Was My Grand Chicken Experiment a Failure?

over the summer i started an experiment involving chicken in today's video i'm gonna reveal the results of that experiment as well as what i learned and what i'm gonna do different next year today's video is sponsored by my friends at barkbox [Applause] oof it's a rainy one where's mr toby dog but he's probably in his house trying to keep dry or something oh yep there he is i don't know if you can see but he just popped out hey buddy you found your nice little dry spot i'm really glad you're using that house good morning pal good morning how are you it's good to see you good morning chickens it's time to rise and or shine [Music] i will admit ever since we called out the roosters the flock's gotten a lot smaller a lot more calm oh you can see dottie here has been growing in her feathers her sister blanche if you remember about two weeks ago was looking ragged muffin now she's looking beautiful but of course on a rainy day like today the chickens aren't gonna be happy regardless and to answer your question yes we have actually gone through our annual cull of our roosters which actually relates to the experiment that i've been running you know earlier this summer i decided to hatch out the chicken eggs that our girls were laying you know we had two roosters and yes i said had general washington and alexander hamilton my name is alexander hamilton and general washington was a rhode island red alexander hamilton was a bielenfelder however you say that one those two fellas had a flock that included a crevacuoire a colombian wyan dot a couple of bard rocks a couple of leg horns a couple of uh new hampshire reds plymouth rock a black coaching and ankana you know just a whole mishmash mix of lady chicken and my idea was i want to have more laying hens for next year so that they can follow our cattle but i knew that in catching my own eggs i would produce a whole heck of a lot of roosters and so the intention was to see with this experiment could i ethically raise good meat birds and by ethically i mean not raising the freakish cornice cross making sure that these chickens have a long enough life they're actually experiencing the world and doing something that would be cost effective for me as the farmer that wouldn't break my wallet as well as produce a meat product that wouldn't suck and so yeah earlier this week i took the day off from work and called all the roosters i actually did it all by myself i've done butchering here on the farm now for several years but this was the first time i ever did it all by myself but it went pretty smoothly good morning weird chickens [Music] so now at this point on the farm penny the silky rooster is your entire farm and i will admit i'm a little bit sad about it so when it came to when i butchered the roosters we had 20 young cockrells that had been hatched out this summer plus alexander hamilton and general washington i actually tried to find homes for him but nobody was really interested in taking on some roosters and so in the name of honoring their lives we actually treated them as food which i know is probably a little bit controversial but i knew that i couldn't keep alexander hamilhan and general washington around for future generations you see over the summer i ended up hatching out 34 chicks of those 34 chicks 20 of them were roosters 14 of them were hens and all of them were the offspring of the general and hamilton and so in the name of avoiding inbreeding i decided to cull i'm working on actually getting a couple of new roosters for next spring you know it's surprisingly easy to be a free home to roosters but all 22 of those male birds are now in our freezer or i guess a couple of them are now at this point in our belly [Music] [Music] every day that's miserable for the chickens with the water and the rain is a great day to be a duck they're so happy right now if you ever have the chance have both ducks and chickens on your farm it's so fun to see them contrast and interact on the barnyard and just see how what makes one happy makes the other miserable and vice versa all right girls out you go so at this point my large chicken flocks i have two of them i have the flock that you saw me open up earlier where the majority of the chickens are and then i have these four ladies who are holdovers from the old flock who never quite separated appropriately you see over the last i don't know two months or so alexander hamilhan and several of the older females ended up moving in with the younger ones and they ended up living inside the brooder house but general washington and actually these four ladies ended up staying inside the chicken tractor coop that i have at some point in the next week or two i should probably sneak in in the middle of the night and take those ladies out and put them in with the rest of the flock and if i give it a couple of days and i do that they'll ultimately integrate in and become one big happy flock together especially because there are no roosters and there's plenty of space i don't expect much like in terms of violence or issues what are you chewing on there goose is that a wood chip all right you do you in case you guys are wondering i have not done my call of the geese yet this year as i've described in other videos i'm still grappling with the issues related to the hoop house and what to do with it and determining how that whole situation gets resolved will determine how many geese i can keep over until next