Making $ with Poultry
There are many ways to make money with poultry. Here are just a few.
Sale of Birds: 
As many more people realize the need for food security there will be a demand for birds. This will drive the price of birds up. We have already seen a laying hen that used to sell for $15 now go for $25. This would increase if the there is a scare of Bird Flu and the postal service refuses to ship chicks any longer. They already tried this in 2002 along with the airline carries, but were defeated. However, this was before bird flu. If a scare happens I guarantee the government will prohibit the transfer of chicks through the mail. Most people do not have roosters and have no way of reproducing chicks without buying them from one of the 12 giant hatcheries. In fact, out of the chicken group I started here in the wine country only 8 out of the 256 members had roosters!
Not just any chicken will do! I’ve been working on rare homestead breeds or ones that our well adapted to our conditions. Currently, I’m raising the Java Chicken which is an amazing dual purpose breed that forages
EXTREMELY well on its own. It took over a year for me just to get the foundation stock (only 2, 600 in existence), but I have been so impressed. These bird’s ability to forage means the grain/greens I need to grow for them is cut by 60% or more. They slaughter out nicely at about 3-4#s when they are 4 months old. The only thing is their egg size is smaller than my trusty Australorps and they don’t lay as well year round. Australorps are extremely well suited to our climate (bred in Australia), lay big brown eggs year round, slaughter out heavy, but aren’t quite the foragers of Javas. I’m creating a hybrid from these two this year to hopefully pull all the good characteristics together, but that can be tricky we will see. Any way, selling live birds would yield from $25 a bird to $75 for a Java.
Sale of Eggs: Our experience has been that individuals will pay the most for organic, free range eggs. However, eateries buy more. Honestly though you would need a community to keep up the demand we have had for eggs when we sold them. We couldn’t produce enough to meet the market demand. I believe you could count on $5 a doz. from eateries and $6 a doz. from individuals.
Sale of Meat: There seems to be many ways to do this to keep it from getting complicated with the laws surrounding the sale of meat. One, you can sell the birds to folks “live” and you slaughter them for free as Joel does (see the book Pastured Poultry Profits to the left). He picks a day when they all come to the farm and get their birds. Two, you can have a traveling butcher do it in his USDA certified trailer he brings on site. Three, you can take them to a slaughter facility that is USDA approved. Four, you can sell live birds for slaughter by the buyer. Many Asian customers prefer this. However you do it, organic raised birds bring a high dollar amount in todays market and are certainly worth doing on a community for income.
Sale of Manure: I can’t begin to tell you how many times people ask me for poultry manure! It is amazing stuff in the garden. Then add seaweed to the mix like we do and you can easily get $10-$14 a bag for composted manure. If you don’t want to bag it come up with a “you load your own truck” day and sell it by the truck load! Either way you go about it chicken s*#t (manure) is big bucks!