As promised, this week is a follow-up to last week's story about our pasture-raised chickens and the Globe article taste test. More than a few folks commented about the story and many more were inspired enough to stop by the Farm Store to try our amazing Freedom Ranger chickens for themselves. Thank you! We trust and hope you were not disappointed with the outcome! One first-time Freedom Ranger customer commented "Awesome!". Bam. Nailed it!
The Globe story brought up an equally important topic about chickens, aside from taste. And that is the price disparity among chicken brands. There is indeed a huge price disparity in the marketplace and it is quite perplexing. We now know (I hope at least) that all chickens are not created equal! They vary tremendously in their breeding/genetics, what and how they are fed, and how they are grown including whether they are grown indoors or outdoors, the amount of space they have to grow in, the size of the groups they are grown and if grown outside, are they on pasture, in a dirt lot? moved frequently or not, etc...
They also greatly differ in how they are handled, processed, harvested, and marketed. All of these factors add up to one gigantic cost differential. In a search online for this story, I found the following about the commercial broiler chicken market: "The US chicken producer margins are currently at 13 cents per pound. While that’s down from a recent peak of 19 cents per pound in June, margins are still sharply above the negative margins of minus 3 cents at the beginning of 2021. Over the past decade, chicken producer margins averaged 9 cents per pound. Margins got a big boost this year as chicken prices rose sharply, while feed costs have eased from their highs." These margins refer to the conventional broiler industry where thousands of birds are raised together in dark barns and fed continuous rations of grain so they grow as quickly as possible, expend as little energy as possible as they grow, and are usually harvested at 30-49 days. The entire system is vertically integrated where the companies control the feed, growing, harvesting, and marketing of the birds. I don't pretend to know the baseline economics of the factory farming broiler industry but the numbers of birds grown are tremendous. This week on the USDA chicken report (which is quite fascinating) you can see that 166 million chickens were harvested the week ending Dec 11th. Astounding numbers. That is over 9 BILLION chickens a year just in the U.S.! That's a lot of chicken and a lot of work has gone into growing and harvesting those birds as cheaply as possible. According to this report, the average weight is 6 lbs per bird and at a profit of 13 cents per lb that equals about $130 million in profit per week. The numbers vary but in general, we can extrapolate that the profit margin varies but can be pegged at around 10%. Small profits times huge production can add up to big $. But the inverse is where the challenge is.
Growers like us who only grow around 5000 birds per year face a totally different cost structure. We are NOT vertically integrated, we don't control the whole chain of growing and harvesting, and despite our best attempts at being efficient in how we farm, our costs are in a different stratosphere than the commercial industry. Where we PAY $1.50 to just buy a baby chicken and then pay about $6 just to have a chicken harvested, the industry sells an entire whole chicken for less than that. These are difficult comparisons to make but when we sell our chickens in the Farm Store at $7.49lb x 5lb = $37.45. Our profit margin is also in the 15% range when all of our expenses including organic feed, labor, overhead, and processing costs are tallied and 15% of $37.45 = $5.61 per bird. When you look at it this way, we are not making all that much for a tremendous amount of work that begins in March when we get our first baby meat bird chickens and concludes in late October. Within this time frame, we are brooding baby chickens in our brooder, using high-quality bedding and heat lamps to keep the birds comfortable as they grow, we feed them local certified organic grain at a cost of $900 per ton (more than 2x the cost of conventional feed), we then catch each bird at three weeks of age and move them to the pasture pens at Mt. Misery Field. Then we have another 5-8 weeks of moving the shelters every day of the week to new pasture so the birds have continual access to fresh forage. We hand feed and water the birds and also have to deal with losses from predation. Finally, we try and rally volunteers to help us catch the birds so they can be crated and brought in for harvest at a USDA facility that is an hour away. We drive back and forth a total of four times to drop them off then pick the packaged and inspected birds back up. THEN, we need to unload them all, price them, put them out for sale, and whatever birds don't sell need to be moved again into our freezers to be stored until they sell as frozen chickens. I'm tired just thinking of all this work!
These are the challenges, small, local farms face when being compared to industrial-scale agriculture. If you solely look at the retail price of a food item, local agriculture will almost always come up short. So we cannot just focus on the economic piece. Many in our community are fortunate enough to have the ability, and yes, luxury, to look beyond the price tag. We fully understand that not all folks are able to look beyond price. Especially these days where the financial disparity in our society is a tremendous problem. Luckily, the amount of work we expend working the land, caring for our livestock the way we do, and being good stewards has its benefits. The quality of the food we produce is stellar and (almost!) beyond compare. And luckily for us, many of you, our fans and customers, know this and value this. But understanding the background, the story, is equally important for many. It's why we try and take the time to inform and educate about the harsh reality of farming, including all the joys and deep challenges we face each and every day as we do our best to feed our small part of the planet.
This is definitely not easy work, and no doubt running a farm is an expensive undertaking, but we believe the work we do has value and contributes to the betterment of our community. We are not producing the "cheapest" food out there, but that's not really our purpose. We are here to nourish, to educate, to inform, and to nurture the land under our care. As always, we are as grateful as ever to have a supportive community that enjoys eating well and is as committed as we are to "Voting with your fork" as my wise wife would say. We all have choices to make in life and ...by voting with your fork...by choosing to buy local...you are voting to support local agriculture and the healthy, nutrient-dense, and super tasty foods we are fortunate enough to grow. Farming is life.
