Broiler Break-Even: The Farmgate Price Where a Batch Stops Losing Money

At ₱1,800 for a 50 kg sack of feeds and a harvest on day 35, a batch of broilers stops losing money somewhere between ₱68.19 and ₱80.07 per kilo liveweight. That is what the break-even tool prints, and it is a floor rather than an answer. It charges you for sisiw and for feeds. Wala nang iba doon: walang gamot, walang litter, walang kuryente, walang hakot papuntang palengke.

Three numbers have to be in front of you before that grid means anything, and only one of them is published:

• The presyo of a sack at your own dealer this week, and the weight of that sack. Nobody in the Philippines publishes it. That is why the tool asks you instead of guessing.
• The day you intend to harvest. Day 28 and day 42 are two different batches, not one batch measured twice, and the floor moves about ₱9 a kilo between them at a ₱1,800 sack.
• What you paid for the sisiw. The archive carries ₱33.50 a head from Bureau of Animal Industry monitoring for the week of 13 July 2026, but that is a wholesale farmgate figure. A backyard keeper buying twenty chicks off a dealer pays more than that, and nobody publishes what.

Break-even asks less of you than a profit projection, and that is the whole point

A profit projection cannot start until you hand it a selling price. You have to tell it what the palengke will pay on the day you sell, and neither you nor I know that. Feed it an optimistic presyo and it hands back an optimistic kita with a decimal point attached for authority. Hula pa rin ang pinakamahalagang numero doon. A profit simulator is break-even with more inputs and less confidence.

Break-even needs no revenue assumption at all. It runs the gastos forward, divides by the kilos you expect to sell, and stops. What comes out is a presyo, and the only thing you do with it is hold it against a presyo somebody else already published. What price do you need, that is the only question it answers, not what you will earn. It cannot flatter you, kasi it never guessed at your revenue in the first place.

Timing is the other half of the appeal. You can work a break-even out bago pa dumating ang sisiw, while the decision to place the batch at all is still yours. A profit figure computed after the fact is bookkeeping. The pillar, raising broilers in the Philippines, walks the rest of the cycle; this page is only about the one number you should have before you commit puhunan to it.

The answer arrives as a band because feed conversion arrives as a band

Thirty-three per cent of the growers in the one Philippine survey worth anchoring to said they meet their own production targets only sometimes or not at all. That matters because of what the survey’s headline number turns out to be. Datuin et al. (2022) surveyed 55 farms for the Philippine Journal of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, split its 48 contract growers by housing, and 16 of those sit on the open-sided big-bird row: feed conversion of 1.50 to 1.83, harvest at 30 to 34 days, livability of 94 to 95%. Read the table heading and every one of those is what those sixteen were aiming at rather than what they got. Almost every kulungan in a Philippine bakuran is open-sided, so it is still the row the tool reads. It is just a floor under the feed bill and not a description of one.

Run both ends and watch the gastos move. At day 35 a Ross 308 AP bird weighs 2.36 kg on Aviagen’s own as-hatched table. At 1.50 that manok has eaten 3.54 kg of feeds; at 1.83, 4.32 kg. A ₱1,800 sack holding 50 kg is ₱36 a kilo, so the feed gastos per manok comes to about ₱127 at the good end and about ₱155 at the bad one. Add the ₱33.50 sisiw, divide by 2.36 kg, and you land on the ₱68.19 to ₱80.07 the grid prints. Walang mahika sa gitna.

Now the part that division does not say out loud. Datuin’s band belongs to a big bird sold on day 30 to 34, and the same paper puts the Philippine target liveweight at 1.6 to 1.7 kg. A Ross 308 AP on day 35 is 2.36 kg, heavier than both ends of that. Run the identical sums on a 1.7 kg manok and the floor lands at ₱73.71 to ₱85.59 instead. The feed leg does not budge, kasi feed conversion is a ratio: a kilo of liveweight costs the same in feeds whatever the bird ends up weighing. The whole ₱5.51 is the ₱33.50 sisiw divided over fewer kilos, and that is the line a lighter bakuran bird cannot spread as thin. That manok carries ₱255.53 of liveweight at the June 2026 household farmgate, so the floor takes a bigger bite out of it than the day-35 row makes it look. Day 35 is the row I ran at the top because that is what the tool was asked for; day 28 sits nearer the manok most people here actually sell.

Publishing the midpoint would look tidier, and there is no mean anywhere in the paper to take a midpoint of. Datuin surveyed contract growers and integrators, not backyard keepers, and no Philippine backyard feed conversion figure has ever been published at all. My own view is that a flock sa bakuran through the hot months sits at the top of that band, not inside it, and I would plan the puhunan on ₱80 rather than ₱68 until I had weighed my own manok and counted my own sako. Feed cost to market weight runs the same range on the feed leg alone, broiler growth week by week is where the day-35 liveweight comes from, and batch costing for 50 birds does the whole thing in total pesos instead of per kilo.

The sack price is yours to supply, and per-kilo is where the arithmetic quietly breaks

No Philippine source publishes the price of a sack of finished commercial feed by brand or by tier. That gap is logged as G-15 in this archive. The BAI weekly monitoring that gives us the sisiw price runs 15 feed ingredients in pesos per kilo of raw material and never a bag. The USDA grain and feed annual prices palay and fertiliser. A PIDS paper offers a single 2018 figure per tonne with no brand behind it. The miller websites carry catalogues, walang presyo. Provincial procurement postings do print pesos per 50 kg bag, but those are budget ceilings on a no-brand tender, which is a different animal from a presyo anybody actually paid.

