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.  

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.

100 years of medical science and a modern diet

According to U.S. CDC Data in 1998 the leading cause of death in the United States was heart disease, at 31 percent of all cause mortality. (The next leading cause was cancerous tumors.)

In 1900, 7.9 percent of all cause mortality was heart disease.

The leading cause of death in 1900 was pneumonia and influenza. (It’s difficult to tell these two apart as a cause of death. In fact, many respiratory ailments present with similar symptoms, such that without a lot of work it’s difficult to isolate cause of death to one specific respiratory disease. Of course, if you have a test that will ensure you diagnose one particular ailment and you receive extra funding for treating patients with that particular ailment, you may find that almost all your respiratory patients serendipitously happen to become diagnosed with that particular ailment.) That percentage of all cause mortality was 11.7 percent. Curiously, after 98 years of medical science pursuing relief from this age-old harbinger of finality, pneumonia and influenza are still in the top 10 causes of death in the U.S., at 3.9 percent. (Suicide is in the top 10 in 1998. Suicide joins the top 10 causes of mortality in 1975. It wasn’t in the top 10 all through the Great Depression. Isn’t all the ease and convenience of modern life supposed to be making people…happier?)

I don’t know the specifics of how the bigjobs of medical science ran their profession in 1900. I assume there were various unsavory practices such as vivisection, along with administering experimental pharmaceutical therapies to populations without adequately informing them of the risks — something that is, thankfully, now illegal and thus never happens. (If it did happen, of course, those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice.) Quite possibly there were a number of shady businessmen back then selling ineffective quack cures just to make a dirty dollar. Today, of course, we are assured that the modern medical pharmaceutical industry is impeccably regulated and basically exists only to serve the greater good.

Still, looking at those numbers objectively, it appears that 98 years of pharmaceutical and medical industriousness managed to decrease deaths (as a portion of total) from pneumonia-influenza by two thirds, while at the same time almost quadrupling deaths from heart disease. I am not a doctor, but I think that is not a track record to be proud of. Succumbing to a respiratory ailment is always going to involve some amount of bad luck, but if the causes of heart disease are, as medical science suggest, internal, it should be easy to regulate. That’s probably why ads for the American Heart Association don’t tout the increase in percent of deaths from heart disease in every year their Association has been associating. It appears that if you simply ate and exercised like Americans did in 1900 and ignored medical advice about diet and pharmacology — including all that stuff about the health benefits of smoking tobacco or how you could supposedly take a synthetic opioid and really, totally, absolutely, cross-your-heart never get addicted — you might be healthier than otherwise. Presumably, of course, if anyone were to buy medical journals and pay doctors to completely accidentally and totally not on purpose fail to tell the truth about something like that, then those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice.

To give the bonesaws their just praise, however, deaths from non-motor vehicle accidents have also decreased more than 2/3. So if you happen to get your shirtsleeve caught in the tablesaw you really, really want to be going to a modern hospital. Though of course the real heroes are the sanitation engineers. Almost nobody dies from diarrhea these days and it was a huge cause of death in 1900.

Lest you think that it’s just all the carbs Americans eat these days that are causing heart disease, consumption of carbohydrates went down during the 20th century and fat consumption increased. Saturated fat consumption stayed about the same; what increased was consumption of things like linoleic acid, which, prior to the temporary discovery by the medical industry that these were healthy, had previously been useful in manufacturing items such as paint. Indeed, over the past 100 years or so Americans shifted from eating a lot of farm-raised pork and milk fat along with a moderate amount of beef fat from lean, grass-fed beef, to eating less pork fat, less milk fat, fattier grain-fed beef, and much more hydrogenated vegetable oils. Crude fiber intake also decreased by about a third. It would be very interesting to see nutrition profiles of common foods grown using 1900s soil and farming practices compared with present-day, but that’s likely impossible. It seems a reasonable hypothesis to assume that if the only thing you add to soil is a modern industrial N-P-K fertilizer, various trace nutrients which might have once been present in food grown therein, which are added through natural fertilizers such as animal manure, are not going to be present in anything like their original scale. Again, over the same period of dietary progress, deaths from heart disease quadrupled as a portion of all cause mortality. (Actual heart-attacks have increased more than that, of course, but modern science is relatively good at keeping a patient alive and on drugs until some future, second heart attack causes death.)

