I Earned an EXTRA $2500 in 8 Weeks by doing this ONE thing - How to Raise Meat Birds for Profit

hey guys so when you are raising meat birds for profit even though we still want it to be profitable when we're raising them for our own consumption in our family but when you're raising them from for profit it takes on a little bit more importance so one of the things that we are doing this is our first batch of meat birds that we're actually raising for our community and not just for ourselves so normally we raise 25 meatbirds for a year with all of the other meat that we have available to us that's what our family will consume in a year so we have increased and this is our first batch where we are doing 55 birds and it's kind of a test run to see how we enjoy raising that many birds at a time and then the processing the butchering at the end with doing that amount of volume compared to we've done 30 at a time but that's been the most of it so one of the things is it's really important to us that the meat birds are raised on pasture on grass one because i don't want the expense of another coop that they're not going to be using all the time that's a big one i don't want the smell and the mess because meat birds they poop a lot more because they're growing a lot faster than your laying hens and we've got so many of them compared to our laying hens that we would have to build a pretty big sized coop in order to house these guys plus when they're on the fresh grass like this they're able to eat even at this these chicks are only five days old they're already eating some of the grass they're going after the bugs and so and the clover and different stuff that we have them in here on and that's all going to help with their health as well as lowering the feed bill a little bit but you still have to definitely feed the meat birds the other great thing though is having them in this chicken tractor is i can move them all over our yard and pasture so one it's going to help fertilize now i don't honestly care if my yard gets fertilized but we have to have them right now because they are so young they do still require a heat lamp or we actually have a heat plate that we got from premiere i'm actually really loving the plate over the heat lamp i feel it's a much more efficient and much safer for the chicks but i have to have this next next to an electrical source and i only have so many feet of extension cords and electrical outlets so right now these guys are going to be housed next to the house until they no longer require the heat lamp and we also just got done it's summer time so something to consider if you are raising meat birds only for yourself or in addition for profit is how they're going to be affected by the weather so we always have on our chicken tractor we've got this tarp which is going to help with providing shade as well as keeping rain off of them so but it wasn't enough for the shade because we just got done with triple digits here in our area the pacific northwest in fact we were 120 degrees fahrenheit not feels like literally 120 degrees fahrenheit here two days ago so we positioned this that they had the additional shade not only from the tarp but the way that the sun moves across our property that they were getting shade from these trees too and the fence and so they were never in direct sunlight now i haven't fed them yet this morning as you can see they know what to expect they're very excited and so we always take away the feed at night with the meat birds otherwise they won't stop eating and you can have organ failure leg failure etc so we only feed them and we take in the morning feed goes away at night so they're very excited but in order to move this tractor with 50 some birds i have to get them to the front because it's not going to be feasible time wise every time i need to move it to try and manually carry and move these guys out while i move it see they're very excited they're like bring it on quit talking and get me my food very careful with our foot placement watch out guys no you can't eat my toes you can't eat my toes oh yeah there you go there you go there you go yellow piranhas okay go on everybody go that way go eat so i can move you go on go on buddy go on there you go oh no you're gonna have to go too you have to go too normally we hang their feeders or their waters but they're so short um that we just had them on the grounds right now but if you have these hung it makes it much easier when you're moving it so this is actually the heat lamp excuse me not heat lamp but because it's obviously not a lamp but this has been great because it covers this area and they can get right under here and you don't have so it's on right now and it's warm but you don't have a bulb that they can break or as much of a fire hazard and we got this from premiere and premiere sent it to me so this is sponsored by premiere and it's supposed to come with legs however ours was like the only box that didn't come with legs and we needed to use it immediately so they are sending me legs they are phenomenal i contacted them and i'm like hey guys there's no legs in this box like i don't know how to make this work so we improvised so if you ever get one of these plates and you don't have legs or a leg breaks this is our solution so my husband took bailing twine you could use any type of string but bailing twine and duct tape are what make a homestead go around around here you can fix almost anything with those oh i'm hooked on my barbed wire there we go so there's these holes that the the legs are supposed to go in and they're adjustable so as the chicks grow obviously you can do it up until they have all their feathers so he just tied the baling twine onto these screws and then you just thread it through like this and then it goes like that and that's gonna support it and then we just have it tied onto this rod here so it hangs and then we bailing trying to get into the rescue we just thread it through here and then each day um i'm not moving this tractor every day i'm gonna probably be having to move it about every other day right now until they get bigger and then we're building a second tractor because when they're full size they won't all be able to stay in here but you can see because they sleep underneath this at night they're all standing there and pooping we're moving this daily because i don't want them standing on that poop in that area so they were there we're moving it and now we're just going to move the entire thing so let's get this moved while they're all still at the front pigging out on breakfast [Music] [Music] this video is sponsored in part by mcmurray