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- #51
I am very envious of you as I would love to live like that. Unfortunately it is not really viable for me without also earning cash as well and having a large lump sum to invest at the outset in buying the property and setting it all up. I have found a sort of halfway compromise by living in a village, working from home and keeping animals. I am only self sufficient in eggs!! My dream would be to keep pigs, geese, turkeys and goats (for milk, eggs, meat) alongside more poultry and have a smallholding in the countryside. I could happily spend my retirement tending to the animals, growing food, and cooking!Yes it is time spent, but I am devoted to this lifestyle of growing good real food and giving that food a good life while it is on this earth. It is not a hobby it is an ethical ecological spiritual choice. Here is another divide in chicken keepers...chickens to me are not just a hobby. They are an intricate part of my whole food system. I LOVE animals but also love eating meat. The meat industries in America are questionable at best and absolutely disgusting at worst. I take pride in knowing that, if I am going to eat a chicken, it is one that I raised so I know it got to eat some bugs and live on grass and have an ok life. It wasn't confinement fed or factory farmed. I then use EVERYTHING I can for stock, dog treats, compost. There is ABSOLUTELY no waste. This helps me sleep at night and still eat meat. Also the taste the taste the taste!!! It is so different from the grocery store i'll never go back to that spongy bleachy fecaly chicken.
I don't believe that good real food is cheap or convenient, and I am willing to spend all the time I can working together with my land to cross things off the list that I need to buy at the store. Either way I have to work hard. Either at a job, for dollars for some chicken. Or i can work for myself, with my land, f*ck the dollars, and produce chicken. Seems to me like a no brainer all around.
Chicken is such an approachable and affordable livestock for meat option that they can really change someone's standing in their personal and local food systems, and it's those kind of changes on the personal and local level that will save the planet if it it is to be saved. Connection to real food, to me, is beginning to far outweigh convenience.
All that being said my last batch of pastuyre raised chicken averaged to about 1.25/lb. dressed. If you are smart and frugal it can be comparable price to the store, FAR superior quality.