In the June mini rants thread in the BBQ Pit, **congodwarf **expressed interest in my occuption-pastured poutry farming-and rather than hijack that thread, I’ve decided to start an “Ask the…” thread to answer his/her questions.
As the title suggests, my husband and I are pastured poultry farmers.
Our (small) 20 acre farm is located in central Texas about 50 miles from Austin.
We raise broilers (meat birds) for local restaurants, specialty grocery stores and a farmers market.
Our model is very different from the typical CAFO or factory farms that raise chickens for consumption.
We are state certified to process (slaughter) onsite.
The processing is not automated. Mr. jlzania does the actual killing and I’m responsible for eviscerating the birds.
And no, congodwarf, I never really get tired of being around chickens but it’s not as if I hang around the pens or brooders and read them bedtime stories either.
Sorry, I know it’s rude to ask about money, but this is the internet. Do you make a decent living at it? I’ve been conditioned to think all farmers are broke and a single bad season away from financial ruin. How accurate is this?
The chicks are kept inside in brooders for the first 3 weeks of life because we have to regulate the temperature . Baby chickens are extremely susceptible to hypothermia. We subdivide an existing barn into five brooder bays and a neighbor donated a WWII army rolling machine shed which we use as a backup bay. Each bay has two hoovers for the chicks to get under when they are cold. The hoovers are based on a design that was developed in WWII and are very simple to build. We do use artificial lights to wake the birds up around 4 AM but those go off as soon as the sun comes up. In CAFO’s the birds are kept constantly under low lights which adversely effects their immune system.
Traditional confinement houses cost a minimum of $150,000 to erect, effectively leaving the producers at the mercy of the banks and the big chicken corporations. Farmers that grow for companies like Tyson are in reality just sharecroppers. Tyson sets the standards for the houses and if the farmer fails to confirm to their demands, they lose their contract.
We have one fulltime employee that used to manage a CAFO turkey farm for his parents.They lost everything when Red and Blue was bought out by Butterball and the contract was cancelled within two years of the houses being paid off.
Once the birds reach three weeks, they are fully feathered out and can withstand temperatures of 32 degrees which is normally not a problem here in Texas.
We began by using the Salatin chicken tractors as our field pens but they were too heavy for me to move by myself and turned into shake and bake ovens when it got hot.
Terry designed fields tents made from chicken wire, PVC pipes and recycled billboards that work very well in our climate and are fairly cheap to build.
Each tent is moved daily to ensure that the chickens always have fresh grass to eat and clean ground to sleep on.
We have a special feed formulation and purchase 4700 pounds which we have ground fresh every week. It’s a mixture of various grains with a supplemental addition of an organic priobiotic to add necessary vitamins and minerals. We never use antibiotics or hormones. and all our pastures are chemical free. The only reason the CAFO’S have to feed a heavy diet of antibiotics is because the birds are grossly overcrowded and the houses are not cleaned out during the duration of the grow-out cycle. Nothing can live if it’s raised beak to butt in its own shit. We’ve talked to poultry experts from A & M and they told us about CAFO’s where all the birds are blind because of the ammonia concentrations on the floor.
which operations during the production process are inherently labor intensive as opposed to amenable to mechanization solutions?
Is there some major risk of business failure involved? If no, why don’t big farms start doing basically what you are doing using hired labor, training employees to do only specific operations, assembly line style? E.g. what’s keeping you yourself from doing that, if you were to get a million dollar investment for just this purpose? Is such a hypothetical trend limited by fear of large wipe out, or by government regulations for this particular certification, or just by the immaturity of the industry right now, or basically what’s the scoop here?
We raise Cornish X’s; a meat bird that was developed in the last 40 years to put on weight really fast. It’s a hybrid and although you can get eggs from them, it’s not cost effective.
The minimum investment in top breeding stock is $12,000 and then there’s the cost of erecting a climate controlled building and purchasing incubators.
Roast chicken is my favorite way of cooking the birds too but I’m becoming more enamoured of poaching as well.
Either method allows you to really work the chicken-we get at least 3 meals of a midsize bird and a great stock.
Terry has a wonderful recipe for oven-fried chicken on our website that uses a ton less grease too.
Our poultry exemption license doesn’t allow us to sell across state lines and although I’d happily send you a couple of birds for free, the shipping would make it the most expensive chicken you’ve ever eaten.
The birds are inverted upside down in ‘kill cones’ (ours are actually modified detergent bottles) and we slit the jugular on either side of the neck. This causes the birds to lose consciousness within about 30 seconds and bleeds out the meat.
I’ve talked to a couple of Iman’s in Austin and we are actually considered halal because we raise the birds compassionately, we say a prayer of thanks before we kill, we are people of the book and we slit the throats with a sharp blade. There was a bit of debate as to whether we had to pray over every individual chicken or could just do a generic prayer over the entire lot.
No inquires from Rabbi’s yet.
Many farmers* are* one bad season away from bankruptcy which is why we rejected the conventional corporate ag model.
As these birds grow so quickly, we get a return on our investment every 5-7 weeks.
We’re far from wealthy but we’ve manage to pay all our bills every month,put a (very) little aside and have almost no debt.
