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Mid MO | There's no secret, more youth than sense!
Average 10 batches of 300 birds per year. 3 or 4 hoop style portable buildings.one brooder house with a hover, 8×12. Brood 3-4 weeks then out to pasture. Move daily. Livestock guard dog. Custom mix all feed and fed with buckets out of an old heider. Extreme heat when they're big or cold when they're little is a major concern.
Turkeys start end of June butcher week of Thanksgiving. Starter 8 wks, then grower, finisher about Oct 1. Out to range at 8 wks in intermediate houses. Oct 1 in the super coop with wooden hog feeders until.glory day. Straight run hens 18-22 pounds. Small poults have a will to die. Invariably I'd end up sleeping in the brooder house because there would always be a wicked thunderstorm when they were brooding.
Individual sales, specialty grocery stores, and restaurants. The little old ladies who can cut up a chicken are dying off. Home cooks now adays.cook for.one meal they don't know what to do with mix matched pieces and aren't cooking quantity. Some restaurants pay quickly others poke around. I'm not much of a salesman.
This was all on a worn out rented farm. I'd run out there after working a.10 at the local drinking water plant. I was able to completely rehabilitate the land and make it productive enough to run sheep as well. It was all blackberries and sumac when I got there.
I didn't butcher Jan or Feb. Stocked the freezers to make it through. Had to have birds ready to go by Rag Tag film festival in March. Had an insulated winter building for those first couple groups. Walls were square bales of bean stubble. Condensation and dust!
In 2014 I picked up an actual farm to rent. Like with fence and ponds and soil! I kept raising poultry, went part time in town, and used the gross of each batch of chickens to buy A cow. Short term cows and share cattle paid the bills and built my herd, eventually. In winter of 2018 the sheep and poultry went to town. I kept the cows. Now we live on our farm. 100 of the chickens are spoken for, and the rest are for our freezer. | |
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I don't miss chickens......
