“When my family and I raised chickens on our farm in Henry County we realized a net profit of $6,000 on the sale of 2,000 chickens processed over the course of five months. A factory farm realizes a profit of $20,000 to $30,000 on the sale of 1,200,000 chickens.
…
The grain farm and the hog and chicken farm are the result of a modern industrial mind, a mind that refuses to accept any context.”
From “Agriculture vs. Agribusiness”, by Wendell’s daughter Mary Berry Smith, on Front Porch Republic.
The Berry family made a profit of $3 per chicken. The factory farm made a profit of—assuming the $30,000 number—two and a half cents per chicken.
Last summer, I went in halfsies on an 800-bird chicken business. After all the capital outlays (chicken housing, feed, a plucker, other assorted items), a loss of over 100 chickens to some hard Spring weather, the diversion of another 120-150 chickens to our own freezers, we still made a wildly better per-bird profit (spread out over the 800 birds, not the 550+ that we sold) than the industrial chicken operation.