Starting a pastured poultry business...

[rainplace]

Quote:
Yes, yes we were.

Are you getting lots of interest in your processing event? It would be a shame for people to pass up an opportunity to learn!

 

[Dogfish]

I have enough folks to make it interesting. It should be fun. I'll have some young turkey poults, 5 days and some hatching, plus some week old pheasants, and possibly a quail hatch going on. Should be a good time.

 

[Drk_Wlf]

This is really informative! Thanks! Me and my husband want to raise some meat bird on pasture once we get our farm. We plan on raising Freedom Rangers though.

 

[Mrs. Mucket]

Thank you Rainplace--that was very informative!! We recently left "that corner" of WA for a sunny corner of the state but this year? No difference! There was snow on nearby mountaintops this morning.

I am interested in seeing how your Jericho Settlers'-type outdoor brooder turns out. I got carried away on their website and links from there...

 

[rainplace]

Mrs. Mucket :

Thank you Rainplace--that was very informative!! We recently left "that corner" of WA for a sunny corner of the state but this year? No difference! There was snow on nearby mountaintops this morning.

I am interested in seeing how your Jericho Settlers'-type outdoor brooder turns out. I got carried away on their website and links from there...

Yes, their website is pretty cool and their flickr stream is packed filled with photos!

I forgot we even had a sunny corner of the state. We keep saying around here, "It's a nice day for February."​

 

[rainplace]

Quote:
We keep wanting to try a different model, but this one works. We have a lot of interest in our DP birds, but I think we're going to wait for the fall to start growing more out as they fair better in wet climate. We'll move towards ducks and geese during that time also.... they thrive in the wet.

One of the things I forgot to link to was the Chicken Production Worksheet I found in this forum a while back. I used it to play around with numbers and found it helpful. I used conservative numbers to help me plan a budget. I found that I spent about what I thought I would spend. It also allowed me to see before starting that I could not afford paid labor, especially when more than one entity was sharing in profits. It's easy to get caught up in potential profits. As you can see from my initial post, we made a lot less than if we had sold all the birds.

 

[rainplace]

Oh yeah, and another thing I forgot. If you're having people come and help you, MAKE SURE YOU ARE READY TO GO AT START TIME! I make sure everything is set-up the day before. The only thing I have to do on processing day is start the scalder and sanitize the work area.

 

[Dogfish]

Exactly.

 

[PotterWatch]

We have started our poultry business this year as well. By our last processing day before summer really hits, we will have raised and sold almost 300 birds. We will start back up again in late summer and plan to have our first batch available around Oct. 1st. We are hoping to get up to 240/week by the end of our first year in business. That will be the maximum we feel we can realistically manage and keep the level of quality and involvement with the birds that we want. We are hoping to get into a new farm location near the end of summer as our current location is about 35mi from our house and it makes it really hard to be as involved as we want with the daily care of the birds (we rent the land and the landowner currently does any daily care at the property). We have our application in for a much more local farm that we would move into and rent out our current home. I hope that we will find out within a week or two if we get the new place.

 

[krcote]

Great thread! I have 51 week-old freedom rangers that are our first go at meat birds. Wish us luck!