hatchery we have ordered our meat birds through the mail from various mail order hatcheries for a number of years but it wasn't until we started ordering our birds from mcmurray hatchery that we had a really high success rate in fact some of the hatcheries that we ordered from in the past we would lose over half of the birds they would send us replacements and we would lose half of them as well i'm very pleased to say that that has never happened when we ordered from mcmurray hatchery not only have the birds been extremely healthy and had very minimal loss of the birds but they even seem to be livelier and healthier throughout the entire raising process all the way until butcher date we elect to go totally natural with all of our birds meaning that none of our birds have any types of vaccinations or medication given to them so we love being able to support a hatchery that offers that and also has really healthy animals okay that scared them just a little bit so we can see they feel safe they like to go back under the heat plate because it provides if they feel like it's under their mama and they're safe from that they really like to hover under there we've got a few brave ones that are coming back to the food but now because they are so small they will go underneath here which is why we've got a lot of these different blocks of wood that i have to shore up and see that's pretty close to the ground so i think they'll be fine there but i think they can get out through this one i'll get that blocked up now the nice thing about raising these guys in the summertime is i can have them out in this movable tractor even when they're a little really small when it's colder we'll keep them in a brooder because we're worried about having too much of a cold breeze and the ground itself is too cold but with the high temps that we have had the ground is really warm and they'll go under the heat lamp at night or the heat plate i should say at night but i'm really not worried about the breeze in fact we normally will keep them in a brooder in our horse trailer because we don't have a barn so we use the horse trailer as the brooder box but it gets so hot inside of that that we were worried because we got them the day when we started having triple digits is the day they actually arrived in the mail and so we brought them out here from day one and it's actually been really nice i'm not having to clean out or use shavings or anything like that as far as bedding material which means less expense and because we're looking to sell these to obviously make a profit because they don't recommend selling anything unless you have a good profit margin that is keeping expenses down so we will see though with the heat with the high heat that we had we only lost two chicks and i always get extra you never know most the time when i use mcmurray hatcheries i don't have any fatality loss but i'm normally not experiencing that extreme of temperatures so we did lose two but i'm actually pretty pleased out of the 55 that we've only lost two chickens and we ordered enough margin rise um for the ones that we have already spoken for from customers that nobody will be cut short so you always want to have a little bit of extra margin in there just in case especially when you're doing profit so that you don't have to cut anybody short then the other thing if you're doing them for profit is selecting males so the male meat birds are going to dress out quite a few more pounds per bird than the females are and they'll also will come to butcher weight size usually by eight weeks whereas some of the females uh you know ten it can be nine ten weeks and when we're doing this for profit i want everything batched together everything is going to be done on one processing day i don't want to have to have set up because your time is also something you have to factor in when you're raising things for profit and so the expense that would be on our time wise and also renting the equipment we don't own our own butchering equipment yet but were able to rent it from our local agricultural office then i would have double rental fees so we wanted to make sure that we had all male birds so we can do them all at one time and these guys usually we get them dressed out at usually they average about five to five and a half pounds we'll have some that are four and a half pounds and we'll have some that are six six and a half we have a couple that have almost been seven pounds completely dressed out so on average they're about five and a half pounds which is really good in an eight week time frame because the least amount of time is obviously for a profit margin is good for me because then i can do more birds if i want to in that short amount of time i that takes extra two weeks of me not having to account for my time taking care of the birds and really comes down to feed cost so getting all male and then the larger quantity that you buy in it like almost anything you buy in bulk then it's less per price of the bird so mcmurray has it if 25 birds and lesser a certain amount then as you go up in 25 increments they become cheaper per bird so that works well and then your feed bill so with your meat birds you want to make sure that you are still supplementing even though they can start to begin to eat and they are like we have little tiny ants and they're eating all the little bugs and they're picking already at the grass and all of that you still have to make sure that you are feeding them with the meatbridge you want to make sure that they're getting enough protein so that they will be to a full butcherable weight at just that eight week mark so there's been a couple different ways where we've tried to decrease our feed cost and one is if you have a local granary we have a greenery that's about an hour a little over an hour from us which is still considered local but they fresh mill and i can get organic because that's the only type of feed that we feed here is organic certified organic meat bird feed and when you have the baby chicks you don't want to get the pellets that's too hard when they're itty bitty you want to make sure that it's just a fine little green so that they can easily peck them but we can get that from them and it's cheaper than buying it at our local feed store we also use azure standard and i'm able to get scratch and peck through them which is where i've got the feed for these guys and that's nice because i can order it in bulk and kind of estimate out how much i think i'm going to need for the birds and so for the kickstarter where it's just in the grain formulation i got um they're 40 or 50 pound bags i got three of them