You can stock your freezer full of meat when you learn how to work with what you’ve got. Small scale meat chickens is doable on very small acreage with a plan and a purpose. In this post, you’ll learn how to raise a year’s worth of meat chickens in your yard for your own family and even some friends. If you have the space (and you don’t need a lot!), recruit another family to help process the birds in exchange for raising their birds on your property.
This post will explain how we on the Johnson Home (stead) have been raising 80-100+ meat chickens every year for the last 3 years for our family and a few others. This process is scalable if you choose to only raise for your family or like we did our second set of birds– for our family and one other. We did this in exchange for help on processing day. It has grown every season we raise meat chickens until we have reached a place where infrastructure will not allow us to raise any more than 50 at one time.
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What is considered “small scale”?
Small is relative. You get to decide.
I consider one acre small but someone with 1/4 acre may consider that a lot. Someone with 100 acres may consider 10 acres small. You get the point.
On our one acre homestead, we have raised 71 meat chickens at one time and admittedly, that was too much. Splitting this number up into two batches over two seasons is way more manageable.
We own one acre but a lot sits on it so not all of that acreage is used in our small scale meat chickens adventure.
Generally we use the back half of our acre but that space is chock full of things like 13 garden beds, a fire pit space, a greenhouse, chicken coop and run, gas tank, a workshop, patio, fruit trees, wood shed, utility lines, and more. So we have started to run the meat chickens along the edge of our property. Starting the chickens on grass in the back and ending up in the front at the driveway where we are set up in the rock driveway to process the birds.
How to figure out how much chicken our family needs
For a family of 4, we eat about 3 whole chickens a month.
Take into consideration what other meats you have in your freezer, if you do other meat shares. Chicken is not our only source of protein.
Since raising whole meat chickens, I have changed up our meal plan quite a bit. (See below in Bonus Info 2 for more on this!)
The math is 3 chickens x 12 months = 36 chickens per year or 18 chickens per round of raising for our family (1 spring and 1 fall round).
Generally, we raise 15-17 for our family as the hatchery often sends more chickens that we ordered in the event of loss which almost always happens.
What’s the #1 thing I need to consider when raising meat chickens on a small scale?
The #1 thing to consider when raising meat chickens on a small scale is how much they poop!
It’s A LOT. Look at the picture below. That brown “mud” is poop!
This is why we use the perimeter of our property to run the chicken tractors on.
My kids and myself are great at grounding ourselves (we run barefoot most of the time). We aren’t interested in chicken poop on our feet. So we purposely avoid using the spaces in the yard where we spend most of our time.
If you use your yard, how do you plan to keep the chicken poop outside and not in your home via shoes and feet? For sanitary purposes.
Work your way up to 100 meat chickens
Starting out gung-ho wanting to raise 100 meat chickens for your family and a few others is advised against!
We began with 15 then jumped to 71! Again, not advised. We got a little too confident. But we also had secured a good amount of helpers to process on harvest day.
Processing day is a breeze once you are set up assembly-line-style and have the helping hands. It’s the chicken tending duties that get to be a lot on one or two people for 8 weeks.
If you use this chicken tractor design and have 2 of them, you can comfortably raise 25 in each tractor. One tractor for your family, one tractor sold to another family or each bird sold separately by pound.
Fifty meat chickens in the spring, 50 meat chickens in the fall. There you have it– you’ve raised 100 small scale meat chickens!
How to recruit other families
This was actually easy for us. I simply shared on Facebook and Instagram what we were doing and had a close friend reach out and ask could we raise the meat chickens for them.
They live in town on 1/4 an acre and while raising a few meat chickens IS possible, they prefer we do it. Also, their weekly schedule as them away from home often which means the meat chickens wouldn’t be monitored as often as needed.
Over the years, that family has recruited a family and we have recruited a few other families just by sharing on social media what we are doing.
We also offer our processing day as a free class for homeschoolers and anyone else interested.
We have capped out at 4 families getting 10-15 birds each both in spring and fall. This means raising about 40-50 birds in our small scale meat chickens operation in one 8 week period, or “round” as we call them.
Can I make money off raising meat chickens for others?
Yes, you can.
I will not get into the details of how to do this because you will need to first start with your municipal regulations… asking what you can and can’t do on your property. Or don’t. Choice is yours.
Options may include:
- starting a Flock Share (like a beef or pork share– they buy the animal, you raise it for them and process with our without their help)
- raising and processing the available amount in 1 year to sell according to your state’s laws for backyard poultry growers, sold by the pound or bundle
- price per pound: look up your state’s monthly USDA pasture raised poultry prices
- bundle: pack of 5 or 10 birds at a fixed price
If you’re just getting started raising chickens, start goal setting small such as:
- the first goal is to raise enough birds for others that it covers our bird costs (birds + feed). That’s free food!
- then move to new goal of free food + making extra to start investing in efficient equipment
- lastly, the goal is free food + equipment + profit
Bonus Info 1: No vacation time when raising meat chickens
Maybe this should be the number one consideration before raising a year’s worth of meat chickens.
There’s no vacation, not even an overnight stay, when you’re raising meat chickens for 8 weeks. Not unless you have a really great homestead sitter (reliable, timely, trustworthy) and you pay them well. If you have to pay a sitter, consider that in the cost of raising your meat chickens.
Plan accordingly. Always work backwards from your set processing day. Eight weeks back will give you the hatch date you want to select when buying your meat chicken biddies.
We choose a March and September hatch date for a May and November processing date, respectively. It’s also a great time for the weather too on processing days in Northeast North Carolina, generally.
Bonus Info 2: Raising your own meat chicken will change how you prepare meals
I talk with folks about chickens a lot. A LOT.
One thing I get asked about is cooking a whole chicken. It’s also one of those curiosity convo starters– “but we don’t eat chicken with bones” (not even kidding!) or “we only use chicken cuts”.
I used to be the latter one myself. It’s just easier to grab a sleeve of chicken breasts to baked Italian seasoned chicken breasts for dinner.
But when you start raising your own meat chickens for whatever reason got you into it, you’ll learn to change up your meal planning and how you prepare chicken.
Sure, you can cut up chicken on processing day into breast meat, thighs, wings, etc. That’s too much work, for me personally, on an already hard working day.
I’ve decided it’s much easier to just:
- cook whole chicken in an Instant Pot with water to shred chicken for other meals like tacos, soups, casseroles, and more. Then have that lovely pot liquor (chicken meat stock) for a soup or rice cooking.
- spatchcock the bird and grill it.
- roast whole bird in the oven with vegetables for one meal, use whatever meat is left for another meal (like tacos, soup, casseroles, Tex-Mex rice bowl, etc), then the neck, back, other bones for chicken broth.
Over time, you’ll start to see the whole bird as more than one meal. Also because of all the time, energy, effort, and money you put into raising that bird, you’ll find ways to stretch the whole bird and not be wasteful.
If you love this conversation on small scale meat chickens, check out our other posts:
We aren’t able to do a lot of what we want to do on our one acre (raise cows for meat) but we are learning to work with what we have.
Click here to read more on how we raise meat chickens on a small scale.
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