Each R/R chicken eats about $10 of feed. In order to reach market weight, our slower-growing chickens (the Nova Ranger) eat about 20 lbs in 10 weeks while the faster-growing chickens (the Cornish Cross) eat about 12 lbs in 6 weeks. Our feed is certified organic which is approximately twice the cost of the conventional feed.

 

Processing costs about $7 per chicken. Most chicken processors only take orders of thousands of chickens which has left us with the one processor locally. We are lucky to have them but the price can get expensive for small certified organic batches.

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We are competing with typical grocery store prices which have chickens produced in a completely different production method. This is what consumers are used to paying for chicken, but in reality our chickens are produced in a very different method (read more here), making the comparison difficult. The contrast in farm labor, chickens’ lifestyle and the end product between barns with 20K chickens produced in 6 weeks versus our chickens moved on pasture daily for 10+ weeks is glaring...

 

A chick costs $2.50. We are happy to work with a Canadian producer of a unique chicken variety who flies the chickens to us across the country. Breed diversity is important to us; 99% of chicken in the grocery store comes from a single type of chicken.

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Other consumables include chick brooder bedding & electricity to heat for the first few weeks...

All in all, we generally have put at least $20 into each chicken by the time it gets to you. This is without accounting for the infrastructure costs of portable housing and pastured poultry netting and the farmers labor to raise and sell the chickens.