Breeding vs Buying

[protodon]

Can anyone tell me if it is cheaper to breed some meat birds or cheaper to get them from a hatchery? I know for cornish X you have to get them fro ma hatchery but for say pekin ducks, one could breed their own but is it cost affective? Are colored rangers a breed that breeds true and is it more cost effective just to buy them as chicks? Whether or not it's cost effective, I can tell you at least hatching my own chicks is much easier than coordinating a pick-up at the post office on the day of arrival.

 

[Sasquatch]

Finding a good hatchery still allows you to bring new blood into your stock. All too often folks end up with Mutts or too closely breed birds, IMHO.

 

[Le Canard de Barbarie]

Quote:
A pekin should consume 0.4 pounds per day of feed, or about 150 pounds of feed per year. That translates for me about to $30 a year for the hen, and assuming that one drake will service five females, $6 of feed a year for the drake allocated to the female. Now if you can get 100 fertile eggs per year from the pekin, that will cost $36 in feed or $0.36 per fertile egg. If you add all other costs such as incubator depreciation, electricity, bedding, etc. you will probably be at $1 per fertile egg or duckling.

So, yes it is feasible,

 

[Buster52]

I'm hatching and raising my own meat birds (Dark Cornish), but it is because I want to be as self sustained as possible, not because it saves me money. The idea is to have a closed loop, with as little outside input as possible. Some day I will be raising my own feed for them, which will make us even more self sufficient. For now, I buy as local as I can for it.

If I wanted to do it as cheaply as possible, I would probably order Cornish X every year.

Cheaper yet, I could shop at Walmart.

 

[TarzantheChickenMan]

i plan on hatching my own heritage turkeys next year selling some poults to pay for feed to raise the rest to eat i guess ill have to see how many i hatch lol
as for meat chickens i dont know the feed conversion efficiency would be lost breeding your own meat birds if you were going for a CRx type birds but if your breeding a heritage breed you can eat the culls and extra roosters, thats my plan for the years to come once i fill my big coop with Dominiques next spring

 

[Misty Oak Ranch]

I guess that it would depend on the breed. I plan on keeping a few red broiler hens back and crossing to a RIR rooster. Not sure how that will work out, I would think it would work fairly well. Also thought about rosambro, but I have yet to talk to anyone who has raised them.

 

[Buster52]

Quote:
It will probably hit-or-miss, as Red Broilers are hybrids that are the result of crossing four different lines. None of them will look like a Red Broiler, I would imagine.

If you do, though, let us know how it turns out.

 

[protodon]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I think I might buy some chicks next spring and decide if I want to keep any around once processing time comes around. But I do have my own mixed flock that I hatch eggs and cull roos from and I find it to be pretty convenient. One thing that I think I definitely might try to keep some breeders for is Jumbo Pekin Ducks. I've never raised them or regular Pekin, although I do have many other kinds of duck. The Junbo Pekins are a bit on the expensive side. If I buy some from maybe Metzer and see how they grow, then I will decide if I want to raise them myself. I imagine they would require more feed to keep around as breeders than a normal sized pekin duck though.