debt-leveraged corporate agriculture confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) poultry business profits. In contrast, healthy birds raised outdoors appear to be less susceptible to the disease. Also, decentralized and distributed small scale outdoor flocks are logically more likely to experience a self-contained outbreak in contrast with huge confined flocks which are served by delivery trucks and machinery going between multiple buildings every day and thus spreading potentially contaminated litter. However, the U.S. government blames migratory wild birds for spreading avian flu, not Big Chicken warehouses full of aerosolized manure and the industrial supply chains which serve them. The solution promoted by the U.S. government is to destroy any chicken flock in which avian influenza is suspected, regardless of how many birds actually have symptoms, and to promote CAFO poultry as the safest way of raising chickens. The net result is the deliberate destruction of small, less capitalized poultry farms and thus decreased competition for the major corporations which fund agribusiness lobbying. As a (very) small producer, we can’t afford to cover the cost of having the government come and kill all our chickens, so we’re raising our deposit per chicken.

* Of course there may be many well-meaning employees of the Government. All of our interactions with such employees have been cordial. Most Federal employees probably mean well and are trying to do the right thing. None of these people has any real power to set policy. Perhaps if the hard working government employees who actually want to do the right thing were put in charge, things would be different.

Marek's Disease and the Story of Non-Sterilizing Vaccinations

Two types of vaccine treatment

Fifty years ago Marek's caused mild paralysis in some chickens, reducing yields. This problem was solved with a vaccine. Almost all commercial chickens are now vaccinated against Marek's. Unlike the measles vaccine or the original polio vaccine, but like the flu vaccine, the avian influenza vaccine, and the vaccine which is 100 percent safe and effective after two shots, but also requires unlimited boosters, and correlates with decreased naturally immunity across all age groups and with increased danger from post-vaccination infection, and is associated with a larger incidence of extremely debilitating side effects than all other vaccinations combined, such as unexplained myocarditis in previously healthy children, and is now officially safe and effective for children despite more children dying in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated group in the abbreviated and materially inconclusive (on the record!) efficacy trial, and which occasionally causes otherwise very healthy people with no prior risk of heart disease to drop dead from massive blood clots, which were previously "misinformation" and you were a liar if you said this happened but are now classified as "rare", and which is known to cause increased concentrations of potentially dangerous toxins in the ovaries, and correlates with an increase in miscarriages and a marked decline in fertility, the Marek's vaccine is "leaky".

Non-sterilizing vaccines: what could possibly go wrong?

"Leaky" is highly technical language. It may seem, to those of us who aren’t pharmaceutical company CEOs with profitable Defense Department contracts to inject American soldiers with experimental vaccines which correlate 100 percent with debilitating chronic illness, as if it means "they're lying and this isn't a real vaccine and it doesn't work", but what "leaky" means is highly technical. The Marek's vaccine preserves chickens from the symptoms of the disease (we hope) but doesn't prevent them from becoming infected and contagious. Instead of a sterilizing vaccine which effectively wipes out the disease, the leaky Marek's vaccine resulted in mutated strains of Marek's which are now extremely deadly, perhaps because, in the words of Harvard Medical School graduate Michael Crichton, "life finds a way" -- and the Marek's vaccine doesn't kill the Marek's virus, it just shoves it under the featherbed. This has been known for well over a decade (see, for example, Gimeno 2008 in “Vaccine”, Witter 1998 in “Poultry Science”, Boodhoo et. al. 2016 in “Veterinary Research”)* which is one reason why many previously highly-respected but, now that they disagree with industry-captured government agencies and people with a journalism degree, obviously incompetent, epidemiologists and virologists have been trying to spread the misinformation that widespread use of a leaky vaccine in humans might be a bad idea. We should obviously listen to television news anchors, who can read a teleprompter, and government bureaucrats, who can sometimes, and not to the top scientists in the field, who in speaking out and thus losing very lucrative grants and contracts from the drug companies and government agencies they criticize are clearly just self-interested and don’t understand the science.

You may be wondering if leaky vaccines given to people could result in a potentially dangerous disease mutation as with Marek's in chickens. The answer to that is, of course, absolutely not -- and if it does, rest assured pharmaceutical companies will come up with new vaccines to sell. So there's nothing to be concerned about. This was just a boring history lesson and any comparison to recent events is entirely unintended.

