How can i raise pastured poultry

Farmers no longer need to build expensive chicken houses or pay the high electric costs to ventilate the buildings. The improved genetics and healthy, active lifestyle that pastured poultry enjoy translates into better tasting meat and eggs. Discerning customers are now choosing responsibly-sourced chicken not only for ethical reasons, but also because it is a better product. Switching to pastured poultry can be a benefit to your farm and help you create a sustainable, thriving business you can hand down to the next generation.

While pastured flocks involve more labor costs, there are considerably less infrastructure and overhead costs than conventional farms. In addition, raising free-range poultry provides you with a clearly defined, unique selling proposition, giving you a financial and marketable advantage over other farms. One of the greatest challenges facing most commercial farmers in the 21st century is marketing and selling.

As a pastured poultry farmer, you have additional, unique avenues to sell your meat and eggs that may not be available to traditional farms. Long a staple of rural America, the farmers market has increased in popularity in recent years — especially in suburban and urban areas — as people are more discerning of where their food comes from.

Farmers markets are a great way to meet new customers and highlight the benefits of your free-range birds. Be sure to check with your state and local laws to find out what regulations apply, including how many birds you may process and sell. If you live in an area with a lot of people, consider having open hours on your farm for people to purchase directly.

This helps you create personal relationships with your customers, build brand loyalty, and increase profits per bird. Plus, having individuals visit your farm allows you to educate them on the importance of locally-sourced food and raising birds in a healthy, humane way.

Community Supported Agriculture CSA groups have become a popular option for farmers and consumers alike. Meat CSAs are a great opportunity for a farmer to receive money at the start of the season.

To set yourself apart from other CSAs in your area, consider adding additional offerings — like vegetables or bone broth — or offer delivery to nearby communities. Remember that meat-type chickens today reach heavier weights at younger ages than in the past and recommended densities are lower than with old-fashioned breeds. This space requirement is particularly necessary during periods of heat stress.

Because you are confining the birds to a shelter with no fans or other reliable ventilation, you must give the birds room to spread out and help stop heat from building up in the shelter. You should be able to remove any solid walls or cloths covering the sides of the shelters on hot days; you want as much breeze as possible to flow over the birds.

Remember that the birds are confined to a small area and you must provide them the conditions that they need to be comfortable. Feed costs especially organic feed can be fairly high.

Therefore, if you are raising a significant number of birds, you may want to consider growing some or all of your own feed. Growing feed can reduce your expenses and make your operation more self-sufficient and sustainable. Pastured poultry are generally resilient to diseases and infections. The most common health and management challenges are weather and predators. Adequate shelter is vital in most climates to shield your birds from cold, rain, severe wind, and heat.

Predator protection, such as portable electric poultry fencing, is also important in most areas. Daily maintenance tasks include checking the birds for health, replenishing their feed and water supply, and cleaning their housing and pen areas. Be sure to keep detailed health records for your birds, including: age, vaccinations, egg production, etc. Chickens will graze any type of pasture, and while they prefer legumes over grasses, they will eventually consume the entire pasture.

As you plan your pastures, begin by utilizing pre-existing pastures, especially if you already keep pastured ruminants. However, if you must replant or create new pasture areas, plant a diverse mix of forages that mature at different times of the year to improve soil quality and provide grazing variety for the birds.

As you choose forages to plant, be certain to consider your site factors such as soil type, rainfall, etc. Salatin also suggests keeping grass short a few inches because it helps the birds to ingest more food. Fencing is another significant and beneficial component of your poultry pasture. Though fencing is not essential, it offers protection from most predators except avian predators such as hawks , while enabling the birds to access adequate range space.

Most small scale producers use only a few foot rolls of poultry netting and one battery charger to pasture an entire flock. Andy Lee offers helpful advice on working with poultry netting in his book Day Range Poultry. Birds raised outdoors on pasture especially free range are susceptible to attacks from predators such as foxes, raccoons, coyotes, skunks, weasels, hawks and dogs.

Once you have identified the predators most prevalent in your area, poultry producer Brian Moyer offers the following suggestion to prevent losses:. Recycling resources within your farm is the key to both; it reduces the number of inputs that must be purchased from off the farm and replaces many of the resources that are lost through off-farm exports.

Approximately 3 acres is required to grow feed for about broilers per year, and as Andy Lee notes, the manure from that number of birds is sufficient to fertilize the land to grow their feed. If feed is grown on the farm and manure is recycled as fertilizer for the feed crops via pasture and composting , it is then easy to replace the nitrogen exported off the farm via eggs and meat by growing leguminous cover crops and forage. Recent research determined that 0. Clearly, poultry can enhance and benefit the farm, but is small scale poultry farming economically viable?

Producers Joel Salatin and Andy Lee agree that pastured poultry farming is easy to start on a small scale, with little initial capital investment, and often provides a quick return on investment. Diversity is also vital. Pastured poultry is an excellent, low cost way to diversify your farm and increase your income. One of the greatest advantages of raising poultry is that, once a management routine is established, time and labor requirements can be flexible.

Some poultry producers start out with some other off-farm income and then gradually grow into a full-time farming enterprise. Joel Salatin, for example, has perfected raising poultry for profit. According to Salatin, raising poultry on pasture, even for part of the year, can be lucrative.

If you want to raise poultry with the goal of a full time income, like Salatin, you will probably need to raise thousands of broilers and layers. However, with a well-designed, ecologically sound operation, either a few hundred or a few thousand birds can improve your income and operational diversity with a minimal outlay of money and time.

Thanks for the information, Really useful to know about all these poultry equipments in a single place. Also shared with my colleagues. This is very detailed. I will read it more thoroughly soon. What I am curious about is if there is any way to raise chickens that meet my dietary needs. For pain management, I do a very restrictive elimination diet, a more severe form of the Paleo diet, and do not eat any grains, legumes, sugars, dairy and many nightshade vegetables.

Many country folk are going back to raising poultry outdoors, joining the movement which was pioneered by Virginian grazier Joel Salatin. But we have advanced beyond the chicken wire run, or free ranging barnyard birds in Old MacDonald fashion.

Movable shelters offer protection from weather and from predators. Moving them daily also gives the chickens a controlled portion of fresh pasture instead of the dusty run or barnyard of poultry that stays close to the shelter of the farm buildings. Chickens raised in a portable pen and moved regularly, eat grass, legumes, forbs and insects to supplement their diet, and typically consume less grain.

If they are crowded or not moved regularly, the feed consumption will noticeably increase. We will give some suggestions for raising the most common types of pastured poultry. Egg layers are probably the easiest pastured poultry to raise and are very popular. Their basic needs are feed, water, a place to roost for the night, and a place to lay their eggs. Pullets can be bought ready to lay, usually weeks old, or you can buy chicks and raise them yourself.

Raising layer chicks is the same as for meat chickens — they need to be brooded with a heat lamp or thermostatically controlled propane brooder for a few weeks. Then you can move them outside in a pasture poultry shelter. Pullets young hens are fed starter and grower feeds until they start to lay eggs, then you switch them over to layer ration.

Always try to switch gradually by first mixing in the new feed for several days. Layers need less feed than meat chickens, so they also require somewhat less feeder space. One of our 4-foot long feeders is enough space in a shelter if you move the shelter and fill the feeders twice a day. If you want to have over 75 hens in a shelter , or if you will only move them once a day, you should have two 4-foot feeders.

We put about hens in a Cackellac model shelter and move them twice a day. Model does If you put in a you should definitely plan to move them twice a day.