The typical middle-class American family in 1900 had a small garden. They bought fresh, natural food from local farmers or grocers, canned or preserved it themselves, and cooked at home. The lack of modern labor-saving devices like dishwashers and washing machines meant that the family of 1900 did not have the copious free time every working middle class couple with children presumably enjoys today. Instead of the soul-affirming technological achievement of the family separately watching separate entertainments on separate screens, a family might have been forced to spend a day off together, picking cucumbers from the garden and pickling them while taking turns reading a storybook out loud. The reader will likely have some understanding of what the typical middle class family of today eats and how they spend their time.

Then again, the food that Americans ate in 1900 was really expensive. Households spent 43 percent of income on food. Housing was 23 percent and clothing was the next most expensive item of a household budget. These days American households spend closer to 10 percent of the budget on food. Cheaper materials and labor-saving technologies (along with low-cost, some would say criminally exploited, immigrant construction labor) have, however, somehow coincided with a 40 percent increase in housing costs. The other big ticket item Americans spend money on today is transportation. In 1900 one would typically work at home or close to home, shop locally, supplement with a home garden, and cook and eat at home. A shopping trip would be an all-day affair perhaps involving a visit to friends and family along the way. In these more progressive modern times most Americans have the luxury of driving an automobile to work, driving an automobile to a takeout chain for lunch, driving an automobile to a store, and purchasing food grown by strangers a thousand miles away or more.

Food was different, as well. In 1900, a chicken dinner would be a cockerel which had been foraging in the field on a varied diet, stewed to improve tenderness in a homemade stock made from its bones. Today, a large number of Americans don’t have a clue how to roast a chicken, but if they do it’s a genetic hybrid specially bred to grow in a third of the time of the 1900 chicken while sitting in a small cage and eating a diet engineered to pack on as much meat as possible in that short time at the lowest possible cost, plus a vitamin powder reasonably sufficient to prevent the chicken from dying prematurely.

At least most people don’t die from measles these days. In 1900 without a measles vaccine, 7,575 patients died from measles, 0.009 percent of the population. Today, due to the assistance of the $1.3 trillion U.S. biopharmaceutical industry, we can be assured that something less than 0.009 percent of Americans die from the measles. Lest someone scoff at such a tiny number, this really is a big deal: measles mostly affects young children, and that pre-vaccine measles death number is more than three times all the deaths in the 5-9 age group in 2019. Is that reduction the result of the vaccine or, say, better sanitation? We may never know.

Looking again at all cause mortality, now sorted by age, almost all deaths from heart disease occur after the age of 65. It might be interesting to know how soon after the age of 65 these numbers pick up, but the CDC, which is staffed by pharmaceutical industry insiders who presumably went into government service because they care deeply about the health and well-being of each individual citizen, tracks data in discrete cohorts right up to retirement age and then lumps those of retirement age who are no longer paying payroll taxes into one big catch-all category. Furthermore, as with most respiratory ailments, deadly influenza or pneumonia almost exclusively affects those well over 65 years in age. So perhaps the choice is between falling asleep due to pneumonia-induced low blood oxygen and passing away peacefully in old age at home after a final tearful but meaningful visit from your children and grandchildren, or having an extremely painful myocardial infarction, being rushed to the hospital where you are stripped naked, tubes are shoved into you and your chest cavity is cracked open before time of death is determined and your surviving family members are presented with the bill. Either way, for those who make it to 65 the average life expectancy is around 85 total years these days, which is around 5 years more of being in and out of hospitals and eventually confined to an assisted facility than it was 80 years ago, where you might have to spend your final years spoiling your grandchildren.

This all applies only to the United States. If you live, today, in say, sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps most of your most arable land is now devoted to producing cash crops for the global market on behalf of global corporations which are totally, absolutely, one hundred percent not imperialistic looting operations (just look at the “Commitment to Diversity” statement in their Annual Report to Shareholders), and you might have the opportunity to roll the dice by having your children injected with a vaccine known to correlate with a higher rate of mortality than it prevents. Of course, drug dealers would like us all to know (sorry, I mean public interest-oriented pharmaceutical companies and billionaire philanthropists whose selfless philanthropy has somehow preserved and increased their billions) they ship such therapies overseas in mass quantities because of their philanthropic focus, and not because of a potential $5 billion market or the prospect of reducing labor costs by shifting production overseas at the “local prevailing wage”.

But hey, I mean, “safe and effective”, right?

