13.5K
THI call it the $1,000 meat bird method.
Because that’s about what it costs us to raise 100 meat birds from day-old chicks to freezer-ready here in Canada.
We buy 100 Cornish Cross (unsexed).
No vaccines. No beak dipping.
They cost us $3.57 CAD per bird.
That’s $357 CAD.
We order as a group so we get bulk pricing and split the shipping.
We feed chick starter for the first three weeks. That runs us about $200 CAD.
After that we switch to grower ration. We buy in bulk from a chicken farm about an hour and a half from us. A full tote costs $450 CAD.
So all in:
$357 CAD for chicks
$200 CAD for starter
$450 CAD for grower
= $1,007 CAD
Right around $1,000 CAD.
They stay in the brooder for 3–4 weeks, then we move them outside into two chicken tractors. We move the tractors daily so the birds stay clean, and we run electric fencing to keep predators out.
We process at 8–9 weeks.
We don’t pay for butchering. We do it ourselves. Family comes in for butcher day and we pay them in homegrown chicken.
Butcher day starts around 6am and we’re usually wrapped up by 3pm. One person catching and dispatching, one scalding and plucking, one gutting, and two inside packaging birds.
We’ve been working toward self-sufficiency since 2020. It started with vegetables. Two years in, we added meat birds — and that’s when we really started relying less on the grocery store.
Our freezer is mostly homegrown chicken, deer we hunt and process ourselves, and fish from local lakes. We love beef too. This spring we’ll be grazing a steer on our land and butchering at the end of 2026. Until then, we buy beef from local producers.
If you’ve been thinking about raising chickens for meat — I’d recommend it. It’s the easiest, most efficient way we’ve found to fill a freezer.
Eight weeks. One butcher day. Done for the year.
I have the plans drafted up for our chicken tractor. Would you guys like the plans up on the site?! Let me know.
#meatbirds
#homegrownfood
#canadianhomestead
#selfsufficiency
#fillthefreezer
@thehillsidemarket
