$50,000 A Year Farming

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Let’s say that you want to start a farm, and you’re going to use that farm to replace your current income. That’s a beautiful goal, I love it, but where do you start?

Whether you want to raise vegetables, beef, eggs or honey, the process is the same. We’re going to use broiler chickens for this exercise.

Simple Math To Determine Farm Scale

This is some dangerously simple math you can do to develop a picture of what your life will be like if you go full-time raising chickens for meat.

  1. Study your market to determine what you can charge for a chicken raised to your standards.

  2. You are targeting an average 30% profit margin. That means all-in, your costs are 70% of your sale price.

  3. Price - Costs = Profit

  4. You’re going to pay yourself 50% of your profits, and invest 50% back into the business for growth.

Let’s Make $50,000 A Year Owning A Farm

We’re going to gloss over the fact that the average working-class income no longer supports a family. Too much to unpack there. As a random placeholder, we’re going to say that you need $50k a year to live the life you want to life. Who knows if that’s true? It’s just an example.

You have visited some local grocery stores and have taken notes on how much chicken is selling for in your area. You’re going to raise the best possible chicken, pastured poultry, and you know what you can charge $8/lb for a whole chicken.

You are raising chickens to an average of 4.5lbs in 7 weeks, which gives you a gross revenue of $36 per whole chicken. (My personal record is a $52 chicken at $6/lb).

Assuming that chicks, feed, grit, processing, infrastructure, advertising, admin, insurance, etc… will cost you $25.20 per chicken.

  • Gross Revenue - Expenses = Net Profit

  • $36 - $25.20 = $10.80 per chicken

You are splitting the profit between paying yourself and reinvesting in your farm business.

  • $5.40 to you

  • $5.40 to the business

10,000 chickens to make $50k/year

Your goal is to make $50k a year to support your family, and still have money to reinvest in the your business. You are splitting out per chicken profits accordingly, which pays you $5.40 per chicken.

  • $50,000 / $5.40 = 9,260 chickens

9,260 is a weird number, so we’re going to round up to 10,000. This scenario isn’t real, so exact numbers don’t matter.

Besides, 10,000 chickens is the number you are going to start with. You are going to to lose chickens to genetic defects, predators, stress, processing mistakes, gifts for friends and family, etc… Starting with 10k chickens means selling 9,260 chickens.

How do you raise 10k broiler chickens?

I don’t know about you, but now that we have a rough number of how many chickens we’re going to raise (or vegetables, or cows, or bees) I have so many other questions…

  • How much land do you need to raise that many birds?

  • How big are your batch sizes going to be?

  • Can you sell 10k chickens?

  • The list goes on….

To help you answer those questions I have compiled a resource section of this website, and I have written several books on this very topic. It is my mission to see that you succeed.

Disclaimer: There are many ways to approach this, and there are entire books written about each piece, but that’s too much, so we’re going to keep it simple. This is also written for the solo-entrepreneur, and not someone hiring employees.

My goal is to get you more comfortable with the numbers (data) so that you can make decisions for yourself, your family, and your business that are better informed, so that you are more likely to succeed.