year hey how's the buff crew doing yeah you got lenny and the outsiders plus bruce the goose and all his ladies all is one big clock now to give you a little more background on the experiment i pretty much raised those chicks just like i'd raised any other birds for the first four or five weeks of their lives i gave them chick starter feed but then the remaining parts of their lives they just got regular old food rations just like our other birds which are a combination of layer pellets scratch grains cracked corn a little bit of duck feed meal worms you know just a pretty good mix of diet but i also give my birds overall pretty sparse diet when compared to what i do for winter because i also try to force them to forage and go through the pasture and eat all the bugs and insects and weeds and all the good stuff that's out there and so for most of their lives these rooster chicks they spend a lot of time wandering around this farm so i guess to look at one part of my experiment of wanting to raise meat chickens that had good happy lives i actually feel like i very much checked that box they spent their earliest days in the brooder as they got older at about i don't know two or three weeks old they started to have outdoor access at four weeks old they had even more outdoor access and then by six weeks they were completely free-ranging and they were born in mid-july and i ended up butchering them in early november i don't know this video will probably come out a little later than that but the actual butcher date was the beginning of november now let me break down all the numbers for you guys but first i gotta go run a quick aaron so you know just because toby dog is a working dog doesn't mean he doesn't like to have fun things and by fun things i mean stuff like toys and treats and stuff to make his life as a dog that much more enjoyable so that's why lately i've been working with barkbox and it looks like we just got our latest box here in the post office toby dog's gonna be so excited when i get back to the farm hey toby dog i got a surprise for you i know you're so excited for it every time you see this cardboard box show up you know what to expect [Music] oh boy toby this one's a special spider-man bark box it has a nice spider-man disc a little squeaky ball [Music] a chewable spider-man newspaper a little spider-man though toby you don't know what to make of these squeaky toys do you livestock guardian dogs usually don't get squeaky toys but i think toby can handle it oh and then some spider bites and chicken sticks the dog treats that they've been sending him from barkbox are like his favorite you want one yes you do oh yes he does barkbox is a monthly delivery of unique toys and treats and chews all with one goal making your dog happy barkbox's toys are made exclusively in-house and you can't find them anywhere else and toby dog goes crazy for the treats each bark box is one of a kind and tailored towards your dog size and allergies and each month's bark box has a special theme and free shipping like for example this month is all about spider-man barkbox has three different subscription options either 12 months for 23 dollars a box six months for 26 dollars a box or one month for 35 dollars a box toby's never seen a frisbee before i don't think he's quite sure what to make of it chickens are definitely curious too [Applause] toby's never quite figured out the whole mechanics of the game of fetch it's a great deal it's gonna make your dog really happy and if you use the subscription link down below you're gonna get a free toy with each box every month it's a big time value you guys since we're still getting soaked with rain i'm gonna let toby dog play with his bark box and i'm gonna head inside to break down the numbers for you guys about the chickens hey molly it's your friendly neighborhood spider-man [Applause] oh you want spider-man to pet you that's just adorable i know it's called barkbox but i think our cats actually like the toys that come with it too okay now i know you guys watch this video because you want to get into the data and i do have the data here so when i talk about the great chicken experiment let me break down the numbers for you again over the summer we hatched chicks overall um 12 of them turned out to be hens 20 of them turned out to be roosters which is kind of a weird ratio usually it's a 50 50 split or somewhere very close to it to be that skewed is kind of surprising and ultimately we ended up butchering 22 birds our two roosters like adult roosters alexander hamilhan and general washington were the heaviest birds and i'm gonna like set them aside from these numbers but they're dressed weight meaning the weight after everything's done with getting them all prepped and gutted and all that good stuff it was 7.9 pounds for alexander hamilton and 7.1 pounds for general washington the young roosters were much lighter they were ranging i think the the heaviest one that i had there was 5.1 pounds and the lightest one was like 3.4 pounds i think something like that so they were ranging between like you know three and a half pounds and in five pounds of the upper limit and that's kind of normal for a bird that's 16 weeks old the average weight for my young roosters ended up being 4.115 pounds and in terms of some of the cost that you might be interested in it took me roughly 256 pounds of food to feed these birds it's like six and a half bags of feed uh based on the feed bags that we use