I have one customer that never picked up his chicken order so… If you’re up for a road trip I have 15 fresh frozen chickens for sale here at the farm. Email me if you’re interested.
I can also ship frozen chickens (or pork or beef) within the state of Iowa. I’ve never done it before, so I would have to find out costs and such. I know it involves a styrofoam cooler, dry ice, and Fedex Overnight. Email me if you’re interested.
And I’d also like to hear if there is any interest from those outside the state of Iowa in purchasing beef, pork or chicken and having it shipped. The only change we’d have to make is to use a federally inspected processor rather than our state inspected processors. But I’d want to know what interest is out there before we make that change.
You can email orders, questions, or comments to:
themillers92 (at) osage (dot) net
Sounds like a really cook idea! If it were more than just me and Tom, I’d be totally up for it — just over the border here in Illinois. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of takers… Good luck!
Great blog. We are doing a lot of the same stuff you are. One thing we started doing to keep people from standing us up on meat orders was to take deposits on everything. When people have money to loose they almost always follow through. Also it gives me the money I need to raise it. I’ve never shipped anything, but anyone I have talked to who has said its not very profitable. By the time shipping, packaging, dry ice, insurance and labor are added up the shipping costs as much as the product. Then a certain percentage doesn’t arrive in good shape which causes more hassles. Let us know if you can figure out how to make it work. We have been lucky in that we started with a couple of great customers who have really spread the word for us, and I think our customer list is right on the verge of snowballing, so we have all we will be able to handle selling locally. We live in a pretty rural area but have some decent sized towns within 15 miles of us. Also we had an open house last fall where we gave tours and let people sample our wares. We got a lot of names for our mailing list that way. Also, having a fat customer list (not fat customers, a fat list) makes it easy to get rid of extra stuff when we have it. It usually just takes a few calls.
What are you able to get for your chickens there in IO? I feel guilty for charging $1.65/lb here. I think that pricing is the hardest part of this whole deal for me.