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

TIL: CSA History

The following is a copy of an article originally published in 1995 in In Context #42, “A Good Harvest”, copyright 1995 by Context Institute. Here is a link to their web version. I am reposting the text here because things have a way of getting lost on the Internet, and at least some search engines appear to no longer even connect to the original version. Though I have worked for several CSAs and now run a CSA I had never heard of this work until now. The following is a copy of the text at the above original link. I will of course remove it if the copyright owners ask.

The author, Robyn Van En, is credited with creating the first CSA in the United States, at Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts.

Eating for Your Community

A report from the founder of community supported agriculture

By Robyn Van En

One of the articles in A Good Harvest (IC#42)
Originally published in Fall 1995 on page 29
Copyright (c)1995, 1997 by Context Institute

The origin of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) concept, the partnership between consumers and farmers, can be traced to Japan in the mid-1960s. Homemakers began noticing an increase in imported foods, the consistent loss of farmland to development, and the migration of farmers to the cities.

In 1965, a group of women approached a local farm family with an idea to address these issues and provide their families with fresh fruits and vegetables. The farmers agreed to provide produce if multiple families made a commitment to support the farm. A contract was drawn and the "teikei" concept was born, which translated literally means partnership, but philosophically means "food with the farmer’s face on it." Clubs operating under the teikei concept in Japan today serve thousands of people sharing the harvest of hundreds of farmers.

The First CSA

This innovative idea did not come to the US until the mid-1980s. At that time, I was in my second season as owner of Indian Line Farm. Many small farmers across the country were struggling with the financial realities of market gardening. Several of us, with the CSA concept at the tip of our thinking, had no real model to crystallize the thought. "Subscription farming" – paying on a weekly/monthly basis – existed and experienced significant support and proliferation through Booker T. Whatley’s book, How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres (Rodale, 1987). However, it did not address limited financial resources at the beginning of the growing season or the question of community support.

Then, in summer of 1985, Jan Van Tuin came to Indian Line Farm fresh with the experience of helping organize a Swiss version of the Japanese Teikei clubs. He and I talked briefly and decided that the Swiss experience was perfect to apply at Indian Line Farm. We attracted a core group of organizers and after many long discussions, dubbed the proposed endeavor "Community Supported Agriculture," and introduced the concept to the Great Barrington community that Fall. We offered shares of some of the local apple harvest, and members received storage apples and jugs of cider each week. Most of the families from the apple project bought shares in the vegetable harvest for the following season.

Today, there are at least 500 active examples of this original US initiative throughout North America. Each year, the number of CSA farms and participating members increases dramatically. Though there are variations on the basic theme, most successful CSA projects begin with a central group of consumers and producers who draw up a budget which reflects yearly production costs.

The budget includes all salaries of the farmer/gardener, distribution and administration costs, plus costs of seeds, soil amendments, small equipment, etc. The resulting figure is divided by the number of shares that the farm/garden site can produce for; this determines the costs of a "share" of the harvest. A share is designed to feed 2-4 people with a mixed diet or 1-2 vegetarians by providing all of their vegetable needs for one week. Larger households and restaurants buy multiple shares. The consumer group of sharers agree to pay their share of production costs and also share the financial risk with the producers. In return, the sharers receive a bag of local, same-day-fresh, typically organic vegetables and herbs once a week all summer, and once a month all winter (East of the Rockies), if a root cellar or cold storage unit is available. Projects typically provide at least 40 different crops, and Indian Line Farm was able to feed 300 people 43 weeks of the year from five acres of land.

Incentive to Farm

We are still in the pioneer stage of introducing and adapting CSA to North America – home to the cheapest food in the world. Few CSA farmers are turning a profit, but they are covering all or most of their production costs, including a guaranteed salary. As our video states, "It’s not just about vegetables;" most CSA growers are in it for the long haul. The evolving community relationship of CSA actually gives incentive and means to continue farming or to enter the field (no pun intended), with the highest standard of land stewardship practices.

The CSA system also gives farmers financial credibility; I know that the CSA guaranteed income helped me get my farm mortgage. When lenders see that people are willing to take this risk with farmers, they begin to take more risks and try alternatives.

The annual commitment and relationship with the members also affects our ability to cope with unexpected setbacks. After a rainstorm dumped eight inches of rain in three hours, the winter baking squash had to be picked prematurely. Everybody froze, dried, and ate as much as they could, but it was basically a $35 loss to each share. That would have been a $3500 loss to an individual farmer.