ultimately the birds produced a total of 82.3 pounds of meat the real thing that you guys are probably wondering is how does this compare to other operations remember i was setting out to do this as an ethical way to raise meat chickens as a byproduct of raising laying hens and really when it comes down to it to do something like that right i really need to be thinking about contrasting what i did here in this experiment to a more standard more traditional model for raising chickens and that's where my buddy john ceskovich comes in so if you guys don't know him john ciscovich has his own youtube channel he also used to have a podcast he is a super smart guy he runs a farm he actually works at a really famous brewery and he has a little consulting company called farm marketing solutions you know he really helps farmers think about their business john also very notably is the inventor of the ciscovich model stress-free chicken tractor it's that chicken tractor that you see around on homesteads and farms all across the country and really all around the world it's one of the best designs i've built several of them for our farm here i highly recommend it it's my favorite design of chicken tractor john sells like a version of the plans on his website he also sells a product known as the pastured poultry packet that is essentially a whole setup and template for you if you wanted to start marketing your own meat chickens and what's nice about john is he is a data geek he loves to collect data and so i reached out to john to actually get some numbers to compare and contrast what i did with my experiment to what he does when he's raising meat burns on his farm his model is much more traditional he's raising cornish cross chickens he's doing them for about eight weeks he keeps them in his chicken tractors and moves them along every day so you are getting very good organic pasture-raised birds but you're not getting birds that are running around completely free-range like we had at our farm and so what i decided to do is take a cost comparison per bird of one of john's meat birds versus one of my meat birds you know john pays a dollar 43 for each chick from a hatchery meanwhile you could actually make the case that my chicks were free because i just took some of my eggs from the farm and chucked them in an incubator but you know you need to calculate for the cost of electricity and the cost of the egg and so i roughly arrived at 50 cents per chick as my cost per bird when the chicks are young you need heat and so john has about nine cents per bird for his cost of heat i'd say mine's a little higher because i'm doing fewer birds and so i have less scalability and so it's about 20 cents per bird for certain numbers i didn't really track my data as good as i should and so i just kind of used the same number that john did so i can have a somewhat apples to apples comparison a lot of these costs though are very negligible things like shaving and grit and then also my labor cost i didn't really track my hours john meticulously tracks his hours and so i'm gonna just assume that we were both at 4.24 cents when it comes to the labor of supporting raising the birds the biggest difference by far when you look at the cost structure is per bird it cost john 6.77 to feed the bird for its entire life meanwhile i was at 12 and 80 cents per bird over the life of that bird that is a pretty sizable difference and i know that that's going to ultimately impact the bottom line cost that i have to deal with here when i get to the grand total if i'm actually looking at our feed costs like as we're buying per bag of feed it's actually very very close you know what john pays versus what i pay so that is apples to apples i think the biggest difference is the fact that john only raises his birds for eight weeks meanwhile i had my birds around for a total of 16 weeks that's twice as long that makes a big difference in your feed cost and that makes a good sense of why my feed cost would be almost twice as much as his in terms of processing costs john ends up taking his birds and sending them off to a processor meanwhile what i did for my experiment birds is i processed them all myself and so he has a per bird cost of five dollars and 30 cents while if i look at my hours and then divide it by 12 an hour i'm at about four dollars and 36 cents per bird but because john's taking his birds to a processor he has to think about the cost of gasoline i don't have to do that so i get a zero he has a 50 cent charge cost of storage like keeping him in the freezer you know john uses 50 cents as his plug i just kind of took his number as well john also vaccinates his birds i don't do any of that so i didn't have a cost there the total cost per bird ended up looking actually somewhat similar again i saved money on the chicks i saved money on the processing but i ended up spending a lot more money on feed and so while john's birds cost 19.14 to produce an average bird mine cost 22.68 cents john's average weight per bird was actually much higher than mine even though his birds were only eight weeks old and my birds were 16 weeks old they were 4.832 pounds per bird on average for john's birds meanwhile mine checked in at 4.115 pounds per bird that's where those cornish cross birds make such a big difference to your business model and so if you take all of these costs and you take the average weight and ultimately get it down to what's it cost per pound of meat we're talking about 