The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Poultry & Waterfowl => Topic started by: sarahdean_66 on November 19, 2014, 02:27:50 pm
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I'm starting with chickens as a bit of a business having kept them as pets for years now. I'm looking for general advice really some dos and don'ts from people who have already done it! Going to rear chicks from heat to pol and sell, sell eggs both hatching and eating, hatch chicks and sell at all ages and rear some meat birds as well. Also got some pol hens for eggs and a group of frizzle hens cocks and chicks which I can breed more from. Any hints and tips?
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Start with the best stock you can. Market research, what sells in your area (or what would people like to buy?)
Decide what you are doing with boys before you hatch.
Work out all your expected costs/profits.
Record everything you spend, including electric for incubator and lamps, sawdust, wormer, etc. and the time you have to keep males for, till you can Id them.
Good luck!
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Your going to be spending a lot of money before you get it back.
Pointless breeding rubbish from rubbish, as the market is swamped with lookalikes and hybrids. Getting a reputation and keeping it can be difficult.
Do not make the big mistake of getting to many breeds.
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Thanks guys some useful points!
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There are quite a few 'chicken sellers' around Cambridgeshire. Have a look at the competition and see what they are offering. You need to then have your own unique selling point or go into direct competition with them.
With eggs go and speak to your potential buyers and see if there is a market for you either shops, markets, pubs/restaurants or 'joe public'. You need to work out how much you can get for the eggs and if it is cost viable.
Do the research and costings prior to purchase, whilst not a guarantee to a successful business it may prevent a huge failure.
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Yes there is a few around and one of the big pol sellers is closing down and not due to lack of sales for other reasons. Im fairly sure I can sell the eggs, and I can match the prices of the other pol sellers just about mainly due to the low rent on the plot of land I have. I'm not expecting to make a fortune either. The points made about not too many breeds and there are a lot of hybrids about are good ones. I have frizzles as I said and some wellsummer hens so might get a wellsummer cockerel. Also looking at getting some cream legbar hens and a cockerel plus have some hybrids and will probably get a few more.
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How many batches can you hatch a year? How big is your incubator and brooders?
I can easily cover my costs and make a bit ( enough to pay for dog food) but then I don't rent land and get free barley and wheat. I was given my incubator and had wire to make pen no.1. But I think it must take years to cover start up costs if buying everything new. How are you at diy? ????
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Shed donated, run made by diy. Will need more but been offered another free. Been given incubator it holds 30 and can use the frizzles as broodies as they hatched chicks for previous owner. Rent includes land used for horses and sheep as well so bit for chickens is tiny on scale of things. I can hatch as many batches as I want really.
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What about a small side bit of a handful ducks for eggs and meat birds? Might be something a bit different for a unique selling point :) Or quail?
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A very basic calculation. For arguments sake you set 30 eggs every 3 weeks, more likely 4 weeks by the time you've waited for stragglers to hatch, cleaned the incubator etc. Let's say you average a very good 80% fertility and 75% hatch rate so every 4 weeks you hatch about 18 birds. Half of them are males so you're down to 9. You then grow these to POL and sell them. Is selling 9 birds a month worth the bother? Plus setting eggs every month you're going to need about half a dozen houses and runs to accomodate them all. I would say stump up the cash for a big incubator, say 400 eggs at least. Or maybe just buy in a nice big flock of egg layers and concentrate on egg sales. Breeding chickens to make a living is no easy task.
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An autosexing breed like the Cream Legbar will help avoid raising too many cockerels. Research your target market - pretty chickens for gardens, rare breed enthusiasts, etc. If buying in stock have a quarantine system in place or the whole lot could be wiped out. I raise three hatches a year and keep only two replacement cockerels of each breed as we've found that on average the older the cockerel the meaner he gets.
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Thanks guys I have got a few ducks as well any way so should have some eggs and meat from them too I also have a good source of day old hybrids which are sexed as well.