so it's either 150 pounds or 120 depending on if they were 40 or 50 pounders now i can't remember they smell heavy when i lifted them i'll give you that um but i just went ahead and got that and then i'm only doing one trip i can get them in bulk and so i'm saving on my time and my gas as well if i can buy in bulk um and i only went with that amount because as these guys start to get their full feathers and bigger then i usually switch over to the pellets instead so we kind of went with that so but those are all things that you want to consider a lot of times we think about the exact cost like how much the cost of the birds are and how much the feet are but when you're raising things for profit like this where i've obviously got daily time any way that i can batch things or decrease the amount of time that i'm spending on it because often times we think about profit we don't think about our time but you have to evaluate your time when you are doing things for profit when you're selling them and you're actually creating a product from your farm your time is one of your most valuable assets along with your money but a lot of times people don't prioritize their time or think about ways that they can decrease the amount of time that they're spending on something especially in smaller increments and that all will begin to add up so like i said when these guys are just a little bit bigger i will have their waters tied up and then that will be something where every day when i'm moving this or every other day once they get bigger it'll be every day right now it's every other day that just that small amount of time of me having to manually move their waters out of the chicken tractor instead of just pulling it well that actually adds up a couple you know a minute or so a day over eight weeks that actually adds up and so if you look at all those little tasks and you're able to minimize them it actually becomes quite time saving which then in turn increases your profit on your time loss so that chicken tractor is great to house all of them when they're little but by the time they are about halfway grown in a few weeks that's not going to be enough space for 52 birds 53 we had 55 we lost two i can do math on the fly 53 birds so we are building a second chicken tractor that we've got right here and we're actually tweaking the design on this one a little bit this one will be one that is just strictly for the meat birds it won't be one that we house them for throughout any of the winter months that chicken tractor there i actually when i need to move some of the hens if i need to separate them out if we've got too many and they're fighting or one's getting bullied etc or if i just have more hens that will comfortably fit in our movable coupe and tractor i can put them in that one so it's bigger as you saw i can almost stand up when i go in it so i can easily go in there and walk around especially in the front part we actually have an egg laying box in there so that they can go in there and so if you have chickens that aren't meat birds that you want to be able to raise for longer then i would recommend doing something like that but we know that this is just going to be a secondary tractor strictly for meat birds and we won't be doing them during the winter months because it would just be too cold and honestly i don't want to deal with trying to butcher in the rain and the snow and all of that so we won't be doing them during those months so this is a slightly different design that we're modifying so this will have the chicken wire on top of it but because this part is pvc pipe we'll be able to easily which is still under construction as you can see but we'll be able to easily lift this up so we can still go in here this is easy to lift up to put them in and then also on processing day when we're going to pull them out it'll be something where we can easily reach in here and grab them whereas that one's going to be a little bit more difficult because the climbing in and out you're physically climbing in and all the way out so when you're looking at the chicken tractor designs and the pens it's important to think about what your main goal with it is so this one is going to be for meat bird processors and the meat birds whereas that one is more of a dual purpose and like i said i do like to have that one because i can use it both ways but the great thing is these once they're built you know even though wood prices are exorbitantly high right now this still isn't very expensive for us to make and it will last for years and years we'll be able to use this so we consider it a good investment so another thing that you want to consider when you are raising birds for profit really any product that you plan on selling from your homestead or farm is you want to minimize the risk as much as possible and that is knowing that you have paid customers before you ever go through the work and expense of raising or creating the product so i highly recommend pre-selling so where you put the word out hey we're planning on raising these this is going to be the price this is going to be when they're ready how many do you want and you actually have people committed they can put a deposit down they can pay you up front however you decide that you want to do that which is what we did with these guys we actually now have a waiting list because i did not want to order these in and go through all of that i don't have freezer space for an additional 55 birds to begin with but anytime product-wise profit-wise i want to make sure that i have paying customers before i invest really anything into it so highly recommend if you're planning on doing these and selling them beyond just your own consumption that you find your customers get them confirmed already before you move ahead now if you are raising your animals during the high heat of summer like we went through you want to make sure that you watch my video on those tips on how to make sure you keep your animals cool during extreme warm high summer temps

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 332,806

Keywords: cost of raising meat chickens, chicken farming, raising meat chickens, pastured meat chickens, free range meat chickens, chicken farming for beginners, chicken farming at home, chicken farming business, chicken farming in usa, raising meat chickens for profit, raising meat chickens for beginners, raising meat chickens on pasture, raising meat chickens start to finish, raising meat chickens your backyard, raising meat chickens in a tractor, raising meat chickens in summer

Id: Vsb1FLgE2wg

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021