Questioning my sanity on raising meat chickens.

Mealworms are also a good addition thats easy to raise.

As for eating storebought chicken
Theres a reason I get mine from small local farmers and it aint the price

 

I have found that the $0.99/lb chicken is tough and not good. This week Safeway has chicken breasts on sale for $1.87. I know if I buy them, they will have to be slow cooked, usually the crockpot can make them edible. I would keep raising chickens if I was you. Yes, they are work but the health benefits you are receiving from eating good poultry will pay off.

 

There's another good reason for raising your own chickens. It's a great way to teach kids (or grandkids) about ethics, responsibility, and self-sufficiency. A kid gains immensely by knowing that he (or she) can make food happen--and make a valuable contribution to their family.

It builds confidence and strengthens the self-image. And teaches good habits that can last a lifetime.

As for feeding "backlyard flocks", black soldier flies are great--and so is that gag where you suck insects onto a fan covered with window screen at night, and then feed the bug jerky to the chickens in the morning.

Give them a compost pile to excavate, and they'll dine divine on worms and mushroom "roots" (hyphae), while contributing to the compost.

 

We do a mix of buying and killing our own. If you can find chicken breast on sale buy a bunch and fill up the freezer. We raise white rock chickens because the roosters dress out well and the hens lay well. We bought some of those hybrid chickens one time that grow super fast and it was too much pressure for me to get them all slaughtered at the proper time with everything else I have going. My wife was convinced that if we let them grow too much they would explode and she would not let it go, I think she read it on the internet somewhere.

I do the same thing with firewood, beef, etc. If you find a good deal jump on it and apply the energy you would have used to produce it to another good cause.

 

I kind of figure if the SHTF, not having cattle, that corn I have for the chickens might be in as much demand for corn meal, etc as the chickens and eggs. I plan on cutting down the flock for food, to make the stored food last longer, and to eat some of the chicken feed myself. I have raised a little Bloody Butcher corn and am afraid that all of it would be kept for seed, so I hope to feed my chickens, extend my prep food and use some of the hybrid for charity food.

 

I know of a few letter boxes blown up with carbide bombs...but never chickens.

 

I hear ya. That's why we add our secret ingredients to the corn we buy. We've been fine tuning it for several years now. We are getting close to the best organic feed we can, for our flock.

Here is a video of me feeding some of our chickens, Black Soldier Fly Larvae:

 

I had almost zero feed into the chickens they rotated pastures with the hogs. I ran 1500 per time and usually ended up with 1200-1250 that survived, pigs had a chicken dinner here and there What I saved in money I gave up in time, it took 12-13 weeks to finish a flock at a average dressed weight of 6 pounds. I also maintained two parent flocks to breed my own cornishX, while not as fast growing as the hatchery Xs still a decent and respectable pair of lines. My total cost per bird worked out to $6 Rounded up from ($5.93 included equipment cost, hired help for processing, feed and freezer electric) average sale price per bird $18 which made for $12 profit per bird. Chickens made a pretty good chunk of my annual income. Switching to the Food Truck and commercial kitchen and only producing for it, made for a lot less work and basically the same money earned per year, with about 1/3 of the work. Since I got sick I had not even been out to look at the hogs and chickens on pasture until 3 weeks ago. If my count is right there 120-130 new piglets running around, the hogs are fat and happy and the chickens are closer in size to Turkeys......... Missed that processing by a long shot that is 3 months without a dimes worth of grain going out there. The biggest problem is that people that try to do this for a living, run it like a hobby instead of a business and quite often get in trouble with the IRS for deducting the hobby as a business. Lose money 5 out of 5 years and the Auditor will come knocking. Second problem is folks have no idea the sheer amount of work operating a profitable small farm is, profitable enough that you can earn a better than average living that is. 3rd problem is they buy NEW everything and have a big mortgage to go along with the other 75 financed things. There are actually very few of us that consistently run well into the black and can live comfortably with what our small farms generate in revenue. Most start ups fail within the first 2 years by 5 years there are 2% left standing and by 10 years it is way less than 1%. I have been doing this since I was 10 years old giving me four decades worth of experience in the small market farming gig, and the Thunder 5 Ranch Turned 20 years old last July 8th. I have seen just about every way to screw up and fail that there is and made more than a few mistakes along the way, some really bad mistakes But I never bet more than I could afford to lose and never played the debt game beyond a gas card and tire acct. Which is real handy when you blow 3 trailer tires and only have two spares!

The smaller scale typically the higher the cost to produce per animal or bird. Also pasture comes heavily into play, tossing them out on a field of weeds will have very poor results. Tossing them out on a multi mixture pasture will yield great results. 40 acres of alfalfa, clover, red top, fescu, winter radish and turnips and some milo and sunflower seeded in strips was my preferred pasture and still is. I am just down to 80 hogs per year and 500 chickens. Obviously you can't run that many animals on a 5 acre homestead type operation, not knocking smaller operations as they are great for self reliant living and can produce an abundance of food if well managed.

Is it worth it to produce at hobby farm or very small scale......... Yep what I produce for my own family is totally separate from what I produce for the customers. And raised pretty much the same only my personal stuff has a different pasture make up and spends far more time in the woods. The cost of my personal stuff runs about 18%-22% more per animal than my commercial inspected stuff. Where you lose is the time investment if you are strictly looking at dollars and cents. If you look at it as a investment of time then it doesnt make sense. If you look at it as doing something you enjoy and providing better for your own it does make sense. Same with the capital investment, are you spending money to work or are you spending money on something you enjoy that gives something back in return? Personally I can't stand that flavorless pork and poultry that is mass produced and sold in the stores. SO for me it is very much worth the time and money spent with my personal livestock and poultry.

 

Thank you Thunder5Ranch for that information. In my lifetime I have seen most small farms vanish. You can not compete with the large farms on price, if you attempt to by buying more land and all modern inputs, you will most likely go broke. You can still however do OK in a lot of places growing it for yourself, quality and continued availability, or in some form of niche farming. Community agriculture is doing fairly well as well as organic produce marketed locally in our area. The chicken farms, dairy cows, apple orchards, most truck gardens, pig , sheep, beef, meat operations are all gone. Last data I saw indicated that New Hampshire, a rural state, imported about 96 or so percent of all the food we eat and are down to less than 100 dairy farms for the whole state. Most people seem to continue to expand the scale of their operations using more and more credit until they run into some problem, health, weather, insects, disease, etc, and than lose everything.