Cost of dressed goose

[Capvin]

One of my favorite things is to make goose on the rotesserie and I have made it many times but never really paid much attention to the price. Until now. Yesterday I bought a 12 pound goose at Publix and it was $6.70 per pound for a price of over $80.00. Now, to me it is worth it because it is really a favorite meal, but is that price normal or reasonable?

 

[Kevin565]

Sounds pretty normal to me. That's about the average price down here

 

[Capvin]

OK, thanks for the info. But I am curious as to what makes a goose so much more expensive then turkey, duck or even chicken. Are they that much harder to raise. I have a home in Upstate NY and during the summer I will shoot some of the wild geese that wander about and I cook and eat them also. There certainly seem to be a lot a canadian geese around and why cant they kill and package them?

 

[Kevin565]

I think it just has to do alot with supply and demand. Raising geese for food isn't as popular in the US as it is in some other countries. Since only a select amount of people raise Meat Geese they can only supply so many people. The people who do get supplied still have to pay quite a bit more than they would for many other poultry. Also Wild Canada Geese are protected by law which is why they can not be used for slaughter

 

[Oregon Blues]

The price is a bit on the side of a being a good bargain.

Geese are expensive to raise commercially. Breeding stock is expensive and they might not be fertile until they are 2 years old. The goslings must be raised for months before they are big enough to butcher. Butchering is expensive because they are more work to pluck.

Geese need space and land is expensive and involves property taxes and perhaps irrigation water.

There are a lot of people who are getting between $4 and $6 a pound for Cornish Cross chickens that they finish in 8 weeks so that they can raise another batch in the same space. You can raise 6 batches of Cornish Cross every year in the same amount of space.

You might be able to get two crops of geese in the same area, if the geese are still laying at the time you butcher the first lot. However, geese are seasonal layers, so you might only harvest 1 crop of roasting geese in a year.

My own geese, I figure don't cost quite as much (except for very expensive breeding stock) because I am going to be paying the property taxes and mortgage whether there are geese here or not. Commercial farmers can not ignore the cost of the area where they keep their geese.