Before I started raising chickens I thought that it would be a lot of work and be very expensive. But after we began the process I was pleasantly surprised at how it really was not that much work or that expensive…
I was reading different blogs and they made it sound like it was a very high price per chicken for the feed and such. But in my experience, because the chickens are eating pasture and grains that it did not come out to as much. And the work was really nothing more than taking care of a pet. Today I am going to share with you the step by step process that my family did to raise meat birds on pasture.
Step by Step
Build Chicken Tractor
You are going to need something to move your chickens around in. We built something called a chicken tractor. It is basically a chicken house on wheels. This way you can move the chickens to new grass every day. I believe this is the best way to raise chickens because they are so much healthier this way. They can eat the grass and bugs and whatever they can find.
As I mentioned my husband built one for us to use and it held about 25 chickens. I would share his plans with you but he just kinda made it up as he went. You can find different plans on Pinterest or you can buy one. If you have the ability I would recommend just building one. It is always best when you can do the work yourself. You save so much money this way. If you are going to buy one I would recommend looking at local buy-sell groups on facebook or craigslist. We have gotten really good deals this way.
Buy supplies
Now that you have a place for the chickens to live you will need a few more supplies. Some of these things you can try to make yourself to save money but most of the things on the list will not cost you that much. The most expensive part about raising your own meat birds is the food to keep them fed. But as I mentioned they will be eating grass and you can also feed them table scraps to help offset the cost of food. The supplies you will need…
- Feeders
- Waterer
- Chicken Starter
- Heating lamps
- Hay or straw
- Small Rubbermaid (more on this below)
Set up the baby area
So now that you have everything on the list you need to make sure you are ready for the baby chicks. You will not put the baby chicks in the chicken tractor outside yet. For the first few weeks, the chicks need to be in the garage or a barn under a heat lamp. We just keep them in Rubbermaid containers for those first few weeks. With the lid off of course. We just filled the bottom with hay and put little feeders and waterers in there. You will be feeding them only chick starter at this point.
Get chicks
You should be ready to go by this point. Now you need to figure out how to get your baby chicks. This will obviously vary by area but in our area, we get them from our local grain mill. They order them from a bigger farm. So we have to call in a couple weeks ahead of time. You might have a couple of options of what kind of bird to get. I would just ask them and they should be able to tell you what breed would be best for pasture raising. As I mentioned you will keep the birds in the garage or barn under the heat lamp for about 3-4 weeks. During this time you will be feeding them chick starter…
You also need to decide on how chicks you are getting. A normal chicken tractor holds 25 chickens. If this is your first year I would not suggest doing any more then 50. It can be overwhelming when you are just starting out. If you want more then that I would say to do them at different times in the year so you don’t have so many at once.
Move to the big tractor
After about a month under the heat lamp, your chicks should be ready to be moved to the big chicken tractor. If you have kids this is a great job for them to help with. It can take a little while to get them all over to the chicken tractor. This will be there first time out and they will be a little timid.
Once they are in the chicken tractor you will repeat the following every day…
- Move the chicken tractor
You can do this once a day or more if you think of it. Depending on how many chickens you have they might need fresh grass more often.
- Feed the chickens
I would continue to feed them chick starter for about another month. It has hormones in it that help the chickens to get bigger and meatier. You can also feed the chickens all your table scraps. This makes me so happy because I hate wasting food and with little kids, I feel like we waste so much food. But when I feed the chickens the scraps I am basically recycling our food. It’s great! And then obviously they will eat the grass and bugs and everything from your pasture.
Butcher at the correct time
It’s butchering time! Generally, chickens are ready to butcher around 11 weeks. But depending on the kind you end up getting it might be earlier than that. Once your chickens are ready to be butchered you will need to pick a day to butcher. Trust me it will be an all-day thing. If you have about 4 people helping that is about perfect. But it can also be done with less or more. It just helps to have someone at each “station”.
Our butchering day set up…
We set up our butchering area right by the chicken coop so we don’t have to go far.
The first step is catching the chickens. This is a great job for kids…If you think your kids are at an age that they can handle the process. I grew up butchering chickens and it never bothered me. This past year my little girls were able to watch and help for the first time and they thought it was great and it did not seem to bother them at all. Anyway, once you catch the chickens the first step is slitting the neck. We use cones…let me explain why. If you just take the chicken and cut its head off it will flop around and the stress will make the meat tough. When you use a cone it holds them tight so that they can’t move around as much and it is much less messy. You will also just slit there necks and not cut the head off all the way. We made a frame and have 5 cones nailed to it. But you can also just nail cones to a tree to make it simple and not have a big thing to store. You can grab the cones I am talking about on Amazon.