Natural immunity? What’s that?

Of course the alternative to treating a marginally dangerous illness with widespread use of non-sterilizing, “leaky” vaccines which directly cause viral mutations that greatly increase mortality, assuming the leaky vaccines even work, is to focus instead on overall population health of the flock (such as plenty of fresh air, exercise, and a natural diet), offer extra care to those which become ill, and allow the population to develop natural immunity to the virus over time, since natural immunity to even a mild strain is apparently effective against all variants. Officially, this practice doesn’t work, however, as widespread empirical observations to the contrary don’t count as data since they don’t take place in industry-funded labs. If you think that’s clearly wrong, and that to pursue as the only possible solution a schedule of constant vaccinations which are proven to make the disease more dangerous over time is criminally insane and everyone involved in such an obviously corrupt fiasco should be executed by firing squadlocked up, you don’t know what you’re talking about and you should stop spreading misinformation.

Our meat chickens are vaccinated against Marek's. We like our local family-run hatchery, and since they have to vaccinate for the larger commercial growers, they don't have any feasible means of vaccinating only some of the eggs but not others. It's too bad farmers didn't make a better decision about using a known "leaky" vaccine fifty years ago, or about believing the pharmaceutical sales representatives and the government regulators who rubber-stamped their recommendations.

Follow “the science”

In order to be better informed, we should clearly listen to talking heads on TV. Reading actual peer-reviewed published research is foolish. (Most of it is not replicable and a large number of studies are outright lies, but these are unfortunately the best we have, if you want to actually look at the data rather than “following the science”.) Simple, common-sense solutions which don’t require expensive and potentially dangerous chemicals sold by multinational drug companies are obviously not the answer to any of our problems. When deciding which “experts” are most credible, we should always give credence to those who are paid the most by corporate industry, and not to those who sacrifice lucrative paychecks in order to speak out. Speaking out is best done with the tongue thrust sideways into the inside of the cheek.

* Note that the people saying the vaccines are safe and effective NEVER cite actual double-blind controlled empirical large N studies, because there are none that support their claims.

Pasture-raised meat chicken enterprise budget

Update: This post was getting some additional traffic (thank you) so I’ve updated some of the numbers to reflect late 2022 pricing.

Raising chickens for fun and…profit?

I went over this for someone elsewhere, and decided I may as well write it out and put it up here. The purpose of this post is to help people who are thinking of starting a pasture-raised chicken enterprise. I also have no qualms about present or future customers finding out how much we (don’t) make from selling chickens, though I think it is vitally necessary to point out that:

(i) a sustainable farm business does not consist of a single enterprise, so that it would be unwise to extrapolate a single enterprise like chickens to the entire farm, and

(ii) we don’t raise chickens this way anymore since we switched to a free-range model. If anything, our costs are now much higher than this. Anyways, here goes.

(Edit: Note: If you don’t understand concepts like “feed conversion ratio”, “opportunity cost”, “depreciation”, “cost of goods sold”, or “gross margin”, then pause your plans to start a chicken business and go study some basic business concepts. Most small farmers lose money — and the farm — because they don’t understand what it actually costs them to produce food.)

Capital Investment (not included in cost)

I will assume producing 100 Cornish Cross chickens in four Suscovich-style coops. I think Salatin-style coops are cheaper to build, but they are also uni-taskers which seems like a poor investment to me. I am glad they work for Joel Salatin but I don’t think building them is a good business decision. Even if you never raise chickens again, the Suscovich-style coops are extremely versatile and useful to have around.

That said, I’m going to estimate $250 to build a Suscovitch-style coop. That will depend on lumber prices but I think it’s wise to err on the high side, and in fact $250 a coop is possibly low depending on how many modifications you need to make to John’s design to fit your local environment. So that’s $1000 which, depreciated over 5 years, is $200 per year. Since these coops have other potential uses I’m not going to require the chicken enterprise to pay for them, but keep that $200 in mind as we continue. You’re also likely going to need to spend on maintenance, such as new roof tarps every few years. That said, a single batch of 100 or 200 chickens shouldn’t be the goal, and the more chickens you raise in a year the more use you get out of your investment in the coops. It is, however, a startup cost to consider.

