It turns out that feeding a bunch of farm animals gets expensive when you buy bags of feed. At almost $30/bag, it adds up in a big hurry, particularly when you have a lot of animals. Right now we have over fifty chickens, and they eat a lot. Particularly in the winter, when there isn't much for them to forage.
Fortunately, there are bulk options, and that's what we'll be doing next year. Bulk feed is a lot cheaper, averaging out to the equivalent of about $4 per bag, a significant savings. And since we plan to do a much larger meat chicken flock this summer, that is going to be a very important shift in costs. Because meat birds eat one hell of a lot of food, especially the kind we get (Cornish Cross). They grow to about six to seven pounds in about three months, and they don't do it by exercising and taking steroids.
The nice thing about buying someone else's old farm is that it comes with a silo to store all this grain. We can expect to fit about ten tons in the silo, which is roughly $1,000 or so. It's hefty, but considering the amount we'd have to pay for the equivalent bags? Yeah, that's not a hard call to make.
Maybe we can even afford to get some turkeys this year as well. That would be fun.
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