Hi all, I've been wanting to find a way to communicate with customers while simultaneously keeping an account of events the farm, and I figured a blog would be the best way. Sadly I don't have too much concrete information from this year except for two things: pictures and some spreadsheets.
Once I figure how to upload some of the photos in a fashionable way, I will, but until then, I thought I'd share some of the numbers I had for the pastured chickens. I follow a couple of other farms and one of my favorite principles we share is transparency. That being said, I felt like a did a fairly decent job at keeping record of feed costs and what I made on the birds, so I thought I'd share.
Spread Sheet: Pastured Poultry '14
Sure it wasn't much, but for the amount of learning that happened this year and all the refinements I will be making next season because of the trial and error I experienced, I think getting sixty bucks isn't too bad.
These are just basic numbers. If anyone has more in-depth questions like my feed conversion ratios, mortality rate, or life-span of the chickens in correlation with their size, I'd be happy to delve into those more scientific topics with you, but I just wanted to show some basic economics of this enterprise. These numbers are based off of 98 birds being processed, and I plan on raising close to three times as many next year.
My hope is that this blog will work as a community-driven conversation, and I look forward to hearing from you as well as sharing more. Next post: Strawberry numbers.
Thanks friends,
Jake