Finally, a Harvest!

My wife gives me a hard time because the last half dozen or so times I've gone hunting I've done exactly that hunting with no killing involved. So it felt great to come home with 137.4 pounds of meat today.

As I told the butcher, all my hesitations about raising Cornish Crosses evaporated when I saw how beautiful they looked naked... :-) I mean that honestly, the Cornish were not good looking birds when they were alive. About a third of them hadn't finished feathering out yet. We'll see how they taste.

Here's the breakdown on costs:

30 Cornish Cross Ideal nursery day old hatchlings delivered to our door: $48 (Caught a good sale.)

Feed: 14 bags at $18 per 50 pound bag, $252 (This is an area we can do better on next time.)

Butcher, vacuum seal, label, etc. $84

Total cost: $384. Price per pound $2.79. 

Takeaways: The snake losses, 3 birds, 2 chickens had wounds found by the butcher and condemned there, and the 4 birds that just died of no apparent reasons really hurt the overall price per pound. Assuming we could have kept 4 more alive and made average weight, it would have cut the price per pound by right at $0.50 per pound. That's a big deal.

The moving Salatin tractor is a must. The chickens didn't do a good job of keeping themselves clean. I've never seen chickens content to never scratch, eat laying down, drink laying down. I think being forced to move onto new grass will help considerably. 

Practice better predator control, the tractors are going to be built with hardware cloth, and we'll focus on snake proofing them each day until they're out of the danger zone.

I've got to do a better job next time breaking down feed costs. This time if anything I way overestimated our costs. Still we have to get our costs under $2.00 a pound if we want to be competitive. 

Feed costs themselves. I bought all of our feed this go round at Tractor Supply. I didn't know how much we'd need. I know there is a farm in Waxahachie milling their own non-GMO, non-soy feed for $14 a bag when you buy in bulk.

If we're going to do this it makes sense to do some geese and turkeys at the same time, then separate them as they get bigger. I think we might do a half dozen turkey's next year as well and see if we can create a market for those as well.