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don't underestimate the cost of electric incubators and heat lamps running 24/7.
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To make a living from chickens especially laying birds you have to think in terms of thousands of birds, meat chickens and ducks in terms of many hundreds and have the facilities to handle them to meet regulations.
I think in terms of dozens which barely covers the cost of keeping them but they are my indulgence :love: ::)
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I dnt need to make a living from them just cover costs and help towards m hay bill as well!
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What hughsey said, but if you can pad out batches with bought hybrids day old, and if you have broody coops for them, can add chicks to those hatched by hens, etc, to up production and save on electric costs.
This is the sort of scale I am at. It's not serious but fun and does make a little.
Another wee tip - no idea if relevant to you, but I am able to take out bars and blank off side gaps and cram more eggs into my incubator and turn manually for first few days, then I candle out duds and set with auto turn. Just means get slightly bigger batches through.
If you end up with heaps of pens of all diff ages, it does take awhile sorting out everyone's food and water, etc - no longer a 2min job when there's 8 diff batches/runs/houses!
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A very good seller is broody hens, both large and bantam. You need to breed for the double gene to sit. I sold around 60 this year.
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Really! I didn't know that! I've got 2frizzle hens who hatched the chicks I got with then for there old owner so does tht mean they sit and so will their chicks?
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What table birds are you looking to breed ?
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Not sure yet possibly just the cockerels that hatch depending on how many I have or might get a few specifically for meat as well really depends how long it takes to get another run up!
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Problem is with chickens is that their optimum laying period is quite short and with pure breeds, can take a while to get to. If you hatch a Marans in the spring, don't expect to get a decent egg much before the next spring. If you want good hatching eggs, you might be looking at the spring after that. All that time you have to house and feed the hen and in all that time it might die or get eaten. A good percentage of what you hatch may not be breed standard either so worth very little.
There is some money to be made from running chickens but it takes dedication and effort. As mentioned, when you have chicks, growers, layers and breeders on the go, there is a lot of feeders and drinkers to keep on top of. Then you have to deal with the cockerels. Pure breeds or hybrids won't be commercially viable unless you can find a market for them. We now generally take off the breast meat at 18 weeks and put the legs and thighs in the freezer for cat / dog food. Nothing gets wasted but it's all about effort vs. return.
If you can get a decent number of pure breeds after first moult with a good cockerel or 2 in a pen, there is some decent money to be made from hatching eggs but it's not easy to get there.
My Exchequer Leghorn program which I have been carefully working on all year and hoped for a return in late 2015 has just been wiped out by a fox. I guess my fault for not securing them well enough but it all gets difficult with weather and stuff, especially if you are trying to give them a decent life at the same time.
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Just make sure you focus on a few things well enough to track their costing. I'm still relatively new into breeding two colours of Orpington, two breeds of ducks and West of England geese. I think the only ones that cover their costs are the geese and I'm never going to make much from them because they only lay about 30 eggs a year and they're hellish difficult to hatch. I've found the hens much harder to shift that I had anticipated because everybody round here just wants some nice hybrid egg layers and my big, beautiful but expensive birds are not what they're after. Interestingly I've had more interest in the ducks but had a really bad year for hatching so I only had a couple of ducks to go and the rest were all drakes which will be eaten (sadly).
Also agree with the small batches being a problem - it's hard to anticipate the number of runs and houses you need if you've hatching twenty birds a month. But then equally if you're hatching hundreds you're on a whole different scale. Either way start up costs are huge.
If you're selling eggs at the gate or direct to consumer that's fine but if you want to sell to shops, restaurants etc. you need to be a registered supplier which involved egg grading and stamping. Remember the huge seasonal fluctuation in pure breed eggs layers too - I get one egg a day at the moment from about 18 'in lay' hens and two eggs a day from 12 'in lay' ducks.
