Reddit reviews Pastured Poultry Profit$

Don't grow feed. You might think it's expensive, but you'll never break even compared to the cost of buying the feed. The reality is that the corn growing industry is HIGHLY efficient, and the perceived "high cost" of the feed is actually much lower than the real cost of the industry producing that corn, due to various subsidies in crop insurance and an overall approach to keeping prices low and stable.

In my opinion, with the very very small amount of acreage you have, you have very few options for turning the land into a legitimate profit.

Your two options that are high enough in density/intensity to make the work, organization and logistics worth the effort are hogs for meat, and chickens for meat and or eggs, and even in this case, I'd suggest a focus on meat chickens, as broilers are much more intensive, and a good layer operation (if you're looking at the premium, affective market) is much more extensive.

You can pick up a book by Joel Salatin, "Pastured Poltry Profits" if you haven't already read this.

If you want to do this, your acreage is a bit under the amount that he suggests for a full time vocation (20 acres), but enough that you could make a substantial operation, and depending on your location, you might get a longer/larger season. My weather is a bit harsh, and in many ways it makes poultry production a pain. If you live somewhere with very mild weather, or somewhere relatively hot and dry, but with access to irrigation that keeps your grass growing for a much longer season, you might be able to approach the volume that Salatin is suggesting on smaller acreage, but you should include more info so we can help you better.

I'd suggest you work on primarily:

Curb Appeal - the small space you have, which is really just a big yard, hardly even worthy of being called a homestead traditionally, let alone a production farm, means that you need to squeeze every bit you can out of each square foot to make production profitable. Making your hole operation pretty means that you can get customers to irrationally associate the visual appeal of your operation with a host of other assumptions about the happiness of the animals, the quality of care you provide them etc. This isn't immoral. People WANT this out of their farms, because they are neat city folk, and they want to feel comfortable and not have their standards questioned. Pigs want a muddy pit and gross slop. They don't care how it looks, but people will be happier eating pork that came from a pretty farm, so play to that, not to what the animals need. Having a pig hut that you move around from small pig pasture to small pig pasture that looks like a miniature red barn might seem dumb, and the pigs wont care, but many customers will LOVE it, especially if the visual appeal of your property creates photo ops. Play to that market demand.

Overlapping systems of production - Salatin raises rabbits, which produce potent manure, and he stacks his rabbit operation literally vertically on top of a laying hen operation. The hens scratch through the bedding below the rabbits, and they help turn the manure into useful fertilizer, and keep the operation smelling relatively mild. He also grazes cattle on the same fields he runs chickens on, and turkeys on. This vertical stacking increases the economic activity per acre, and your small parcel demands this kind of stacking. Think about ways you can use the same space for multiple things throughout the year.

Affective Experiences - Customers want emotional value in the things they buy from small farms. Cutesy bullshit to a farmer is gold to a non-farmer customer. Silly signs, heart warming blurbs and product descriptions, chances to get their hands minorly dirty in some of the production work in a non challenging way. People want a narrative about the farm their products come from, and they want to make memories/come away with stories about the experience. Since you don't have a large property, you can focus on combining the visual appeal with things that help create these opportunities. Consider teaching classes on things like making pickles/jam, harvesting honey, making cheese. You might even be able to teach them about a thing you don't even have space to do on your farm. Maybe you pair with a local farm that does have a large number of apiaries, and you do a class that involves a "field trip," to the neighbor and a meeting with a bee keeper.

People want these experiences, and a shockingly low amount of information and expertise is needed to impress them. You already know a huge amount more than most city folks, and they will pay what seems like a ludicrous amount of money to get a taste of the things that you consider mundane.

Good luck!

Also, remember, share some more info about zones, what your neighbors are up to, how far away you are from a major city/town that gets a lot of seasonal tourism, etc if you want us to be able to help you more.

I'll also point out that a lot of the guys here are "real farmers," in the sense that they are row croppers, growing corn, soy, wheat, rape, rice, etc. They are working hundreds to thousands of acres, and what they are doing is very different from what you're trying to do. You might get more applicable expertise in like a homesteading/backyard chickens/permaculture forum than you will here.

Thank you for posting that.

Also Joel wrote a whole book about it in 1996. Using his numbers he made $25,000 net profit on 20 acres. That's $1250 an acre in 1996, adjust for inflation and that's $1900 per acre now. Given /u/fonzietheman 5 acres that's $9500 in the first year. Since some of the costs are installation, the profit per acre in the following years would be higher. Also of note - the demand for pastured poultry in the US has gone up substantially since the 90's.

I hope that clears that up, /u/l0destone

Yea you could have a good amount on that space. You might look in to raising broilers, or even specialty eggs for market, check out Joel Salatines Pastured Poultry Profits. I am on about a 10th of a acre and have 7 layers and 15 broilers, I will probably do 25 broilers in the next batch. Plus I have a feeling you can get cheaper feed than the Seattle metro area.

PM me if you have any questions and maybe I can point you in the right direction

Pastured Poultry for Profits is where I started with broilers.

As far as I know these birds won't produce very viable offspring unfortunately. There's four breeding steps involved to get the birds to the point where they are now. Not as many steps as a Cornish X but you're not going to get the same type of bird if you can actually get them to mate naturally. I'd just prepare to slaughter them all around 50-55 days old. I read here that others have gone as far as 12-13 weeks but I'll tell you the cockerels are huge at that point, have really big gonads and honestly don't taste as good as they do if they are slaughtered under 8 weeks of age. I sometimes will allow the hens another week depending on their size. 4.5-6 pound dressed birds is what I like. They fit into Vacmaster 8x12 bags well at that size.
These birds may be too big and cumbersome to actually help protect the hens. Well, I guess they'd really just be a sacrificial lamb.

As far as a fair price. I'd say $10 would be fair but most people I know can't even give away their extra roosters. I've got two that were dumped off at my local feed store. I took them in thinking I could re-home them but no luck so far. I'll most likely cull them in the next few days. I have the first batch of Red Rangers coming the second week of April and I need to clean the area in the barn where the rooster currently are to make space for the brooders.

Do you have any photos of these Red Ranger you could share with me?