Chicken experiment #1: Day 14

How time flies. I had higher-than-expected shipping mortality; lost 30 chicks of the 300, about 10%. Post office didn't deliver them the day they arrived, waited until the next day, and a day with no heat is pretty tough on chicks.

So I waited an extra week to start weighing the chicks and their feed. Here's the starting point. Note that the cornish cross are twice to three times as heavy as the heritage breed chicks. I suspect they've also eaten twice to three times the amount of feed, but I can't tell for sure.

I've fed 175lbs of food so far to the 290 chicks in this batch; about 8 ounces to each chick, on average.

From here on I'll weigh each chick each week and also the food given to each group of chicks and post it each week on Tuesday.

Pictures of one of each of the chicks and their weights below.


speckled sussex? 10 chicks, weight after 2 weeks: 3.5, 3.25, 3.75, 4.25 4.5, 3.25, 4.25, 3.75, 4.5, 3.75



Rhode island red? 10 chicks, weight after 2 weeks: 4.25, 4, 3.75, 3.75, 4.25, 4.75, 5.5, 4.75, 4, 3.75



barred rock? 10 chicks, weight at 2 weeks: 3.75, 4,3,3.25, 3.5, 3.5, 3.25, 3.5, 2.75, 3.5



I believe these to be "light brahmas". They have feathered feet. 10 chickens, weight after 2 weeks (ounces) 4, 4, 3.5, 4.5, 4.75, 4, 4, 4.75, 4.25, 4.25



Cornish Cross: 10 chickens. Weight after 2 weeks (ounces) 11.25, 9.25, 11, 12.25, 9.75, 8.5, 9.25, 12.5, 11.25, 10.25

Cornish cross vs Buff orpington at 5 weeks

At 5 weeks of age:

This is a cornish cross chick on the right, and a buff orpington chick on the left. They're exactly the same age. At this point the cornish cross weighs about 3x what the buff orpington does.

at 2 weeks of age:

My guess is that the cornish cross eats about the same amount of feed per pound of chicken produced as the heritage breed does, but that it does it in a shorter amount of time. At this point we're on feed restriction for the cornish cross.

Feed restriction prevents the cornish from eating themselves to death. If given all of the food that they want they'll completely stuff themselves and die, probably of flip.

Flip isn't a problem with heritage breeds who grow much more slowly and seem to regulate their feed intake better than the cornish cross. For me this is one big advantage with the heritage breeds. You put them out on pasture, make sure they have food and water, and walk away. They'll happily grow and forage without any work on your part for the next 6 months.

The cornish aren't nearly that self-sufficient. Part of the reason that people raise them in pens that you move is that it's easier than cleaning a coop of manure, and it encourages the cornish cross to forage. Otherwise they'd pretty much stay glued to their feeders.

"free range"
There are various huge chicken producers that produce "free range" chickens. It would be more accurate to say they're "barn raised". One producer simply cut doors into the side of their broiler barns and during the last 2 weeks of the chickens life opened the door. Of course, since chickens are territorial, and broilers in particular want to stay close to the food and water, it's not unusual to find that not one chicken ever goes outside. In a rather cynical move, some of the producers have little lawns they maintain between the barns so that they can claim to be "pasturing" the chickens. None of the chickens actually get on the grass, but theoretically they could.

For my chickens they're out there on the ground, pecking and scratching and doing what chickens are meant to do.

Chicken economics - cornish cross

Cornish cross chickens are the standard meat chicken for the American market. Joe Salatin uses them exclusively in his pastured poultry operation, and most of the small farmers use them as well. All of the pictures for this entry are chicks that are IDENTICAL in age, and they're used to illustrate the amazing growth of these chicks. The chick on the left is a heritage breed chicken, the buff orpington. The one on the right is the cornish cross.
The cornish cross goes from hatch to slaughter weight in 6 to 8 weeks. From a farmers point of view that's a very quick crop. Because the grow-out time is so short, the labor costs are less, as well.

Here's the breakdown for 100 cornish cross:
equipment for 100 chicks:
4 30 gallon rubbermaid tubs and metal shelving (to keep the chicks in the tubs)
$80.
4 heat lamps,
$52. 4 heat bulbs,
$32 4 feeders,
4 1 gallon waterers, $35

This equipment lasts for at least 2 years, and during the year will be used to raise 6 batches of chicks. Notice -- more batches of chicks per year. So I'll assign 1/12th the cost of the equipment to this particular batch, or $16.10. If you were to raise fewer batches you'd be assigning a higher fraction.

