How to grow a good ROAST CHICKEN
Chicken is the cheapest meat you can buy, but a home- grown roast can be well worth the effort.
Eight years ago, we looked at whether it was worth growing your own meat birds. Our conclusions then were: Lifetime feed costs: $8-$10 per bird Time: up to 25 weeks Overall cost per bird: $10-$25 Factors that contributed to the big variation of the final cost included:
• whether you bought purpose-bred meat chicks or used heritage or cross-bred birds
• how fast they grew
• the age of the bird when processed
• feed, eg organic, commercial
• processing time At the time, organic chicken was available in supermarkets for around $20-$25 for a whole bird.
Things haven’t changed much. If you want cheap chicken, you won’t beat the economies of scale of the 120 million birds grown in NZ every year, that you can buy already plucked, processed, bagged and stuffed. Supermarkets have options from a whole, free-range, organic chicken for around $15-$24, to a barn-raised whole bird at around $8-$12, depending on weight.
But there are other factors that make home-grown chicken a good option. The same principles apply if you’re raising ducks, turkeys, geese or quail, but time periods, weights and feed consumption will be different.
Self-sufficiency writer Ross Nolly processes all his own heritage poultry. This is one of his typical Orpington hens. He feeds out fermented grain, pork stock, meat scraps, and maggots from his maggot farm.