Better? Possibly. But I can't argue with
@jswordy's comment about cheaper.
My father was a full time police officer, ran a 20 head dairy farm, and purchased 50 chicks each spring. No, he had no idea what "sitting down" meant.
Fall of 1977 he figured out the cost per pound for the chickens. He kept 4 for laying hens and we had finished butchering the last of the other chickens. IIRC, he started knocking the fryers off at the 6 or 8 week point, then 4 or 5 each week until just the laying hens were left.
The fixed costs, not including his labor, was $0.39/pound. The sale paper listed fryers for $0.29/pound. That was the last batch of chickens.
Honestly, I haven't had good chicken since then. Nothing made better roasts or soup than those laying hens, and his fryers were plumper and tasted better. But at a cost.
For those not familiar, laying hens meant they produced eggs. We collected 5 to 8 eggs per day (IIRC), and had a large enough family that we used 'em all.
Agree. I was not making a quality vs. cost comparison, but here let's look at that with beef. Chickens work differently than cows. A free-range chicken is the best tasting thing ever precisely because it eats every darned thing out there, bugs and all, and the meat doesn't change. But the plants in a pasture are directly reflected in the taste of a cow's meat if it is only grass-fed. When I ran a 60-head herd of Boer goats, we slaughtered and ate some of them, because goat meat works differently than cows, too. All we had to do was grass-feed the goats, and the meat was great. Oh how I miss it sometimes.
But with cattle, if you want the same quality meat you buy at the store, you must wean them (oh that is fun, trying to keep them and mama away from each other with a wire fence), then finish them penned up for 90+ days on corn and grains. That not only takes up land, it means feeding them $8 a bag corn a couple-three times every day (you can cut your corn cost by buying a bin and having it bulk filled, but then you have the cost of the bin and the service). If they come off spring pasture where there is a good chance of wild onion and other aromatic weeds present, you'll feed them for as long as 200 days if you wish to avoid the risk of your meat tasting terrible. Then between age 9 months and a year, you haul them to the butcher, who charges you for the kill and then the cutting.
So you have invested your daily time, plus the opportunity costs of what you could have sold the calf for as a six-month-old. You've paid for the grain feed, and paid the butcher. That adds up to quite a bit more than what you could buy the processed, graded meat for at the supermarket, and oh my gosh grain prices are rising. They are talking maybe $12 corn! There has only been one time when my farm-to-table neighbor's store prices were in range of the supermarket, and that was when there was a severe meat shortage after the big packers got hit hard by Covid. That lasted about 2 months, and was a great boost to that family's business model.
So, the cuts are back from the butcher. The beef you finally produce can be highly variable in marbling and taste unless you decided to grain feed long term and are a stickler that it got done properly. And you get ALL the cuts, not just the cuts you ideally want.
Like your dad, I figure the costs. We would have gotten along just fine. Farming is hard work, so I try to pencil it out to me making $20 an hour for the hours I invest. Anything that falls below that $20 an hour gets a real hard look. It is a low return on investment business, so a sharp pencil is required. A great example is cow patties. Most years, using my old 1913 John Deere harrow to break up and spread cow patties across pastures doesn't pay, as chemical fertilizer is much cheaper per acre than the fuel and time to repeatedly spread out cow turds. So most years, I only do it once or twice in spring, to break up the turds and reduce parasitic worm loads and summer fly populations. But this year, with urea fertilizer at $1,500/ton (now down to ~ $1,000 cuz farmers are buying less of it, compared to $650 last year), my pencil said it did pay to do it often, and so I did it often out there in the cold. I have some nice grass coming along now and saved on my chemical fertilizer, too. Everything I do has the pencil pushed on it first.
Rather than investing in a chicken house and chickens while in an area where bobcats and raccoons rule, I buy my free-range eggs right up the road for $3 a dozen, worth every dime to let someone else have their "pet" chickens and bear the costs and risks.
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