Chicks

100 Cornish Cross chickens from our local hatchery will cost about $275. Everyone should start out raising the standard Cornish Cross chicken. If you can keep these alive you can keep other hardier breeds alive, and the CX will likely net you the most return of any meat breed, so you’ll know what you’re giving up by switching to a more chicken-like breed of chicken, if you choose to do so in the future. Pasture-raised Cornish Cross are sufficiently different from grocery-store chicken that I think you’ll be very pleased with the results, although I think flavor is improved with slower-growing breeds.

If you put your brooder, where you keep the unfeathered baby chicks, in an enclosed and sheltered area then I think you can build it out of something like the cardboard box that a refrigerator or freezer is shipped in. Make friends with the warehouse workers at your local big box store. Cardboard would be a single use but it saves on initial materials cost. You could also build a similar-sized brooder out of plywood, OSB, and scraps. That would add extra cost. If you need to build a brooder outdoors you’ll need better materials and a better-engineered design. However, you’re probably going to need a better-engineered brooder because you have more orders for chicken, and perhaps you need to start chicks earlier in the season with a brooder which will keep them sufficiently warm. Brooder cost can therefore be a bit more in line with sales than is the cost of the coops. You’ll need a couple heat lamps and a way to get electricity to them but those aren’t all that expensive and can be reused many times. The only cost I’m going include for the brooder is the input of wood shavings as bedding, 2 bags for $18. If you use enough shavings they should still be quite high in carbon content but they will have some nitrogen from the chicken manure. They could make a halfway decent mulch for a garden or you could try adding them to a compost pile, so you can get some use out of them after the chicks do; still, I’ll call it an expense.

Feed

On pasture we should estimate that the CX’s feed conversion ration will be 4:1. It’s supposed to be lower, and certainly is in the CAFO settings these chickens were designed for, but you’re going to have feed waste on pasture regardless of what you do. Other breeds all eat significantly more than this, and free-ranging, while healthier for the chickens, increases feed use still further, as they spend more calories foraging than they get. Regardless of forage availability, these are not layer hens. You can potentially reduce feed waste by wetting the feed, which prevents smaller particles from being lost. A lot of people say you should ferment your chicken feed, and this makes sense theoretically but it is extra work, you have the potential risk of your wetted feed not fermenting but going moldy and being wasted, and I have not seen any study showing what the FCR benefit is from fermentation. Fermentation proselytizers get mad when you say, “I believe you that it helps, but show me the evidence that it helps enough to be worthwhile,” but there it is. Wetting the feed right before you give it to the chickens is easier to do, doesn’t introduce the risk of mold, and is at the very least probably not going to hurt anything, so long as your feeders are designed to hold the consequently larger volume of the daily food ration.

The cheapest feed is around 40 cents a pound. This may be lower if you live in corn and soy country and you are feeding corn and soy feed. Non-GMO, non-corn, non-soy feed may cost more. Given the rampant fraud (allegedly) in the organic feeds business, I think paying for organic chicken feed is stupid. Perhaps if you know the mill owner and they know the farmers and so on you will actually get a truly organic feed mix, and if you can find people who will pay the resulting chicken prices, well done. If you pay extra for a bag that says “organic” on it made by people whom you don’t know, who likely buy their ingredients on the open market from people they don’t know, then you’re just paying extra for a label. Most “organic” food isn’t tested in the field where chemicals would best be detected: nobody has the capability to do much more than “selectively audit” a few crops here and there. For anything which gets shipped from overseas, what is sold as “organic” is really just an “organic equivalent”, which in some cases means basically something like whatever “organic” legally means in the U.S. and in other cases is spelled b-r-i-b-e-r-y. Also there’s apparently no concern that having regulators paid by the farms they regulate might introduce a conflict of interest, which is…interesting. Mixing your own feed when you start out is a very bad idea, you will likely kill your chickens. Again, these are not layer hens that can survive on kitchen scraps. As you get more experienced you might look into mixing your own feed, but that’s not a good risk to take when you’re first starting out.

If we assume your average carcass weight will be 5 pounds, which is an achievable if particularly good result, then for 100 birds at 5 pounds and 4:1 FCR you need 2,000 pounds of feed which is $800.

