With food prices on the rise, more people are raising their own chickens and growing food to save money.
In the last four years, food prices have increased 19 percent. This year, the cost of food is expected to increase almost three percent. That's why 86 percent of Americans are planning to grow vegetables in their backyards, a recent survey found.
Stacey Wiseman has a farm on the edge of town and has been raising chickens and growing her own fruits and vegetables with her family since the pandemic. She grows a variety of vegetables, including cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus, as well as berries and apples. Growing food saves her hundreds of dollars a year at the store.
“You can't beat a strawberry that is right out of the garden,” she said. “Flavor-wise, it's just sweeter. It's picked at its peak of ripeness, peak of nutrient content. And we're so fortunate to have the ability to grow foods from far away and transport them to us so that they're available all year long, but you lose quality, and you definitely lose flavor in doing so.”
Wiseman has a lot of leftover food from the garden that she saves too.
“We'll can a lot of our own tomatoes,” she said. “And then we freeze things as well. So, we freeze spinach, we freeze kale, collard greens, anything really that that we can preserve. We're still eating cabbage from last year.”
Tyler Potts, regional live goods buyer for Tractor Supply, said this trend of more people raising chickens and having gardens, has taken off since the Covid-19 pandemic. He said with the wide variety of small plants you can buy at the store, it’s getting easier for people even in apartments to grow their own food. Tomato and pepper plants, as well as herbs, are some of the most popular choices.
"Those are very, very easy, especially for an apartment owner, to grow even on your window sill," he said. "They don't have to be outside. That's a really good offering, and really something that you can easily use, especially when you're just cooking at home."
In Indiana, Potts says more customers are purchasing herbs and seeds, starting their garden inside and moving outside once the weather warms up.
Raising chickens
According to Potts, one in five Tractor Supply customers in Indiana are raising chickens at home. That number is increasing.
Every year, Wiseman orders three batches of about 30 chickens each. After raising them for about eight to 12 weeks so they can build up weight, they process them. Wiseman gets between three to six pounds of meat off each chicken, for a total of about 300 pounds of chicken meat a year.
“We can typically get two to three meals off of a bird, depending on how we cook it,” she said. “So, if we cook it and shred the meat, then we can usually get three meals out of it. If we roast it or smoke it on the grill, we'll typically get two meals.”
For the last group of chickens she processed, Wiseman spent about $18.50 on each bird. That includes $5 to purchase them and feed costs. But for the new group of chicks she's raising from a different hatchery, she only spent $2 on each; plus feed costs, she expects to invest about $10.75 into each bird.
While this doesn't save her much at the grocery store, she's considering purchasing dual purpose chickens. If she can get chicks from her hens' eggs, that already cuts the cost of purchasing them from a hatchery. If they only have to consider feed costs, they could decrease the amout of money they invest into every chicken to about $4 or $5.
"If you look at it from, we can hatch our own birds, so then, you know, we have a pasture that they can supplement on. They can forage," she said. "So, that's going to cut feed costs down, I think, from a sustainability standpoint. Doing a dual-purpose breed can really, really help lower costs and make everything more sustainable."
Wiseman's hens produce 13 eggs a day; she consumes those eggs in her household and sells them for $3 a dozen. That money helps her cover feed costs. At Kroger, a dozen eggs costs between $1.79 and $6.99, depending on the brand.
“From a safety perspective, when the bird flu hit and they had to cull a lot of hens, that just took the supply down,” she said. “So being able to provide eggs for our family [was important].”
With all the food she’s able to get from the chickens and the garden, she doesn’t have to purchase much from the grocery store during the summer. She only buys staple foods such as milk and bread.
“It's really, really rewarding for me when we can sit down to a meal and we've raised the chicken, we've grown the vegetables, like we didn't purchase any of that food,” she said. “We grew it all here.”
To raise chickens within city limits, residents are required to purchase a permit annually from Animal Care and Control. There are rules in place to have chickens, including having a chicken coop and a chicken run, an area that is securely fenced to allow chickens to roam outside with protection from predators and access to sun and shade.
According to Director of Animal Care and Control Virgil Sauder, the number of new permit applications hasn't increased. But Wiseman said she has talked with more people who are interested in raising chickens and growing food.
"I would definitely say there's a growing interest," she said. "When we tell people what we do, they're like, wow, that's really neat. I would love to come out and see it. So, you know, we welcome people anytime to just come see the farm, experience the processing process. And if they need help, we're always happy to do that too."
