20 Dec Sat 2008
Poultry 2008
Note: This is in response to a former student of my MATC organic class and represents about the entirety of my thoughts on organic poultry 2008. I decided to post it here as well hoping that others might gain...whatever they might gain...from our experiences. No, I'm not going to provide YOU dear reader with equipment/market - SMT
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Hi Guys! Great to hear from you!
"White lumps" -- cornish crosses, which is what you're going to get pretty much everywhere. We liked the "Freedom Rangers", which would be some kind of crossbred but not the big white lumps. They went out of business this last spring, oh, a week or so before we were to get our chicks!!! We even wrote to the Amish fellow that did a bunch of the hatching to see if we could buy chicks direct. No response.
Look around, you might be able to find some kind of slower growing different kind of chicks. They would be more expensive surely than the big white lumps.
Maybe things will have changed here this next spring. I sure hope so. We really really liked those other birds. "Label Rouge" is some kind of code for non-big white lumps and command a premium.
I doubt there will be a certified organic processor anywhere close enough to make any sense at numbers you'd do. You can however call Brian at Twin City Pack in Shopiere and ask him. He indicated he would be getting organic certification -- this year -- but I doubt that happened, and with the economy, I doubt it will happen. You can -- if it was really important to you -- get a farmer certification for his facility; that would cost you about $500. So divide that into the number of chickens you'd like to grow and find that's pretty obnoxious. Otherwise -- do what we've done and describe what you're doing, and ask Brian to process them organic -- which is to say your birds go in first in the morning before they put any chemicals in the rinse water (I think that is only difference). Unless you were going to sell your birds to a store, say, that required that organic seal, and will pay you shit for your birds then as a reward, I wouldn't bother and sell them direct to customers. We might even be able to help you with that through our customers. We can talk more about that.
Very frustrated with chicken feed prices. Peaked out at over $1000/ton. Back a couple years we thought anything over $500/ton would be too much. So for a 50lb bag -- that's $20! Yikes! Frank's is all the same for chicks & feed. Through Abendroth's & Cashton (feed). Abendroth's, you're closer to them than Frank's, you may as well go over to Waterloo and pick them up yourself rather than at Frank's. And yep, they're the big white lumps.
I don't quite know what to think about poultry. For us, at the end of the day, especially with the big white lumps that offered us NO marketing advantage over anyone elses similiarly produced big white lumps -- especially those selling "all natural" -- (but not organic feed -- that organic feed is the killer) chickens just were the least fun and most "real work" we have during a day. And the thing about chickens is more chickens = more work. They don't scale up nicely like cattle/pigs do, where, for example, you open the gate for one steer it's the same to open it up for 50. With chickens how we do them, each unit of about 90-100 chickens was one more shelter to maintain, move, feed, water. Some unit of time per shelter, like 10 minutes morning & night, x number of shelters.
Now for folks just getting into animals -- chickens are quite perfect. I would just caution you about predators. You have a barking dog? No? Get an electric fence around the base of the shelters. We have had to do that even with the barking dogs. (dogs are now old and don't go tearing out into the field. They bark from the yard and don't think anything is much afraid of that).
Egg layers -- we got some really nice 'spent hens' from over by Johnson Creek, organic even -- and they were especially nice this year, some kind of heavier crossbred we had no problems with at all. $2/each, that is a good deal for a 16mo old hen on its way to a molt. We keep them from May to December. The eggs are outstanding and are a great draw to the farm. We charged $5/dozen even and still sold out. We felt we needed that to make it worth our while -- back to that costly chicken feed. Customers to your farm really like seeing the chickens pecking around the yard. You will get tired of seeing their poop around everything and getting into places you don't want them. And pooping on it. And the constant battle of find a nest, the hens move the nest. Who's smarter? The hens are when you find some old stink bombs way back in a hole!! If you leave them run free. If you don't, it'll be one more place to clean up, and the egg quality will suffer some. Whatever small place their in will become a poop & dirt place. Not that attractive. Or fun. There are some alternatives to that too though to think about.
I sure don't want to dissuade you from poultry -- but you should look at it realistically. How will having poultry help your farm? Or will it be more work and take away from more profitable activities on your farm. That's kinda where we are. People would really like us to have chickens -- and even buy a few at the $4.50/lb we charged -- that we felt we needed to make it worth our while. It is good marketing to have a variety of things for people to buy from us. We will likely always do eggs. Maybe if the kids got interested we'd do meat birds. But we need to really pencil it through, too, and beyond the money, the time budget. Limited time, unlimited demands on it. What spending of time does the farm the most amount of good.
If you were still interested in meat birds, I may have more help for you in form of equipment, feed ideas & even market for some birds. We just can't do everything ourselves!!!
Resources --
"Success with Baby Chicks" by Robert Plamondon. Also look for his newsletter. Although that has been really infrequent and rather downbeat for some time now. I think he's pretty much had it with poultry.
My favorite little guide -- is "The Poultryman's Handbook" -- from about 1912. It's a book that would fit in your shirtpocket that I got somewhere by accident in a bunch of books. I like that era of advice on things. Pre-industrial focus.
"Pastured Poultry Profits" by Joel Salatin is the classic, it will fire you up all the way around.
"Feeding Poultry The classic Guide to Poultry Nutrition" G.F.Heuser. That would be the equivilent of the Poultryman's handbook
And APPA -- American Pastured Poultry Association -- joining them, their newsletters are great, and they've got a good book called "Raising Poultry on pasture: 10 years of success", which is reprints of articles put together in a book.
I have all of these I would gladly loan you. I just need to make sure I get them all back. I have a bad track record of getting my loaned books back!!! (mainly because I forget I loan them out)
All the best, and I'm really proud of you getting your organic certification. Stick with it, we'll change the world yet!!!
SMT
Scott&JulieTraut
05:56 AM CST
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