This is a video I made in the summer of 2014. It was the third summer of my time as a hobby farmer in northern Minnesota, and I had a website and blog I was running at the time called Gardenagerie, on which I was documenting that experience. I was also preparing to teach American Environmental History online for UMass, so I decided to use this with my students when we talked about the relationship between family farming and agribusiness.
Here’s the transcript:
Hi, my name is Dan Allosso and I am an environmental historian as well as a small farmer. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is test out, as I learn small farming, to test out some of the ideas that I run across in books. And today what I want to talk about is the idea that heritage Chickens, or at least standard breed chickens, are an easier or more economical or a better way to go than the hybrid birds that you see in the grocery store.
One of the things I think that we're discovering is that the ideological element is sometimes not the most practical way to go. Ideologically, for example, I have kind of an objection to the hybrid chickens that can't reproduce naturally, that have to be bought year after year from a hatchery because the Genetics are all controlled by a very small number of growers.
The goal of this was not only sustainability, but knowing where our meat came from. We do occasionally go out. And we do occasionally eat steaks and fish, which we don't raise ourselves. But all of the chicken, all of the eggs, all of the turkey, and all of the lamb that we eat, which is probably 95 percent of our meat consumption, comes off of this land now.
And so That's a nice feeling. To know where these things came from, to know how they were treated, to know what they were fed, and what they weren't fed. It's important. So, mission accomplished as far as that goes. But still, the process of raising meat in the summer, although we do live in a northern climate, is still a long way to go ahead. The process of raising meat in the summer and putting it in freezers for the winter is not a real time process. It's not the same as just having chickens and, going out to the farmyard and taking one down to put fresh on the table. And maybe that's something that in the long run we'll get to.
Right now we're happy, I think, to be in a situation where we're providing our own meat. So the questions that we're asking ourselves about this chicken raising process have to do with the expense of getting the birds, the cost of feeding them, and the cost of upkeep, which in the case of the free range birds includes the cost of fences and fence chargers and batteries and things like that.
And then the time that we put into them. As I said, the hybrid birds, you keep for about eight or nine weeks. The standard breeds, you can keep for up to six months before they really get to the ideal size and weight to be butchered and thrown in the freezer. And six months is a lot of time. Six months is a lot of trips up to the pasture with feed and water. Six months is a lot of moves of the paddock throughout the field Because you gotta move that paddock about once a week. And, if the birds end up being five pounders, and the hybrid birds are all nine, ten pounders, that means it's twice as much butchering. But before we get to butchering, let's talk about the whole process.
When you order chicks by mail, you get a box that looks like this. And inside the box, in our case, is the frying pan variety of general purpose chicken. All males, whatever they happen to have on the day that they fill your order. We got our batch about the 5th of April. And this is what they looked like when we put them in the brooder. Occasionally you get a bird that doesn't make it. That little guy in the front didn't. Unfortunately, right after we got them, we had a snowstorm. So we had to bring them indoors and put them in a new brooder, which added a little bit of expense.
Several weeks later, about a month later, the broilers arrived. And they were all uniform because they are all Cornish Cross hybrids. Two weeks later, they had grown substantially. And about a month later, they were actually out on the field. So about the end of the first week of June, it was a cold spring for us up north, we were ready to put both the broilers and the standard breeds out on the pasture.
Now, I was surprised, a little bit surprised, and impressed that the broilers were actually able to forage a little bit, because we had been told that they really weren't good foragers, and that they would simply sit around and wait for you to bring them food. These guys are exploring a little bit. They seem active and alert, which is a good thing.
The big birds, which are twice as old at this point, are really good foragers and are pretty self sufficient. They're up on a bigger pasture farther away from the barn. And they're doing a good job taking care of themselves at this point. At about five weeks of age. These Cornish cross hybrids are actually by weight about twice the size of the birds that are twice their age up in the high pasture.
They are not great foragers, although they will eat a little bit of greens. They don't seem to like food scraps or sprouted grains or any of the other things that the standard birds will eat. So they are a little bit pickier. We're told that the hybrid Cornish crosses are extremely feed efficient, but what that means is that you actually have to feed them feed, which is an added expense if you're used to feeding standard birds on scraps and food waste and things that you find around the farm.
It's the 4th of July and these are the hybrid chickens at the Roughly six weeks of age. Now they're supposed to be reaching butchering weight about eight weeks of age and then the breeders warn you, the hatcheries warn you not to keep them more than about nine weeks because they start to develop problems. As you can see these guys are getting big. Their size is actually real unlike the guys up the hill who have a lot of feathers and Not a lot of weight under them. These guys are very thin feathering and all body weight. Their body shape is a whole lot different from the ones up the hill. We read that you're supposed to feed them 12 hours on, see how they waddle, 12 hours on, 12 hours off, so that they don't eat themselves to death.
