08/29/2026
THIS!
A great look into what really goes into raising pasture-raised chicken on a small, family-run farm.
There’s so much more behind the price tag - feed, housing, equipment, daily moves to fresh pasture, processing, packaging, storage, and most importantly, time and labor.
We’re proud to raise our chickens this way here at Coleman Hay Farms, and we’re grateful for everyone who chooses to support local. 🌾
A $30 chicken?! In this economy?!
Yep. And I totally understand why, at first glance, $5/lb for a whole chicken can sound expensive. A 6-pound bird is $30. You can walk into a grocery store and find chicken for a whole lot less.
But here’s the thing about food: the price you pay usually reflects the way it was produced.
So let’s follow one of our chickens from the hatchery to the freezer and talk about what that $5/lb actually pays for.
Let’s say we start with 60 birds.
Our chicks cost roughly $4.50 each.
That’s $270 before they’ve eaten a single bite.
Those chicks spend their first two weeks in the brooder, where they need heat, bedding, clean water, feed and daily care.
Then around 2–3 weeks old, depending on the weather and how they’re feathering out, we move them outside onto fresh grass.
And from that point on, they’re moved onto a new patch of pasture every single day.
Fresh grass. Sunshine. Bugs. Dirt. Little pebbles. Room to scratch, peck and spend their days doing very important chicken business.
But pasture doesn’t mean we stop feeding them.
Growing meat birds still need balanced feed for the protein, energy, vitamins and minerals necessary to grow into healthy, quality birds.
A 50-pound bag of feed costs us roughly $20–$30 depending on what we’re feeding.
For easy math, let’s call it $20.
If we average two bags a week for, let’s say, 10 weeks, that’s another $400 in feed.
We’re already at $670.
And now let’s talk about something that isn’t nearly as fun: mortality.
You can buy 60 chicks, but that doesn’t mean you’re putting 60 chickens in the freezer.
Things happen.
A chick might not thrive. You can lose birds to illness, injury, predators, weather or sometimes seemingly no reason at all. Certain meat breeds can also be more prone to health problems because of how quickly they grow.
But here’s the kicker:
You already paid for that bird.
And depending on when you lose it, you may have already fed and cared for it for days or even weeks.
If we spend money raising 60 birds and only 55 make it to processing day, the cost of those five birds doesn’t magically disappear. That expense gets spread across the birds that DID make it to the freezer.
Then there’s all the stuff that doesn’t conveniently fit on the price tag.
The brooder.
Bedding.
Heat and electricity.
Feeders.
Waterers.
Fuel to pick up the chicks.
Water.
Daily chores.
And equipment.
Our chicken tractor alone was roughly a $2500 investment.
Could we raise chickens with something cheaper? Absolutely. But we chose something durable, predator-resistant and built to last because it allows us to safely move our birds onto fresh grass every day.
And somebody has to actually move it.
Every. Single. Day.
Then processing day rolls around.
We process our birds right here on our farm, with our own hands.
That requires a scalder, propane, knives, tables, sanitizing supplies, running water, freezer space and a chicken plucker that costs hundreds of dollars.
Then we need poultry bags to package them. Ours run about $40 per 100.
And processing doesn’t end when the feathers are off and the bird is in a bag.
Every bird has to be cleaned, packaged, weighed and labeled individually.
I actually designed our labels myself and print them right here at home. Does that save us money? Absolutely.
Does it magically make my time free?
Unfortunately, no. 😂
Then everything has to go into the freezer.
And when the last chicken is finally tucked away— We still aren’t done.
Now comes everybody’s favorite part of farming:
cleaning up.
The plucker gets cleaned.
The scalder gets cleaned.
Tables get scrubbed and sanitized.
Knives and equipment get washed.
Everything gets put away.
The processing area gets cleaned.
And somehow there is always one more thing you forgot about until you thought you were finished.
So add just the chicks, that very conservative feed estimate, packaging and propane and we’re already around $750 into that batch.
