Author: Anna & Mark

One of the interesting facets
of Pastured
Poultry Profits is
that Salatin tacked on extra information at the end to show how his
business grew and changed.  One of the most recent changes to the
business model is that he finally caved in to customer requests and
began to sell his chickens by the part as well as whole.  In 2010,
he charged $3.25 per pound for a broiler, but sold parts for following
prices:

As you can tell by the
more than ten-fold difference in price between the necks and tenders,
customers like some chicken parts much more than others.  Walter
Jeffreys wrote about this concept very eloquently on his blog, explaining that meat
producers have to ensure that the whole animal gets sold.  So even
though his customers might prefer that all of his time be devoted to
making bacon (or chicken tenders in the case of Salatin’s operation),
you have to raise the price of the in-demand pieces and lower the price
of everything else until sales come out even.

Although we don’t sell
any of our meat, we had to think in a similar manner when we started to
grow your own (and to buy whole lambs from a local farmer).  Two
years ago, the only red meat I was comfortable cooking was steaks and
hamburger meat, but a whole lamb required me to learn how to roast
shoulders, stew up bones, and much more.  Like most parts of the
sustainability learning curve, the result was good for my wallet, the
earth, and our taste buds.



Which is all a long way
of saying — even if you don’t have room for chickens in your backyard
yet, you can start your journey toward self-sufficiency by simply
learning to cook with unusual cuts of meat.  Maybe then you can
afford to buy the meat from a pastured producer rather than supporting
CAFOs and factory farms.

A few weeks ago, I
regaled you with a summary of Joel
Salatin’s broiler chicken operation.  This post continues
the story by looking in on his Eggmobiles, which house laying hens on
pasture.



Although most of us
won’t be able to recreate Salatin’s success, it’s worth understanding
how he’s able to raise laying hens while spending only 33% as much on
feed as the average egg-producer does.  Here are the key factors
in Salatin’s layer operation:

• Non-hybrid breeds —
  Salatin raises Rhode Island Reds, Barred
  Rocks, and Black
  Australorps.  Even though they only average about five eggs
  apiece per week, he believes that these heavier birds experience less
  strain per egg since they lose a smaller percentage of their body
  weight with each egg.
• Young hens — After the
  chickens have been laying for two years, Salatin kills his layers and
  sells them as stewing fowl.  This keeps egg production high and
  the operation economical.
• Free choice food —
  Hens in the Eggmobile enjoy a buffet of whole corn, oats, meat and bone
  meal, and oyster shells in separate compartments.  Since they get
  plenty of protein from pasture, most of the chickens’ storebought feed
  consists of cheap grains.  The feed analysis I listed earlier in
  the post is a bit misleading — if you weighed the amount of feed you
  give each laying hen and the amount Salatin gives each of his hens, he
  wouldn’t be feeding only 33% as much.  However, since Salatin’s
  birds focus more on ingredients like corn, his feed cost is only a
  third as high.
• Plenty of bug-filled pasture
  — This is the real reason most of us can’t replicate Salatin’s
  results.  He keeps about 100 birds in each Eggmobile, letting them
  free range as far as they want (about 600 feet), then moving the coop
  every three or four days.  Since Salatin rests each pasture area
  for four weeks before letting chickens back on it, one Eggmobile ends
  up covering about 50 acres each year, or half an acre per bird. 
  Also keep in mind that Salatin’s pasture is home to cows, so the
  chickens get plenty of fly maggots in the manure.

Although it’s not
relevant to the discussion of lowering feed costs, I thought you might
also like to know that Salatin solves the winter
chicken pasture problem by simply moving his hens to
hoop
houses full of deep bedding.



I like to look at
systems like this as an incentive to make our homestead-scale pastures
even better.  No, we don’t have cows and 50 acres of pasture, but
surely we can use some of Salatin’s techniques and a bit of ingenuity
to lower our feed costs at least a little.  Stay tuned as I
continue to experiment with the backyard-scale chicken pasture.