Will Form 8865 Farming 2023-2024

Hi, my name is Johnson Skubick. This video is the answer to the question, "Is pastured poultry profitable?" I have a 52-acre farm where I raise chickens, pigs, hops, and apples. Today, we will focus on chickens, specifically the broilers. I raise 1,200 broilers a year in five batches of 240 birds each. So, in a typical season, I raise 1,200 broilers. We market our chickens through a CSA, farmers markets, and a little bit of wholesale. This year, we kept a close track of our numbers and conducted a cost-benefit analysis on everything we did. I want to show you exactly, down to the penny, how much it costs to produce our birds and how much we can sell them for. To start, I ordered day-old chicks from a hatchery in another state. Each chick costs me $1.43, totaling $343.20 for 240 birds. We keep the chicks in the brooder, which requires heat lamps. I use 3-4 lamps initially and then reduce it to 2-3 lamps, 2 lamps, and eventually 1 lamp as they grow. The electricity cost for heating the brooder comes out to approximately $0.09 per bird, totaling $21.60 for the whole batch. In the brooder, we use pine shavings that cost $4 per bale. I use three bales, which amounts to around $0.05 per chick and approximately $12 for the entire batch. Additionally, we provide grit in the birds' gizzard to ensure a healthy start. The cost of grit is around $0.04 per bird, totaling $9 for the whole batch. Moving on to the two big costs: feed and labor. Our feed costs approximately $6.77 per bird. To calculate this number, we keep track of every 50-pound bag of feed we use. At the end of each batch, we add up the total feed used and divide it by the...