ina wrote:
I know it's not ideal chicken feed - but can you get free stale bread somewhere, that would otherwise only be chucked out? It doesn't replace all feed, but might supplement it.
We've been doing this for 18 months now, and depending on your source (commercial bakery's "waste" bread, much of it is whole grain/seed bread, very high quality, and most of it hasn't even reached the expiry date when we go to collect it!). It costs us approximately $6NZD a day to feed over 100 chooks, ducks and turkeys, and they remain with good condition over our very cold winters, and we eat all excess cockerels at around 6-8 months of age. We sell excess hens for $20 each, turkeys for $30 each, ducks $25 each. Anything we can't sell or choose not to sell is either eaten by us or we use it to feed our 4 dogs and 4 cats, saving the $115/month we were spending on pet meat for the dogs and $80/month we were spending on crap catfood (go figure, as picky as cats can be, they only ate the cheap dry catfood). Even if we only break even (figuring cost of feed and what we would be spending on buying chicken meat, as well as $ made from selling live poultry), it's far better than we'd do eating chicken from the shops (we basically didn't even eat chicken meat when we didn't keep chickens, which over the last 10 years has only been for a short time). But for the last year, we've actually made a small profit on the chooks.
Thing is, I don't do huge batches of meat birds as was originally suggested by Ireland, but rear whatever cockerels are hatced over the course of the year, by our free-ranging hens.
Our breeds crosses are mainly Australorp/Barred Rock or White Leghorn/RI Red. I couldn't tell you a carcase weight, but I just cut off the leg/thigh portion and the breast portion and the remainder goes to the dogs/cats. It feeds a family of 2 adults and 2 ravenous teens for 2 main meals (soups, stews, curries, stir fries). No one likes roast chicken anymore, actually, but we do like the occasional roast turkey, and we rear about 6 a year for ourselves for meat and sell the rest.
Not sure if this helps you, but just sharing our years of experience.
Cheers
Andrea
NZ