People usually join a CSA project for fresh, ripe, and local foods (most store-bought vegetables are picked green and ripen in transit to the store shelf). With access to a farm, many are dazzled by the bounty and wonders of nature. I love to see grown people awed by the delicate beauty of a carrot seedling. People start eating vegetables they never liked before because they had never tasted them vine-ripened and chemical-free.

CSA members are supporting a regional food system, securing the agricultural integrity of their region, and participating in a community-building experience by getting to know their neighbors and who grows their food.

CSA also helps bridge socio-economic gaps. Intelligence and knowing you like good, fresh food has nothing to do with money, status, or where you live. Members range from people who use food stamps to those who pay extra to have their vegetables delivered. Together they guarantee that local farmers survive and ensure that their children and grandchildren can eat from the same farm.

Community Supported Auto Mechanics

Because the CSA concept is about building community, the logical evolution is to community support of almost any cottage industry. Members would pay for a tune-up and oil change at the beginning of the year. This "cash advance" allows the mechanic to pay for the new lift they otherwise wouldn’t have money to buy. This kind of community trust-building takes relationships to a whole new level. That’s why agribusinesses will not be able to co-opt the CSA concept. They just can’t put the heartbeat into it.

One of the most exciting outgrowths of the CSA movement has been the formation of CSA coalitions – where farmers get together to share growing techniques, crops, and equipment. Because of their guaranteed incomes, CSA farmers are immune to the "bigger is better," "mine is better" syndrome and are instead focused on finding new ways to cooperate with their neighbors and with Mother Nature.

CSA is also a vehicle for transition away from using chemical fertilizers. The opportunity for education and dialogue CSA creates between food producers and food eaters creates options toward low/no chemical input. Money out-front allows farmers to do the best job they can by the way of the land, the customer, and themselves.

As we go full circle, I have had the pleasure of co-hosting a group of Japanese teikei organizers and of networking with Swiss visitors, sharing with them information on CSA projects in their own countries. I routinely get requests for my publication, A Basic Formula to Create Community Supported Agriculture, from some 25 other countries around the world. Same solutions, one world.

Robyn Van En, co-founded CSA in the US in 1985. She is the director of CSA North America. For CSA contacts, please refer to the Resource section in this issue.

Day-Range (Free Range) Broiler Chickens [edited: updates]

Due to a series of losses to predation despite our best efforts using the old pastured-poultry style system, we have made the switch to a free range system in which the chickens are fed outside the coops and go outside to forage during the day, and are locked safely inside the coops at night. While we expect to lose some birds to hawks and other daytime predators while the birds are outside, they at least have a chance of running away. The chief problem with having the chickens inside the coops was that if a predator manages to get inside then the chickens have nowhere to run. In addition, there is a built-in security flaw in the mobile coops, because they cannot have a floors in them which would prevent the chickens from foraging. In our system and with our topography it was not possible to keep predators from tunneling under the walls of the coop and getting inside.

In our day-range system the coops are now entirely covered in half-inch hardware cloth, including floors. [Covered floors proved too difficult to move through the grass, so we took them out and switched to running an electric strand around the base of the coop at night.] However, since the chickens are only kept inside the coops at night when they are asleep, it doesn’t matter that they can’t forage through the floor. [Still true, but we removed the floors for other reasons.] They go outside all day and forage in a much larger area which is protected by a temporary electric fence perimeter. We still move the coops regularly to spread out the manure deposit and to give the chickens access to new ground and we move the entire ensemble including the electric perimeter every week or two. So-called “free range” systems which do not move the chickens end up destroying all the available forage in the area. We make sure to move ours so that doesn’t happen.

For the farmer, managing this system takes about as much time as a standard pastured-poultry system in which broilers are kept inside mobile coops which are moved daily or more. In our day-range system each move takes more time and effort. The mobile coops are now heavier, must be moved farther, outdoor feeders and waterers must also be moved, and periodically the electric perimeter fence must be moved as well. However because the chickens are able to free range, when they are younger and don’t eat as much we can move them every few days instead of daily, so on average it is the same amount of time per day. Also, when using the old system we were spending a significant amount of extra time attempting to keep predators from tunneling under the coops — ultimately without success.

For now, this free range / day range system seems to be working well. We’ll provide an update after we have seen it in action for another season.