So the sack price is your own input and the grid’s row axis, ₱1,500 up to ₱2,400. Ang presyo sa resibo mo ngayong linggo is worth more than a national average you would have had to trust, and the answer is dated by your own trip to the dealer rather than by somebody else’s survey.

Here is the trap that costs people real pera. ₱36 a kilo and ₱1,800 a sack are the same feeds wearing two faces, and only if the sako holds 50 kg. The grid’s rows are 50 kg sacks. Kung 25 kg ang sako ng dealer mo, the figure on your receipt is half a row, and reading it straight off the table halves your feed bill on paper and tells you the batch clears at a presyo it does not clear at. Ask the weight before you ask the presyo, and write both down. Or convert once to pesos per kilo and stay there, kasi per-kilo arithmetic cannot be misread the way per-sack arithmetic can. Unit confusion of this kind hands you an answer that looks perfectly reasonable and is wrong by half, and it does not announce itself.

The gap between this floor and the farmgate price is not your kita

Now the comparison everyone reaches for, and the one this page exists to spoil. PSA’s household broiler farmgate series stood at ₱150.31 per kilo liveweight in June 2026. The commercial establishment series stood at ₱118.69 for the same month. Set either against a ₱68 to ₱80 floor and it reads like ₱39 to ₱82 a kilo of malinis na tubo, or roughly ₱9,000 to ₱19,000 across the 236 kg a batch of 100 manok carries at day 35, for five weeks of work.

Hindi ganoon. The floor is not your cost. It is two line items out of a dozen.

Four of those eight rows say “not costed”, a fifth is your own time and sits outside the headline on purpose, and nothing published in the Philippines fills any of the four. Dropping a plausible ₱15 a bird into the gamot line would make the table look finished, and you would then be planning a batch around my guess instead of your own resibo.

Here is where I part company with most of what gets written about broiler economics in the Philippines. The standard treatment quotes a break-even to the centavo, sets the farmgate presyo beside it, and calls the difference tubo. That is not slightly optimistic, it is structurally wrong. The cheap-to-model costs are the ones inside the tidy number and the awkward ones are all outside it. Feeds and sisiw are easy to count. Kuryente, bakuna, hakot, the sack of litter, the manok that died on day 20 after eating for 19 days, the four hours a week you never bill anyone for: those are the gastos that decide whether a backyard batch was worth doing, and not one of them is inside the tidy number. Sayang the whole batch if the arithmetic that justified it counted only the easy half.

Death loss makes the same point in miniature. The tool’s own sensitivity block moves the break-even from ₱68.19 to ₱69.77 at the low end as death loss goes from zero to 10%, which looks mild until you notice it charges you for the patay na sisiw but not for the feeds it ate before it died. Kulang pa ang lumalabas doon. Charging that properly needs a mortality-timing curve, and nobody in the Philippines publishes one.

Which farmgate series you check depends on who you sell to

PSA publishes two broiler farmgate series and they sit ₱31.62 apart for June 2026. That is not measurement noise. Magkaibang market level ang dalawa, and averaging them would manufacture a presyo that nobody trades at.

If you sell manok out of your own bakuran, to neighbours, to a viajero na dumadaan sa gate, or to a suki sa palengke, the household series is your comparison. If you are looking at a commercial arrangement the establishment series is closer, and under contract growing neither presyo is really yours at all, which contract growing against going independent works through. Both series are liveweight, the same basis as the tool’s answer, so the comparison is clean. Why there are two broiler farmgate prices is the longer version of this section.

Whichever series is yours, hold your own floor against it rather than against the presyo you are hoping for, and remember that your floor is the grid’s number plus every uncosted row in the table above. Kung kumportableng mas mababa iyon sa ₱150.31, may margin ka pang mawawala bago malugi ang batch. Kung malapit na, isang masamang buwan ng presyo ng feeds ang tatangay sa buong tubo.

One thing not to do. Dressed chicken at retail was ₱213.24 a kilo in July 2026, and that figure will not help you here. Different market level, different weight basis, and no sourced Philippine dressing percentage exists to convert between them. Liveweight against liveweight, and leave the retail number where it is.

Questions people actually ask

What is the break-even farmgate price for a backyard broiler batch?

At ₱1,800 for a 50 kg sack of feeds and a harvest on day 35, sisiw and feeds alone put it between ₱68.19 and ₱80.07 per kilo liveweight. That is a floor. Brooding fuel, gamot, litter, hakot and your own hours all sit on top of it, and none of them has a published Philippine figure.

Why is the break-even a range instead of one number? Show the answer

Because feed conversion is a range, and in the Philippines it is not even a measured one. Datuin et al. (2022) published 1.50 to 1.83 as what the 16 open-sided farms in its 55-farm survey were aiming at, and reported that a third of the whole 55 meet their targets only sometimes or not at all. Feeds are roughly four fifths of the whole bill, so a single break-even figure would claim a precision nobody has measured. Plan on the top of the band.

Which PSA farmgate series should a backyard seller compare against? Show the answer

The Household table, 0032M4AFN10.px, which stood at ₱150.31 per kilo liveweight in June 2026. The commercial establishment table is a different market level at ₱118.69 for the same month. The two are never averaged.

Can I compare my break-even against the dressed chicken price at the palengke? Show the answer

No. Farmgate is liveweight and retail dressed is a different market level on a different weight basis. There is no sourced Philippine dressing percentage in this archive, so converting between them here would be inventing a number.