DH and I haven't bought meat in a store for years. We have been purchasing our meat from a meat company that "plants" fields, does all "organic" feed, and no antibiotics or growth hormone....we have been doing it now for 4 years. I am pretty much done with it....but we have a free order coming, then we are done; trying to save money. Well, tonight I went to buy chicken at the store....HOLY CRAP. So, we are considering purchasing meat chickens, keeping them in a separate coop from our eggs chickens, and raising our own chicken dinner. What info can you give us before we start this endeavor?
Order double what you want/need and pre-sell the other half. Use a feed conversion ratio of 3 to 1 and figure out how much it will cost to feed all of them for the duration. Then you can price them to cover the cost of your feed and you can basically feed your chickens for free. I am in the process of doing this right now and I charged a flat $10 per bird and it was remarkably easy to pre-sell them considering you can go to wally world and buy a whole chicken for about $6.00. Otherwise it's tough to beat supermarket prices.
If you do a search you will find many threads on raising cornish cross broilers and rangers. They eat tons. They poop even bigger. They smell. They need plenty of room. You'll be glad to be done with them at 8 - 10 weeks. They will also be some of the best chicken you have ever eaten in your life.
If you are doing it to save money, don't even go down the broiler route. If you are doing it to feed yourself and your family wholesome food which is immensely better than grocery store chicken, then by all means raise your own. The best way to go about it is to order a crop of broilers (start with like 25), raise them, then process them, vacuum seal, then freeze. It doesn't make sense to have a standing flock of broilers, simply raise them as 'crops'.
Thank you. Our plan wasn't really to sell but to not pay an astronomical (in my opinion at the moment) amount for chickens that God knows what went into. We were thinking about raising, asking our neighbor a retired butcher to process them, and then pay him in chicken....we have a huge freezer to freeze them in. At what age can you start to...process them? I am gathering the cornish I can do at 8-10 weeks from what Miss Prissy said.
Oh, and none of our Walmarts do food around here (and I don't go to them anyway....ours are not the ones used in commercials)