Labor

It takes 56 days to raise a Cornish Cross chicken to processing size. You need move the coops and feed and water the birds every day that they are in the field, plus get and store feed, plus set up and clean out the brooder (if not using a disposable box). The work is less physical for the 2 or 3 weeks the chicks are in the brooder, unless you have brooder problems in which case you will be working a lot more to try to fix your setup and save the remaining birds. However, because of the many things that can go wrong in the brooder, you will need to check the chicks multiple times each day and night and adjust your heat sources and ventilation accordingly, so all these little visits are going to add up. I would estimate an hour a day working with the birds, and you will probably spend a lot more than that by the time you factor in building and maintaining coops, getting and storing feed, solving predator issues, catching and transporting chickens to the processor, and so on.

If you were to make $40,000 a year as a chicken farmer, and you worked 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 50 weeks of the year, your hourly wage would be $20. Of course this is a laughably absurd hypothetical situation, but people who don’t think you should make a below-average income, with zero benefits, in exchange for growing good food for them don’t deserve to be your customers (nor to eat, in my opinion), so value your time with the chickens at least at $20 an hour. That’s $20 times 1 hour a day for 56 days or $1,120.

You also have the rental equivalent of the land, but since pasture-raising chickens improves the soil fertility, as opposed to, say, leasing it out to a tenant farmer, I’m not going to include a cost for this. If you are raising chickens on someone else’s land, you shouldn’t pay them anything other than perhaps a few free chickens, and in fact if they don’t offer to pay you for providing fertilizer and pest control I would look for another business arrangement for your next season.

Losses

You should assume a 10 percent mortality rate. No matter what you do, some of your chickens are likely to die. Other breeds can be hardier than the Cornish Cross, it’s true. Probably your mortality will either be much higher (predation, brooder problems, heat wave) or somewhat lower (everything goes well) than this. Also, if all goes well most of your mortality loss will happen in the brooder due to chicks which just fail to thrive for genetic or other reasons. Still, to be safe you should assume you’ll lose 10 out of 100 birds when full grown. (In the Cornish Cross, the most dominant birds which gorge on the most feed and are the largest chickens in the flock tend to give themselves heart attacks just before your processing date.)

Processing

Processing is $4.00 $5.00 or $6.00 a bird, for whole bagged chickens. Again, the facilities to properly and safely process 100 birds in a day are not in your price range, starting out. If you have a day job, or other farm work to do, I don’t think processing on the farm is a good investment. This is something, perhaps, to look into at a larger scale, but again you have to think about the opportunity cost of time and facilities. By all means process 10 or 20 birds at home for personal use, but that’s different from processing 100 or more of birds you’re planning to sell. Assuming a 10 percent mortality loss, you’ll have 90 chickens to process at $6.00 a chicken for $540.

Adding up the cost of raising chickens on pasture

Thus, we have:

100 chicks at $2.75 each for $275.

2 bags of pine shavings brooder bedding for $18 total.

2,000 pounds of starter/grower feed at $0.40 a pound for $800.

56 hours of work (hah!) at $20 an hour (no benefits) for $1,120.

90 birds processed at $6.00 a bird for $540.

In total, that’s a cost of $2,753.

Over 90 surviving chickens, that’s $30.58 per chicken.

At 5 pounds each, on average, that’s $6.11 per pound. This is your break-even price on a batch of 100 meat chickens.

This doesn’t include the $200 depreciation on your coops, or your brooder once you build a permanent brooder. It doesn’t include any cushion for the inevitable times you have a heat wave at the wrong time and lose 20 percent of your flock despite staying out in the heat to spray them with cool water occasionally to try to save them, this doesn’t include losing your entire flock to a bad predator attack, or, if you can’t pick up from a local hatchery and have to mail order your chicks, having the postal service delayed by a day and losing half your chicks in delivery (most hatcheries will make this up to you, if they can, even though it’s not their fault.) This doesn’t include freezer storage for the chickens, if your customers aren’t picking up on processing day. This doesn’t include getting up in the middle of the night because it’s excessively windy or rainy and you need to go check your coops, and Heaven help you if the wind flips one of them despite your efforts in staking it down.