If you want to sell meat you have to look very carefully into the hygiene regulations. You will need a hygiene certificate covering the preparation area (which means you will also need to comply with their requirements for e.g. handwashing vs. food prep areas, correct type of surfaces for clean down etc.) and for you, proper chiller facilities and chilled delivery facilities if you're not selling directly to the consumer. I think there are also new regulations regarding dispatch requirements. Personally I wouldn't go there because I can't believe it's commercially viable unless you have a local registered abattoir that would handle poultry (unusual and probably expensive). If you just want to eat lots of chicken, that's fine and will save you money on meat.
I think if you want to make money you have to choose exactly which of the various chicken related activities you want to do and just do that. Not a few eggs, a bit of meat and a few POL hens. That's what I do and it doesn't make money - food alone this year will have cost well into four figures (I think about £2k - I stopped recording when it became too depressing!) and I've sold about £600 worth of birds and probably £400 worth of eggs (again stopped recording in June when it was clear that even at the height of egg laying season I wasn't covering food costs - partly because I had so many growers). I will have saved on buying eggs and meat but even so, it's not going to close the gap - and that doesn't factor in bedding or vet costs either.
Just to throw another iron in the fire, if you can sort out the meat handling, Christmas turkeys would cover their costs. Mine cost £14 each in July, will have eaten about £60 worth of food between six of them and will be worth about £40 each on average (I'm guessing). The big scale local organic/free range producer that we have bought from in the past charges twice that.
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Thought of another thing on the meat front too - remember to factor in your time on the actual dispatching, plucking and dressing. Unless you go down the route of the automatic machines (which would be hard to justify on a small scale), it takes a fair time. I know I'm not fast but it takes me at least an hour to dispatch, pluck and dress a bird - more if it's a duck - so if I'm paying myself minimum wage, that's already added over £6 onto the cost of a bird. Add in the cost of hatching and raising and you're soon charging a heck of a lot for meat just to cover your costs.
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With the aid of a burco boiler, I've got kill, scald, pluck and draw down to 20 minutes but that is way off what we should be looking at. It's OK for me but commercially, it's ridiculous.
I don't ever intend to do chicken meat as a business as I think it's been devalued to such a point that you cannot begin to compete with the mega torture factories and at the moment, people don't care enough. The money has to be in hatching eggs or POL rare breeds for me. Eating eggs may pay the feed bill, just. Breeding hybrids to sell at POL is done and dusted. I know a guy who raises tens of thousands a year to sell to poultry dealers and he doesn't make a huge amount. The margins are too thin when you see people advertising POL brown hens for £4/£5.
Go for quality every time. Choose your breeds. Go for the pretty ones. Laced Wyandottes, Marans etc. Do it well and you will get a good return from fertile eggs and POL chickens.
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well as you no we have done right a cross the board hatched 1000 a month made breeds showd etc 2 things worked good sussex croosed silki copper tops £18 next cuckoo marran black or blue marran both sext link .HAVE YOU THORT OF BEING A AGENT SAY FOR MORRASONS OR BLACK ROCK .100 hens sold to you £10 you sell £15 and keep the eggs till sold woth thinking stock vacinated no hatching or brooding .Naw hatching you need youre own stock it has to be the very best . .Stock shown at the english and scotish natshnal will always sell youre eggs and stock are worth gold .Last august 2013 i hatched 200 silver lace hens i had won the highland and showed at the fedaration i put 4 pens of 3 in carlile in febuarey £400 poud i then put 6 pens in Dingwall again £100 pound a pen and £80 per pen for the silkies .The next week 10 pens in thainstone again £100 pound a pen all chicks £5 each .Naw the transport cages and time no time over christmas hatching for the march sales wood for the stove in the pens 4 houres a day just on the chickins electric incubaters lamps .So whot am i up to went to england to the natshnal seen the best stock .Naw the scotish in januarey so i need a result there i can then move on .My dad was ill so i had 2014 out and will start fresh spring 2015 remember you will sell good stock not bad . And need good pens a fuew pics