And that number doesn’t include the $2500 chicken tractor, $600 plucker, scalder, brooder equipment, feeders, waterers, bedding, electricity, water, fuel, freezer space, labels, printing supplies, equipment maintenance, mortality…
or paying ourselves one single penny for our time.
And time matters.
A farmer’s time has value just like everyone else’s.
Those birds were hatched locally, picked up by us and brought home.
They were cared for in our brooder for those first couple weeks.
Then they were moved outside onto pasture, where they were fed and watered by our hands, checked every single day, protected from predators and moved onto fresh grass daily.
When processing day comes, they’re processed here on our farm.
By us.
Packaged by us.
Weighed by us.
Labeled by us.
Frozen by us.
And the mess afterward?
Yep. Cleaned up by us too. 😂
There aren’t many hands between that chick and your dinner table. Actually, around here, there are basically four.
Mine and my husband’s.
We’re doing all of this while raising two little boys under two, and we don’t have employees or a crew behind the scenes helping us run this place.
It’s us.
We’re raising the animals, tending the gardens, maintaining the farm, processing the meat, packaging it, labeling it and selling it.
So when you buy a chicken, a dozen eggs, vegetables, pork or anything else from our little farm, you aren’t adding another sale to some giant company’s spreadsheet.
You’re quite literally supporting one family doing their best to raise good food while raising two little boys right alongside it.
And I think that’s a pretty cool thing to know about where your money went.
So yes, that chicken might cost $5/lb.
And no, I don’t think everyone needs to buy a $30 chicken.
If feeding your family means buying the $8 chicken at the grocery store, buy the $8 chicken.
There is absolutely no shame in feeding your family within your budget.
But I also don’t think the small farmer selling a pasture-raised chicken for $30 is ripping anyone off.
You’re looking at two very different production systems.
Large-scale poultry production has efficiencies that a farmer raising 40–60 birds at a time simply doesn’t have. When you’re buying feed by the truckload, processing thousands of birds and spreading equipment costs across enormous numbers, your cost per bird can be much lower.
We’re not doing that.
We’re raising small batches of chickens that get fresh grass, sunshine, bugs, dirt and room to actually behave like chickens.
And that’s important to us.
We raise meat with intention because we’re feeding it to our own family too.
We care about the quality of life that animal had.
We care about what it ate.
We care about how it was handled.
And we care about what eventually ends up nourishing our bodies.
That’s worth something.
And this doesn’t stop with chicken.
When you see locally raised ground beef for $9/lb, pork that costs more than the grocery store, a homegrown turkey that makes you do a double take at the price tag, eggs that cost more than Walmart’s, or even a dozen ears of sweet corn that costs a couple dollars more…
Remember there is an entire story behind that price.
Feed.
Seed.
Land.
Equipment.
Fuel.
Repairs.
Fencing.
Processing.
Packaging.
Mortality.
Labor.
Time.
And a farmer hoping there’s enough left at the end to make doing it again next year worthwhile.
Here in Wisconsin, we’re surrounded by family farms. Some sell directly to their neighbors. Others are milking cows morning and night so the brands you recognize can put milk, butter and cheese on grocery-store shelves.
Those farms have enormous investments too. Equipment, barns, land, feed, veterinary care and countless hours of labor go into producing the food we sometimes don’t think twice about tossing into our grocery carts.
Different farms. Different scales. Different methods.
But one thing remains pretty universal:
Food costs money to produce, and raising it well isn’t cheap.
But maybe the next time you see a farmer’s price and think,
“Holy crap, they want HOW MUCH for a chicken?!”
Remember…
That chicken isn’t $30 because the farmer is getting rich.
There’s a pretty good chance the farmer did the math and is wondering if they charged enough. 😂
Know your farmer. Ask questions. Support local when you can.
And thank a farmer.
Because there’s a whole lot more behind that price tag than meets the eye.
