Our Pricing Guidelines

On Our Farm

#12 of 21 Things You May Not Know about Peace Valley Poultry

You may wonder how we price our poultry and beef. It may look like some pastured meat producers charge whatever the market will bear. Our formula is like this; input costs + our labor + a profit = selling price.

Our input costs are lower than most because we buy our grain directly from the farmer and grind and mix it ourselves. Buying 500 baby chicks per week for 31 weeks gets us a lower price than smaller farmers. Our goal is to pass those savings along to the consumer.

Over the years we have designed and built many labor saving tools with which to raise poultry on pasture. These tools greatly reduce the amount of daily labor required to move chickens and turkeys to fresh pasture daily. If we assign $15.00/hour as the wage we want to make, it takes about $1.00 of labor to care for a chicken for 8 weeks on our farm. (that number is sky high compared to labor requirements in a confinement house. See blog number 6, )

Profit is the sticky wicket. How much profit per bird greatly determines how many birds you can sell. Currently we make about $3.50-$4.00 profit per bird. That may seem like a lot of money, but we have to replace worn out equipment from that fund, and also buy things that rejuvenate us. Think dental, eye care, etc.

Our business model has always been to make small margins on large volumes, not vice versa. More chickens mean more manure to fertilize the pastures and that is the primary reason we started raising pastured poultry over 20 years ago.

Incidentally, I picked up the meat from 4 beeves at Summersville on Thursday. Included was 1½ beeves that neighbors bought. One kept beef bones for stock and their meat came to $3.63/lb. averaged across all cuts, steaks, roasts, ground beef, bones etc. The other neighbor did not keep stock bones and theirs averaged $4.04/lb across all cuts. I was pleasantly surprised how low that was, considering grass finished ground beef at Aldi in West Plains is $5.49/lb.

We are giving a free sample of grass finished ground beef to all who want to try it. Call, email or ask when at the farm or at our delivery truck if you are interested. Individual cuts of grass finished beef are now available at the farm and on the delivery truck. Price list to follow soon.