Labor I calculate the labor as if I were paying someone minimum wage + all of the associated overhead taxes (medicare, social security, unemployment insurance, bookeeping, which adds about 40% to the base wage). I can't imagine getting someone to work for me for less than an hour a day, so figure labor at $7/day, or $50 a week. Over the course of the 8 weeks to brood out this batch, that's $400. More labor for cornish cross because they require more bin cleaning because of the large food intake.

Mortality Figure 15% mortality. That's pessimistic, but pessimists are only pleasantly surprised. Consumables :
Purchase price of chicks + shipping: $1.57/each
300lbs chick starter, 2100bs lbs of chick grower, $330. Yes, they will eat more than a ton of food.
(calculated as 100 chickens * 6lbs per chicken * 4lbs of feed per pound of chicken produced)

Wood chips/sawdust, $70 - we use free chips from tree service companies, but if we had to buy sawdust or chips, that's what it would cost in bulk.

Total cost to produce 85 chicks: $957, or $11.25 a chicken.

That's cost -- with any business you need to make a profit for when you lose a batch of chickens to a weasel, or your shelter blows away, or any of a number of other bad things.

So if you retail these chickens at $4/lb dressed, and they dress out at 4.5lbs, this gives you a gross sale amount of $18.00. Out of the $6.75 gross profit you'll subtract whatever you need to for processing costs. I figure that one person at minimum wage will clean 5 chickens an hour, and that adds up to a processing cost of $3 per bird, giving you a net profit of $3/bird. So a batch of 85 birds will net you $240 every other month. I've ignored marketing costs and the cost of whatever processing equipment you'll need.

I think that $4/lb is a little low. $4.50 a pound would give you a net of $5.25, which seems more reasonable. The problem is that many folks out there are selling birds for less than that. Usually these folks last a year or two, but there's always enough of them that you'll have lower-than-your-cost every year. $5/lb gives you a little more cushion. Maybe you give your minimum wage guy a $1/hour pay raise.

Buff orpington and cornish cross at 10 days of age

You'll find a similar breakdown of the costs of raising heritage birds here.

chick update

The chicks are growing and pecking and chirping. You can sure tell the difference between the cornish cross and the heritage breed chicks.

These are buff orpington chicks. They're starting to get wing feathers (look at the tips of the wings for a difference in texture) and weigh about half what...

...these cornish cross chicks do. They're growing fast enough that it looks like they're half-bald, but that's just because the feathers don't grow near as fast as their body does. They start out with as many feathers as the other birds, but the speed of growth makes them look like they're half-bald. You'll see more of this later.

Here's a bin of white leghorns and buff orpingtons. When i take a picture like this it looks like the chicks are stacked in on top of each other. There's actually plenty of room -- they just like to be in a group. The other end of the bin is empty

The white leghorns are my favorite chicken. They're flighty and excitable, but you can see the wheels turning in their little heads. Here, a white leghorn chick checks me out. I believe that the white leghorns are the smartest chickens.
I know that they're the most likely to find any hole in their pen, the first to figure out where the food is, and they do excellently at pasture. They are aggressive foragers and they cannot be beaten for egg laying.

Chicks require heat and protection for the first 4 to 6 weeks of their life, until their feathers grow out. I've found that these tubs make changing the litter under the birds easier and allow us to deal with different bird sizes. Bigger chickens or turkeys will monopolize the food and water and pick on the younger birds, so we keep them strictly segregated by age to make sure that we raise a consistent batch of healthy chicks.

Seasonal chickens

Year-round chicken is a relatively new invention. 60 years or more ago you'd see chicken, but mostly as a seasonal meat in the summer and fall.

Seasonal Chicken
This seasonal pattern was due to how the hens produce eggs. In the spring and early summer a heritage breed hen lays best. These excess spring eggs were retained by the farms and hatched, producing next years laying hens, and about an equal number of roosters. The roosters and surplus hens would be sold when they'd grown big enough to eat, and the cycle would begin again.


Year 'round chicken
You can get chicken year-round today because chickens are typically raised in huge barns that are temperature controlled and managed very efficiently. Well, efficiently in terms of cost, but the experience of the animal isn't particularly enriched.


Got a call today...
This post is inspired by a call I received today asking if I sold chickens, and during the course of the conversation she explained that she just couldn't eat the factory chickens any more, and had made that transition for ethical reasons. I completely understood what she was saying -- that's why I started my farm, and why I raise the type of chickens I do.