3.96 per pound from john while meanwhile my little roosters cost 5.51 cents per pound of meat admittedly that is a very sizable difference and so if i'm thinking about my experiment as a business enterprise i think it's kind of not going to hold up you know when you look at john's costs right it's pretty reasonable to charge your consumer five dollars or five dollars and 25 cents per pound for what you're selling to them to make a similar margin you'd have to charge somebody like i don't know six or seven bucks per pound per bird that makes a huge difference and so over the course of this year i hope i have addressed a burning question that many of you had of is it more economical to just raise roosters for meat or is it better to go the traditional route to raise your meat birds if you're just looking at the cost side of things the meat bird approach is absolutely the better approach now the other question some of you might have about the meat birds that i raised is how was the actual meat if you think about john's meat and what his birds taste like or probably taste like because i've never tasted them specifically but i've tasted birds that have been raised in a very similar fashion it is very much the big kind of meaty chicken that americans have grown used to it tastes like chicken it tastes great it's got nice yellow fat to it it's a good good product if i think about my roosters though they were a little bit different they were most definitely less meaty most notably the breast portion of the meat bird was much less pronounced compared to like i say a traditional cornish cross but i actually think i preferred the flavor of our birds it wasn't tough it wasn't stringy it was still very good to eat you can easily roast it you could easily cook it like on a grill or something but i found that it had like the more complex flavor of like dark meat than say like a traditional cornish crust chicken i personally really like that i think some people really like that in general i know it's not for everybody though i think the major contributors there are number one genetics you know the cornish cross is just gonna grow bigger and meteor just because of its freakish genetics but then number two when i look at the lifestyle of the birds it's very different you know john's birds are in a chicken tractor they're pecking away they're outside they're they're not in any sort of factory situation so i don't want to portray it as anything such as that but my birds were out there running around living their best life they were chasing after bugs they were running around chasing each other fighting with each other picking through stuff they were going crazy they were having a good time so i think that that active lifestyle contributes to the more dark meat style bird that i ultimately produced so let's bring it all together if i'm thinking about cost i think that my experiment failed relative to the more traditional model if i'm thinking about taste i'm gonna call it a draw if i'm thinking about the ethics side of it i am going to give myself the the plus because i actually do think that the birds led a more bird-like life and if you really care about seeing the chicken-ness of a chicken being truly expressed i think the model that we tried here this summer did that better than the more traditional model again not that i'm really knocking the traditional model i'm just comparing and saying one is a little bit better than the other and so all in all i would actually kind of call this contest a draw i think the real question that some of you might be wondering is will i try to do this again next year and the answer is yes 100 the reason i plan to do this next year is number one i need more layer hens and so i want to keep hatching more layer hens and i enjoy raising the baby birds and so just from that standpoint alone i think i would be stuck with these roosters to begin with and while i could go to a hatchery and just buy the female chicks i actually like the fact that i'm taking responsibility for the male birds and raising them myself and putting them to good use i will also say that yeah it produces a more expensive meat but if this is just going into the freezer and it's something that alison and i are eating over the next couple of months and it's something we might be sharing with friends and family it's not necessarily exorbitantly expensive you know if i'm looking at it just from a pure cost standpoint right the way that i raised those birds is about 30 percent more expensive and i don't think that this will ever make sense as a business model but for me personally i'm happy to pay that extra 30 to have chicken in the freezer that i know lived a great chicken life and so yes i do intend to do this again now if you've enjoyed this experiment and want to really look back at how all of this started i'll leave a link to the original video over here i definitely recommend you check it out you know i got to say one of the reasons i love doing youtube videos is it gives me this opportunity to step back and look back at what happened previously at the farm and just relive the story i hope you guys enjoy that too thanks for watching

Channel: Gold Shaw Farm

Views: 199,757

Keywords: gold shaw farm, duck farm, goose farm, vermont farm, farm vlog, raising chickens, chicken hybrids, hybrid, hrbrid chickens, raising meat chickens, ethical chickens, meat birds

Id: bXe0vCa207E

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021