As we set our own prices for the chicken, we are not dependent on the market to determine what we charge. I can truthfully say that both our retail and wholesale clients are extremely supportive of us and go out of their way to let us know that they appreciate what we’re doing. Plus everybody eats and once you make the switch to healthy meat, you don’t go back.
We also live pretty simply and are self-entertaining.
For me, it’s a quality of life issue.
I work with my best friend every day and I pay our one employee a living wage. I don’t need a gym membership because I do plenty of hauling, toting and carrying every day and I don’t worry about dieting either.
We eat very well because we can trade chicken for fresh organic veggies at the farmers market each week.
The farmer that grinds our grain also trades chicken for venison during hunting season and we have a freezer full of wonderful wild pig that we trapped.
Some of Austin’s best restaurants serve our chicken and the chefs periodically invite us for a free meal which is always a nice treat.
I live in jeans or shorts and T-shirts year 'round so my clothing budget is minimal.
I have zero commute time except on the two days a week that I do deliveries and the market.
When he feels slightly caught up (there’s always something that needs to be done on the farm), Terry joins me on delivery day and we catch lunch and go swimming or to a movie.
We don’t get to vacation much (in fact, we took our first vacation in 3 years in 2010) but when you like what you’re doing, you don’t need to escape from your job.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard labor intensive work. You get hot and sweaty in the summer and cold and wet in the winter.
We’re never totally ‘off’ but we don’t have to madly rush through the day either.
Most days we start between 6:30 and 7 am and wrap it up between 4-5 PM.
We take long afternoon lunch breaks ( 2-3 hours) on a good day and I like being able to throw a load of laundry in while I’m getting work related tasks.
Of course, there’s always the nights we’re out at midnight in a thunderstorm as lighting crashes around us.
Nothing’s perfect but this works for us.
Thanks for starting this jlzania. It’s really interesting. I think you’ve already answered all my original questions so now I want to know, how often do you eat chicken? How did you get into this? Were you or your husband raised on poultry or other farms? How long have you been doing this? Were you doing something completely different before, like stockbroker in NY? What is an average day like for you?
Have you read any of Michael Pollan’s books or articles? In one piece in particular, he described the operations of Polyface Inc., a farm in Virginia that raises pastured poultry, as well as cattle and pigs (and other stuff). As I understand it, they carefully rotate the various animals through the pasture. Have you considered copying their methods?
How much trouble do you have with predation? Do you have to irrigate the pasture or otherwise manage it, or are you in an area where the weather keeps the grass pretty well managed for you?
I have a city guide to eating locally here in Birmingham and notice that some vendors list “chicken” while other specify “pastured poultry” - what makes the difference? Is it a regulating body or is it self- reporting and buyer beware? What things should I look for to tip me off - color, size, taste? I want to buy and eat locally and more humane, but in the past I heard someone close to me make the comment that a particular group was buying the chicken from the grocery store and repackaging it. I couldn’t tell if that was just ignorance/snootiness talking or what.
Do you trust the stuff available at Whole Foods? They have numerical orders of meats (designating how local, where the animals are raised and such) but it’s still a chain. Do you hear of large scale chicken farmers selling to them?
Also, do you live close to or deal with commercial farmers? Is there tension? I’ve seen a couple documentaries about them and felt awful for them. It’s like by the time they realize how hard the chicken companies have a choke hold on them, they’re screwed.
No chickens running around with their heads cut off? My parents got out of livestock when I was little, but my brother remembers being freaked out by headless chickens when he was a kid.
The most labor intensive part of our operation(besides the processing) is physically moving each field pen every day to a different part of the pasture.
We will be automating the brooder waterers as finances permit but they haven’t invented the machine that can scoop out dirty bedding while the chickens are in the building.
Any business has an inherent risk of failure and that increases when you have so many variables that are not under your control. There’s really no regulation as to how the chickens are raised or what they’re fed. If you read the label on commercial feeds, one of the ingredients is ‘animal protein’. For all we know, it’s chicken feathers or road kill which is why we have our feed ground locally and we know everything that goes in it. The only aspect of my farm that is inspected is our processing building. I have chosen to go with the least amount of regulation which means that we can only slaughter X amount of birds per year for sale and we cannot sell across state lines.
You can’t raise chickens in the field when the temperature gets too cold which establishes geographical limitations. Because we are in central Texas, we can run year round by modifying our field tents for the seasons. In the winter, we wrap clear plastic around the chicken wire at the bottoms of the pens to hold in the heat. In the summer we use irrigation misters to keep the birds cool during the day.
We will never be cost competitive with corporations like Tyson or Sanderson Farms and we will never supply chicken for fast food outlets because we can’t sell it that cheaply. In my neck of the woods, Tyson fryers cost .89 cents per pound. Our birds sell for $3.75 per pound at the farmers market so I doubt we’ll ever pose a threat to them. That said, I sell everything I can produce and have a waiting list for birds.
However, I don’t believe that food-especially meat-should be cheap. As Michael Pollen says “Eat less, pay more.”
It will never be cost effective for us to automate the processing side of the business. It’s an economy of scale. And I wouldn’t be interested in becoming a large corporation. We are sticklers on quality control, during both the life of the bird and the end result which is why our clients are willing to pay a fair price for their chicken dinners.
My parents got out of livestock when I was little, but my brother remembers being freaked out by headless chickens when he was a kid.