New here but have raised chickens for several years now and process on farm and sell locally.
We raise a few rounds of 50 broilers (Cornish) 3 times a year, and have been for the last few years. This year I am focusing on really dialing in costs and perfecting these small batches before scaling to batches of 100-200 birds.
Birds are kept in chicken tractors and moved 1-2 times daily. Fed 22% chick starter for 2 weeks, 24/7 feed then switching to 18% non gmo broiler feed 12 hrs available 12 no feed. Goal is 4.5-5 pound dressed weight.
I’ve been seeing advertised FCR of 1.7 and under, but I’m thinking that is live weight before processing.
I have many questions and scenarios to discuss, but I guess let’s begin with: will I get a better result by feeding a higher protein feed throughout ? Ie 22 or 20% for the entire run? What about allowing feed longer when they are older? I do care about their quality of life and don’t want to over feed and cause issues. We don’t lose many, if any birds currently and I don’t want to cause issues, but would like to develop a profitable operation.
I have many more questions, I’ve been looking into fermenting the feed as well, which I would really like to try on the next round of birds. Anything to get feed costs down, as a pallet is around $750 (don’t have the storage capability for totes yet but that would lower to around 625)..
We raise a few rounds of 50 broilers (Cornish) 3 times a year, and have been for the last few years. This year I am focusing on really dialing in costs and perfecting these small batches before scaling to batches of 100-200 birds.
Birds are kept in chicken tractors and moved 1-2 times daily. Fed 22% chick starter for 2 weeks, 24/7 feed then switching to 18% non gmo broiler feed 12 hrs available 12 no feed. Goal is 4.5-5 pound dressed weight.
I’ve been seeing advertised FCR of 1.7 and under, but I’m thinking that is live weight before processing.
I have many questions and scenarios to discuss, but I guess let’s begin with: will I get a better result by feeding a higher protein feed throughout ? Ie 22 or 20% for the entire run? What about allowing feed longer when they are older? I do care about their quality of life and don’t want to over feed and cause issues. We don’t lose many, if any birds currently and I don’t want to cause issues, but would like to develop a profitable operation.
I have many more questions, I’ve been looking into fermenting the feed as well, which I would really like to try on the next round of birds. Anything to get feed costs down, as a pallet is around $750 (don’t have the storage capability for totes yet but that would lower to around 625)..