Why Is Pastured Poultry So Darn Expensive?
September 22, 2010 by admin
Filed under Natures Choice News
On the surface most people who see our Virginia raised pastured poultry for the first time are a bit shocked by the price. At this time our whole chickens sell for $3.35 per pound.
Compared to the chicken being sold in the local chain grocery stores our prices are much more. The difference is simple. Our chickens cannot be raised with automation of any kind and are not raised in industrial chicken houses where they have to be fed antibiotics to stay alive. To raise a chicken on pasture… requires manual labor seven days a week.
For six months out of the year we work a minimum of 12 hours per day. There are times I don’t leave the farm for a couple of weeks other than to go pick up some of our custom ground feed at the local mill.
Raising pastured poultry cannot be automated and run from a corporate office. In order for the chickens to get lots of sunshine, bugs and lots of fresh green grass requires manual labor.
Everyday we begin the day with feeding the chickens, filling water buckets and watching the chickens in each pen. The purpose for watching the chickens is to see if they show signs of stress.
Stress on the chickens is not good. Most of the time stress is caused by a visit by a predator the night before. We need to know if a predator is visiting so we can quash him immediately. The chickens will tell us with their body language when we are feeding in the morning if a predator paid a visit that evening.
It is around 10:00 pm on a Wednesday evening. I will walk the farm where all of our animals are. I have a 3 million candle light with a red lens. The red lens lights up the eyes of all animals. The animal can’t see the red light because it doesn’t glow like a white light.
My son lives across the street and my son in law lives next door. Everyone has a two way radio. If anything moves on the farm I get on the radio. They love predator hunting. I give a shout out on the radio… and it is war on.
Each morning when we are walking to the pens in the pasture the chickens are happy to see us. They are so happy… they are trying to get through the chicken wire in the pen to be the first to be fed.
A happy chicken is a healthy chicken.
In the evening, the same thing is repeated. Very rarely do we have a predator visit during the day. The thing that will cause stress on our pastured raised chickens during the day is a waterer malfunction.
Recently we experimented with a larger pen. Our typical pen size is 8′ x 10′ and it holds approximately 60 chickens comfortably. We built a new pen 12′ x 12′ to see how well it would do raising 100 chickens.
This pen worked wonderfully raising 100 chickens. We used two large feeders and the chickens were amazing. The problem we had with this large pen that we didn’t antipate… the waterer wouldn’t keep up.
For some reason the waterers we use in this pen would let the water run out for no apparent reason. When the waterers worked properly… the chickens would drink a five gallon bucket by lunch time. More manual labor.
To get healthy, non- antibiotic, pasture raised chickens requires manual labor. To keep my wife and I healthy we have to have help. Manual labor is expensive. This is not typical farm labor.
Anyone who helps on our farm must know and understand exactly what we do and why we do it. I am a very hard task master to please. To grow the best chicken in the world requires perfection.
While pastured poultry can’t be automated in a house with automatic feeders etc… we can produce consistent pasture raised poultry with our system.
We always get the question: Does pasture raised chicken really taste that much better to warrant the difference in the price?
The answer is YES!. But it is not just about the taste. It is about how the chicken was raised, processed and how fresh it is when you receive it. The European Union and Japan banned industrial raised chickens from the U.S. to be imported into their countries. The primary reason was because the U.S. chickens are put into chlorine baths to kill bacteria.
I have no trouble going to sleep at night. We work our rear ends off during the day keeping up, and making sure everything is perfect. Along with our pastured poultry we have their cousins our free range laying hens. This takes a lot of manual labor as well.
To house all of these chickens requires a lot more infrastructure costs no one seems to remember. Tractors, buildings, four wheelers… our farm all costs lots of money.
That is why pasture poultry cost more.
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