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MANAGEMENT ALTERNATIVES 72 Poultry Your Way MANAGEMENT ALTERNATIVES PASTURE: DAY-RANGE When preparing your own day-range budget be sure to include the following variable expenses: • Pasture seed • Fence charger • Houses or construction materials • Battery • Covered feed and water equipment • Hoses • Fencing See Growing Your Range Poultry Business: An Entrepreneur’s Toolbox and CIAS Generic Poultry Enterprise Budget for a sample day-range budget—complete with expense and break-even estimates (Resources under Budgeting, Enterprise Planning and Recordkeeping). Summary. The day-range system is an excellent alternative for those interested in experimenting with pasture production. Housing can be designed to accommodate birds seasonally or year-round and on a large or small scale. This management alternative requires less labor than the industrial and daily move pens models. Investments are minimal compared to the confinement housing models; however, a tractor is required to move shelters when necessary.
Frank and Kay Jones, Earth Shine Farm. FARM PROFILE • Pasture: Day-range Frank and Kay Jones, Earth Shine Farm Durand, Michigan Pasturing Poultry Creates a Different Kind of Product Frank and Kay Jones work hard to produce the kind of poultry products they do. And they expect to get paid for doing it. They charge $2.90 a pound for dressed broilers they grow on their 10 acres near Durand, Michigan, using labor-intensive methods, a topnotch, on-farm processing facility they built, pasture, and organically grown grains they grind themselves. They get $3 a dozen for eggs. The enormous change that took place in the poultry industry starting about 50 years ago was all about labor. Confining hundreds of thousands of birds, broilers or layers, in buildings where they could be managed en masse greatly reduced the labor associated with raising poultry, and mechanized systems replaced manpower. It also changed the nature of poultry products. On the plus side, products were cheaper. Chicken wasn’t just for Sunday dinner anymore. But it was different, too. Less exercised broilers mature at a younger age, the meat is juicier and more tender, but some say blander tasting. Layers on controlled diets produce eggs with yolks that are lighter in color and milder in taste. Is “modern” poultry better, worse, or just different? The Joneses believe there are health and social issues to consider. Are confinement-reared broiler chickens exposed to too many antibiotics? Do they produce meat and eggs with an unhealthy balance of fatty acids? Is denying chickens the right to scratch in a pasture both less humane and bad for us as well? Some think so, including Frank and Kay. To make poultry products their way requires, literally, that they get up with the chickens. They operate a day-range system, in which chickens come into shelter at night and go outside by day to feed and forage, confined only by an electrified net fence that keeps them within a hundred feet or so of their houses. Each morning at daybreak, Frank or Kay opens the houses to let the birds out, and every evening, after birds come inside to roost, Frank closes the doors behind the birds. Housing Why not just let the birds come and go as they please? The big concern is predators, Frank said, primarily foxes and raccoons, but also owls that could come into the roost areas and wreak havoc on the defenseless birds. While the electrified net fence offers fair protection by day, he doesn’t consider it adequate for the terrors of night. So the birds are put into coops fortified with metal walls and chicken wire mesh. Both the coops and the netting are portable, so when pasture gets eaten down or worn down to bare earth near the houses, the houses can be moved. Lots of variations are possible, but the Joneses like to move the netting three or four times to enclose fresh pasture before moving the houses. They have tried several other variations. They used the moveable pen system developed by Joel Salatin, but abandoned that. “It was just too much labor to move the pens to fresh pasture two and three times a day,” Kay said. “The pasture area inside the pen was just too small and too many birds were injured while moving the pens.” They tried using more permanently placed houses and fences. These provided greater protection from predators, but sacrificed the advantages of pasture. The birds killed vegetation close to the building, and it was hard to provide enough pasture without fencing large areas. Manure collected in the buildings, which needed to be cleaned. Moveable houses just leave manure in place, to disintegrate naturally. 73 MANAGEMENT ALTERNATIVES
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A Guide to Management Alternatives
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In memory of Ron Desens and Tom Gut
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WHAT THIS GUIDE WILL HELP YOU DO
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2 Day-range chickens on pasture. Po
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TAKE STOCK 4 People (describe skill
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TAKE STOCK 6 Poultry Your Way TAKE
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OVERVIEW 8 Figure 1: Comparison of
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OVERVIEW 10 Waterfowl, particularly
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OVERVIEW 12 Commercial performance
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OVERVIEW 14 FARM PROFILE • Altern
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16 Poultry Your Way
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MARKETING ALTERNATIVES 18 Poultry Y
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MARKETING ALTERNATIVES 20 Poultry Y
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Page 110 and 111: YOUR PLAN Processing Off-farm (cont
Page 112 and 113: REFERENCES 106 Hamilton, Neil D. 19
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GLOSSARY 122 Keet. Young or immatur
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124 Poultry Your Way
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