All other things equal, $6.11 a pound is not a break-even price for pasture-raised meat chicken. At this price you do not have a sustainable business enterprise. You won’t be making enough to maintain and invest in the business enterprise over time, which is a significant part of being “sustainable”. The only reason to do it is because of the added value you get in improving your soil fertility, which is why if you’re doing this on someone else’s land they should be paying you for your service.

What I’m saying is that you can’t charge that price, you have to charge more per pound or your farm business is going to fail. If you charge $7.50 a pound you’re making a bit less than a 25 percent gross margin (not profit), which is still stupidly low but might be enough to maintain equipment, invest in some improvements, and save up for when you have a bad season. In this case you would have a gross profit of about $125, although we haven’t factored in the cost of gas to go pick up a ton of feed and bring it back to the farm, and take the chickens to the processor and back, which is likely to be around $80 to $100 depending on how far you have to go and what gas prices are like.

Volume can help improve the picture somewhat. It won’t take all that much more physical work to raise 200 chickens than it will to raise 100, so you can allocate your labor more efficiently. However, you’ll then need to make extra capital investments; not just a larger brooder and more coops, but probably a trailer to transport that many chickens to the processor, and of course a way to get them home safely without spoiling the meat, and freezer space to store them. You’ll also need to make sure you get on your poultry processor’s calendar early, because 200 birds is going to fill up a significant portion of their day and they will need to schedule that well in advance, especially if you’re doing that multiple times in a season.

If you process on farm, you’ll save a dollar and change a pound. If the time and facilities and equipment you need to process on farm is worth less than that to you, great. Of course, if you invest in, say, what you need to process 200 birds at a time, and then you don’t sell that many, tough luck. You may have to process yourself if a suitable poultry processor isn’t available to you, but if you have a local processor then I think you really need to ask yourself what business enterprise you are engaging in. The same goes for hatching your own chicks. I’m not saying not to do it, but be very clear about the opportunity costs of significant investments in these other activities as opposed to, say, being more productive on your farm. If people want you to process your chickens on the farm, tell them to bring their own equipment and you’ll sell them a live chicken and watch them do it.

A message to people who think real pasture-raised chicken is “expensive”

Now, if you’re a consumer of chicken who has read this far, thank you. Please ask yourself: when you shop at the famous “organic” grocery store, where all the out-of-season apples are pristinely unblemished despite, supposedly, not having been sprayed with any potentially dangerous pesticides or antifungals, and you see a “free range” whole chicken being sold for, say, $5.00 pound, which includes an advertising budget, and commercial truck transport, and grocery stocking fees, and “fresh” availability year-round even when the grass the chickens are supposed to be “free ranging” on is covered in ice, and the “organic” grocery store’s markup — do you think, just maybe, that the agribusiness corporation pretending to be a small, sustainable farm business, could be, kind of…lying? Do you really think that corporate-branded chicken you see in the store was raised on decent, healthy feed in a clean, grassy field by well-treated workers, all for a cost at which that multi-facility agribusiness corporation calling itself a “family farm” can sell the bird in a high-end grocery store for $5.00 a pound and make a profit?

I am not saying the people raising these chickens are bad farmers. I can see how economies of scale could reduce the cost of raising chickens by half or more. And at the scale of tens of thousands or so chickens each year, you can of course afford to pay people to find even more efficiencies in the process. I think that these corporations are probably doing a better job than the companies (though often they’re the same) making a standard cheap CAFO chicken with its beak cut off in a cage. But they’re certainly not “sustainable” in any sense that normally implies. The idea that these are “family farms” is kind of like saying the Pritzker’s run a “family business”.

I have another blog post (click here) about how much you are being ripped off when you buy the “cheap” CAFO chickens.

I have another blog post about why eating chicken is kind of weird and, in terms of sustainability, chicken is really more of a luxury item than the way it’s treated in modern American cuisine. Not that you shouldn’t eat it…I mean…we do.

Did you know that, despite the supposed benefits of modern medicine, in correlation with everyone eating this factory-produced, factory-farmed food such as cheaply-raised Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) chickens, deaths from heart disease have increased substantially over the past 100+years? Could this be a consequence of all the unhealthily-raised food that is sold to people these days? I’ll have another blog post about that, next week.

See the difference! Chickens help grow pasture