Quote:
Dave is there a thread about that? It sounds like good reading.
You hadda ask, didnt you?!
Lemme see if I can find it....
Here it is:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=175407&p=3
My own comments went something like this (edited for the discussion at hand)...
"You can feed fast food scraps if you can get them (her husbad could it seems - David).
Most fast food places are tightly run and you may find that you won't see a lot of waste for the taking. But, take what you can get and put such waste to good use.
Im not normally one to recommend a smorgasboard of treats for chickens, but in this case it is too beneficial to let the food go to waste.
Besides, chickens are not people, which may surprise some of us here at BYC.
...if you can SUPPLEMENT their feed this way, you'd be nuts not to.
As for your math, you are definitely off.... I plugged the general data from Leonard Mercia's book, "Raising Poultry the Modern Way," into a simple formula.
According to Mercia, feeding a meat bird cock to 10 weeks takes 18-20 lbs. of feed. We'll use that as an approximation for our purpose here.
I'm lucky: I pay 9$-10$ per 50 lb bag of feed, and even less if I want to go to the mill and get it myself. I live in the middle of Carolina Commercial Chicken Country, so, like I said - lucky.
Let's go worst case and use the $10 bag and 20 lbs of feed, which equals 20 cents per pound of feed.
(20 lbs of feed for one cock) x ($.20/lb) = $4 in feed.
Add in incidentals as you may wish and we can round it to $5. You can hardly buy a chicken in the store for that much, and when you can, they are not 'homegrown'. Even with feed at double the price, you still are talking $8 each. Still doable, in my book. Feed a wet mash properly and green feeds as you should and the total comes down by 15%
Sell all or the surplus few of your birds, and you can recoup some of your costs, aside from labor, bringing your total down some more...."
Dave is there a thread about that? It sounds like good reading.
You hadda ask, didnt you?!
Here it is:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=175407&p=3
My own comments went something like this (edited for the discussion at hand)...
"You can feed fast food scraps if you can get them (her husbad could it seems - David).
Most fast food places are tightly run and you may find that you won't see a lot of waste for the taking. But, take what you can get and put such waste to good use.
Im not normally one to recommend a smorgasboard of treats for chickens, but in this case it is too beneficial to let the food go to waste.
Besides, chickens are not people, which may surprise some of us here at BYC.
As for your math, you are definitely off.... I plugged the general data from Leonard Mercia's book, "Raising Poultry the Modern Way," into a simple formula.
According to Mercia, feeding a meat bird cock to 10 weeks takes 18-20 lbs. of feed. We'll use that as an approximation for our purpose here.
I'm lucky: I pay 9$-10$ per 50 lb bag of feed, and even less if I want to go to the mill and get it myself. I live in the middle of Carolina Commercial Chicken Country, so, like I said - lucky.
Let's go worst case and use the $10 bag and 20 lbs of feed, which equals 20 cents per pound of feed.
(20 lbs of feed for one cock) x ($.20/lb) = $4 in feed.
Add in incidentals as you may wish and we can round it to $5. You can hardly buy a chicken in the store for that much, and when you can, they are not 'homegrown'. Even with feed at double the price, you still are talking $8 each. Still doable, in my book. Feed a wet mash properly and green feeds as you should and the total comes down by 15%
Sell all or the surplus few of your birds, and you can recoup some of your costs, aside from labor, bringing your total down some more...."
