We’ve still been mulling over our options since we started analyzing our cost of raising roaster chickens last month. We followed that original post with another answering some of the questions we received from readers and customers. It’s been a difficult time for us, I’ll be very blunt. We have invested tens of thousands of dollars over the years and we just keep running into the same brick wall – our costs exceed what the market will bear for selling.
Last year, we were facing a freezer storage issue, and we looked into a commercial walk-in to contain the chicken we were raising as well as the pork – not only to store what we had for sale, but for our own personal supply. That would have cost us about $5000, all said and done, at a minimum. We opted instead to purchase three large stand-up freezers from a local big box, as those were on sale, and we paid about $2200 for those instead. (Note: the cost of purchasing these and the electrical costs of running these were not factored into our cost per chicken.)
In the State of Michigan, in order for a farmer to bring meat home from the processor and then sell it direct to your customer, you must obtain what is called a “warehouse license.” The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) issues these licenses after they have a state inspector visit your site and verify that you have correctly operating equipment and know how to handle bringing the meat home properly. This license has cost us $70 annually and it renews in April. We realized we had forgotten to factor that into our analysis.
We sold about 20 birds last year out of the 100 we raised. The rest have been for our personal consumption. The only reason we need that warehouse license is so that we can sell from our freezers at home. We can raise birds for our own family’s consumption here in our home without a license.
If you go back and look at our analysis, you will find that we were already losing money. Now, factor in that we paid $3.50 per bird we sold in licensing fees and it gets even uglier. Oh, but it gets worse!
We discovered when we went to renew our warehouse license today that the fee has gone up to $109 per year. If we were to sell 20 birds this year, that would mean we are paying $5.45 in licensing fees per bird. That’s just not realistic. It is a tremendous amount of work to raise these birds, and it is insane for us to think we can keep this up other than raising a few for our own family.
MDARD is raising the fees in 2017 to $148 and in 2018, it will go up to $186 per year for the warehouse fee. This is just not practical for a small farm like ours where we only raise 100 birds a year. It was always our intention that we would sell at least 100 birds and then be able to raise some more for ourselves, but the numbers have never worked out. You can only cost justify all of this if you are raising in greater volumes – 1000 birds or more a year, we figure – and there is no way we can do that without lowering the quality of life for those animals, which defeats the purpose of raising them ourselves.
I am waiting on a call back from MDARD to explain why they are hiking the price on this license so much – but I suspect, like many things here in the State of Michigan, it has much to do with our GOP controlled government looking to find revenue via other sources because they want to be able to run on a reelection platform of not having raised taxes. Well, the money to run a civilized society has to come from somewhere, folks, and here’s one of the places the burden is being placed.
Regrettably, we will no longer be raising birds for sale and we are going to scale back to raising just enough for ourselves. We are very sorry for this, but we cannot keep this up. We su
spect we are not going to be alone in this. And even if we are, that’s our family’s reality. We want to thank those who did support us in this endeavor to humanely raise chicken on fresh pasture.
We’re going to focus on raising our pigs this year; we sell whole and half hogs direct to the customer prior to slaughter, we transport to the processor, and then the customer picks up at the processor and pays them for the butchering fees, so there is no license required, as we do not transport the meat back to our freezers. Perhaps we will expand that offering, although we will be crunching numbers very carefully to determine whether we are just going to run into another brick wall.
We are determined to insure that our life quality is not lowered while we try to maintain a high quality for the animals we raise. We have failed in that regard over the last several years and it has brought considerable stress and debt to our family. In that regard, perhaps these higher fees from MDARD have forced us to reconsider our priorities and we will benefit from it in the long run, even if it brings us sadness and disappointment as an immediate response. Here’s hoping.
Related Images:
Leave a Reply