The last few days I’ve been working on a high hopes newsletter and order form for the upcoming season. Today I called the locker where we take chickens to find out the minimum number we could sell to individuals and let them pick it up. They wouldn’t do it period. So something that was inconvenient for our customers becomes impossible.
Out options are to butcher the chickens on the farm or go to a locker licensed to sell retail – that would add about $3.50 to the price of the already expensive chickens without much of a margin for us. This is one enterprise where economies of scale sure help – driving 100 chickens to the locker plant vs driving 1000 would drive a lot of the costs significantly down, but growing 1,000 chickens does not fit into the balance of our farm at this point.
The chickens are such a wonderful product – but we can’t do it for free or little profit with all the risk that goes along with it. We NEED a plant closer to make it more economical.
So until we decide what to do – the newsletter is on hold.
Bah, that stinks.
100 chickens isn’t that bad to do on the farm. We do 50-60 at a time and it takes around 6 hours from wrangling to wrapping. The only thing is that we skin ours because we didn’t want to invest in a scalder and plucker (We butcher for ourselves). Maybe if you divided the chicks into three batches it would go better for you.
Why wouldn’t they butcher them for you?