The chickens I raise for laying hens, and to eat
I raise both Cornish cross chickens (the type of chicken you're used to seeing in the grocery store) and heritage breed chickens. I hatch eggs from my own breeding flocks of chickens and turkeys, and I purchase day-old chickens from a variety of hatcheries. I purchase chicks from time to time to increase the genetic diversity of my flocks or from customer demand.

I raise both heritage and Cornish cross because I get asked for both. Both are treated identically and both go out on pasture, on grass and get fed a non-medicated feed to make sure that there's no antibiotics or other drugs.

Cornish cross
These chickens are basically bred to be eating machines. They convert the least amount of feed into the most meat, and in terms of efficiency they cannot be beaten. The cross breeding of Cornish chickens and white rock chickens has produced a chick that takes 8 weeks to mature, from hatch to slaughter. In terms of husbandry they're actually more work to produce than heritage breeds. The basic issue is that if you give them all the food they want they'll eat themselves to death. So you end up having to carefully restrict their food intake every day towards the end of their time here so that you don't lose too many. Since they're butchered so young you don't see the foot and leg problems, but they're there if you keep them longer than a couple of months. Since these chickens are so centered on food you have to move their pens to make sure that they eat as much grass and forage as possible. Otherwise these are the chickens that you'll find asleep in the food dish, waiting for the next food delivery. They are actually pretty friendly, goofy birds.

Heritage breeds
I've been raising batches of black australorp roosters as my primary meat bird, mostly because asian customers are reluctant to purchase white birds -- they'd much prefer red or black -- and because the mexican customers don't want a bird that looks like the "safeway" birds -- they want a bird that is longer and narrower than the birds you see in safeway. As far as husbandry, I'll raise a batch of a couple of hundred and keep them in mobile pens on grass. They do pretty well; and don't eat themselves to death, so they're easier to care for, for me, at least. I fill their feeder and check the waterer and walk away for a day or two. The drawback to these birds is that they take longer to mature -- instead of 8 weeks, we're talking 18-20 weeks. And the shape of the body puts off some Americans because most everyone now believes that a chicken should be shaped like a Cornish cross. It's very similar to the situation that you run across when you try to convince people that white eggs can be just as natural as brown eggs. The consumer has been taught that organic eggs are brown, and that's that.

Taste differences
You can raise a Cornish cross to taste about the same as a safeway bird by duplicating the environment they're typically raised in. Get yourself a small box, stuff a couple of chickens in there, and feed them a soybean meal until they're big enough to eat. No exercise, no variation in diet, and in close contact to their own manure.

When I raise a Cornish cross it lives its first weeks under heat lamps and on sawdust, and then goes out to a mobile pen on grass. The pen is moved every day or two, and the bird is given the opportunity to eat grass and bugs and scratch the ground and do all the things that birds like to do. It's also exposed to the weather -- they see sunshine and rain, and can chose where they spend their time. Most choose to roam around their pen and enjoy hunting for chicken treats. Nothing more fun to watch than a couple of birds fighting over a grasshopper.

Even though the pastured bird and the safeway bird are the same breed, and in some cases might even have come from the same breeding flock, my experience has been that the pastured birds have less fat, better color and a meat taste and texture that's superior. But if you're curious, try this experiment: Cook a safeway bird and a pastured Cornish cross in the same oven for the same time, and do a taste test. Once you've had a pastured bird you realize what you've been missing. What was there once.

Heritage bird taste
The heritage birds are much older -- nearly 3 times the age of Cornish crosses -- and have spent that time foraging and eating and so on. so their meat is firmer, and has a deeper taste than the pastured Cornish cross. For the younger roosters and hens they cannot be beaten as a pan-fried or roasted bird. Fried heritage chicken is a real treat. My favorite recipe for the slightly older birds is Coq Au Vin, a traditional french recipe developed to eat the older roosters that are a little tougher than a young, tender bird.

Bird cost
Here's the hard part. I'm interested in making good, natural food available for a price that makes it accessible for most people. We've all seen great food that is priced so that few people can enjoy it. But on the other hand, I need to make a fair profit so that I'll be around next year, and the year after, to produce more birds. For the Cornish cross birds, oven ready (that is, plucked, head and entrails removed) I charge $3/lb. For the heritage birds, that take so much longer to produce, I charge $4/lb.

Lower cost birds
But if you're interested in a lower cost bird, I'll sell birds live at the farm gate for $18 for a rooster, or $22 for a laying hen. If you're not sure what to do, I offer classes two or three times a year on how to process your own chickens or turkeys.