These guys are getting Crumbles and cracked corn mixed. And then they're picking at whatever they find on the ground and in the grass and the weeds. I think they're probably healthier and happier on the grass than they would be in a pen. Every once in a while they try to run around and they flap their wings as if they expect they can get off the ground. Of course they can't get off the ground. Unlike the other birds who, at 6 or 7 weeks of age, were much smaller, but were able to fly.
And these are the variety birds. We call the up the hill birds because that's where they live, up the hill. They have picked over this ground about as much as they possibly can. So, after we go to the Fourth of July parade today, I'll be coming back and moving them to a new spot, directly adjacent to that far fence line there. And they'll be able to eat that grass, as well as the scraps from the restaurant down the road that we give them, and some cracked corn. They eat not much more than, these 90 or so birds eat not much more than the two dozen big birds down the hill. And you can see they've dug themselves a little hole, a couple of holes there that they can use as Dust baths. And then they've spilled out the container of their cracked corn up there and they're scratching away.
Okay, now, they're getting excited because they see me with a food bucket. So, this is what happens when they're fed. There you go, kids. It's a combination of crumbles and corn. And they're pretty good at polishing it off.
Yeah, this one’s kind of staggering. I haven't seen anything that you would call broken bones, but apparently it is getting a lot harder for them to move around now With the weight that they've put on. And this is the upstairs feeding frenzy I've just given them Sprouts on the left, sprouted sunflower on the left, And a combination of cracked corn and a little bit of crumbles on the right so for these guys, sprouts and anything that adds a little bit of variety is really attractive.
That's one of the advantages of these birds is, although they're half the size of the ones down by the barn and take a lot longer to grow out to a slaughterable weight, they will eat. Pretty much anything, they're omnivores. Like, true chicken ancestors. So, they can be fed on food scraps. Yard waste. Grass clippings, actually. Weeding from the garden. And sprouted sunflower seeds. Sprouted oats. I just basically take a bag of sunflower seeds that would normally go to bird feed, and I sprout it for a couple of days. And they love it. I would say, 4 out of 5 birds surveyed here prefer sprouts to cracked corn and crumbles.
Another factor, another cost factor, another issue that you want to think about is housing, and taking care of these birds. These guys the heritage breeds or the standard breeds are a lot more mobile. They will free range, but that means you have to have range to feed them on. We use electric net fencing, which is I think what most people do nowadays. It's been made really popular by farmers like Joel Salatin and we use a portable charger on a battery. That means that for every paddock of chickens you have, you need a fence, a charger, and a battery. So, there's that. It's also a good idea to have a shelter to put them in. And then again, there's the labor input of moving this thing on a regular basis.
So, those are all factors that you need to keep in mind as you're thinking about how you're going to do this. Okay, so this is a side by side comparison the bird in front is a standard breed, not exactly sure what, probably a Delaware or something like that, three months old. The bird in back is a Cornish cross hybrid broiler, two months old.
Today's the day we're going to be butchering them. They're about eight weeks. Three days, four days old, something like that. The standard bird is thickly feathered. That's why he actually looks bigger than he really is. Probably weighs right now about between three and four pounds. The hybrid bird is thinly feathered. And probably right now weighs at least eight to nine pounds. We're going to have to leave the standard birds up on the pasture for another three months to get them to butchering size. And then even at that, they'll only average about five pounds each. Probably these guys, I expect. We'll be seeing some nine pound, maybe even ten pound birds when they're all over and done with in the freezer.
If you've got a big field, you can move them from paddock to paddock. Just move the fence. It's convenient if you have two fences. You set up the new fence and then you kind of drive the chickens into that new area before you take down the previous fence. I'm standing on the last area that they were at before, the one that they're at now. They've been on that. piece of grass for a little bit too long. You can see that it's really eaten down and kind of worn out. I would move them if we weren't in the process of butchering them.
And when it's all said and done, one hybrid chicken is about the same size as two standard. So in the end for us, the decision rests on the time that we have to put into raising and then processing these meat birds. It seems a little counterintuitive to me still and it came as a complete surprise but I think the decision is falling in favor of the hybrid birds at least in the scenario that we're now in where they're available at a relatively low cost where the feed is available and where the biggest factor in our decision making process is the time that we'll put into raising them, the time that we'll save raising the hybrid birds rather than the others, that can go into other things that we need to do here on the farm because there's always plenty of work.
There's always something to be done.
Chicken Comparison Project