You will let the chicken stay in the cone for a few minutes and let the blood fully drain out of their bodies. Once the blood is drained and they are fully dead, you will de-feather them. Our process is holding them in hot water. It should be at 127 degrees. we generally hold them in for about 45 seconds. The whole time we are kind of moving the bird around in the water. The best way we have found is to use a turkey fryer filled with water. This way the turkey fryer can stay at the temperature we need. If you don’t have a turkey fryer you can pick one up on Amazon
At this point…
the feathers should come off pretty easily. You can either just pluck them off by hand or we have this awesome tub that throws the chicken around and the feathers just fall off. You can find a similar one here.
Now you will cut the feet and hands off. You will just use a sharp knife and they come off fairly easy. There is a knuckle that you will cut in between and then they come right off. Now all you have to do is pull the guts and such out. This is a bit tricky for me to explain over a blog post…so If you have never done it before I would suggest looking up a video and watching a few times. This part takes a little bit to figure out but once you do it goes really fast.
At this point, you are ready to store them. You can the meat if you want….but by this time we are pretty wiped out and ready to be done. So we choose to freeze our birds. We just double bag them in freezer bags but if you are concerned about freezer burn then you can do this step however you would like.
woohoo!!
Congratulations you should now a freezer full of good healthy chickens for the year! It obviously is more work then going to the store and buying them but it is so worth it. I don’t trust meat from the store… You have no idea how the chickens were raised or fed or how humane the butchering process was. If you can do it yourself it is always better. And this way you know exactly what happened to them every step of the way.
Q & A
How much does it cost?
This is hard for me to calculate for you because everybody will decide to buy different things and make certain things themselves. But just remember you only have to buy the supplies once. So the most money will be spent on food and the chickens themselves. We paid $1.55 per bird. And I would say you will go through a bag of food a week per 25 birds. So depending on how much your feed cost just times that by the number of weeks you will have the birds. And remember you can’t compare it to the store. The quality of the meat you are getting is SO much better.
How much work is involved?
Up front, you will have a little more work. You will have to spend time building the chicken tractor, buying the supplies getting the area ready and what not. But the actual work of taking care of the chickens is really not that time consuming. I was really surprised. You just move the chicken tractor each day and feed and water them. And then butchering them will take a day. Again, so worth it! You are not only getting crazy awesome healthy meat but you are teaching your kids a great life skill and responsibility. If you want to read more about things kids can learn on the homestead check out my post.
Is it worth the time and effort?
You probably already figured out what my answer to this would be…YES, YES, YES! I believe that it is so worth it. On so many different levels. For one, you are getting amazing meat. Two, you are teaching your kids a great life skill. Three, you are teaching them how to be more responsible. Four, you are getting out of your comfort zone. (at least I was) Five, you are becoming more self- sufficient. If you own a homestead this is probably one of your biggest goals. I was so glad to finally have my own chicken!
Is butchering hard?
Just gonna be honest here…it was for me. Even though I grew up helping with the process I never had to actually cut the throat. So from an emotional level, it took me a little bit to get used to. But the process of butchering it not hard once you get over that fact. And I am so glad that I did it! It was so good for me to get out of my comfort zone and do something that was uncomfortable for me. I highly recommend it!
This last year my sister and I did it. Again, if you can have 4 people it will make it go much quicker. Because there was only 2 of us we had to do each step at a time instead of being able to work an assembly line. But it worked!
Ways to cut the cost
I have mentioned some ways but I am a list/OCD person so I like to see it all together.
- build your own chicken tractor
- Get hay or straw from a neighbor
- pluck the chickens by hand and not get a plucker
- Feed the chickens as many scraps as possible to cut down on food cost
Final Thoughts
I know you might finish reading this is be like “WHAT! How is this easy?” And I guess to some it might not seem that easy. But when I think about raising chickens and butchering I was expecting it to be really time consuming and hard. I was really surprised at how little time it took and the kids and I really enjoyed the whole process. I love that my kids are so comfortable with the chicks and know how to take care of them.
So yes, you will have work at the beginning and end. But the whole process is pretty easy. And once you get everything the first year you should have everything ready for the following year and it will go even smoother.
I was raised in the country but never really cared about this type of stuff. But now that I have a place of my own I have totally fallen in love with it. I love that I can produce my own food and that I can teach my kids to do the same. My kids are my world and I want to do my best to raise them to take care of themselves as best as possible. And I believe that learning these life skills is invaluable. I home-school and love that I can teach my kids things that they would never get the chance to learn in school.
I know I talk about kids helping all the time because I have kids…
But whether you have kids or not doesn’t matter. You can still learn so much from raising your own birds and get the benefit of great meat. So if you are on the fence about whether or not you should raise your own birds or not…I would say DO it. You will not regret it. You will make mistakes but you will learn from them and do better the next year. But that’s life right? we live and learn!
As always I hope this was helpful to you in your homestead journey and please let me know in the comments what you have tried and what has worked and your total flops. We can all learn from each other.
Happy Homesteading!
~Courtney