Most of the sausage inside the national numbers is ground meat with a bag of seasoning in it. Yours does not have to be, and the price follows that choice far more than it follows the bird.
USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service collects direct-to-consumer prices from 66 pastured producers and publishes them by cut, in the National Pasture Raised Poultry Report. Its sausage numbers are worth a careful read this quarter, because what they measure is not quite what most of us assume.
Chicken sausage averages $14.85 a pound. But the reported range runs from $8.00 all the way up to $22.67.
That is a spread of nearly fifteen dollars on the same word on a label. No bird explains that. No feed bill explains it. What explains it is what went into the sausage and who did the work.
The spread is the whole story
The same word, two very different products
The data
| Item | Low | Average | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken, whole bird | $4.50 | $7.47 | $16.99 |
| Chicken, ground | $10.00 | $14.73 | $22.99 |
| Chicken, sausage | $8.00 | $14.85 | $22.67 |
| Turkey, whole bird | $4.99 | $8.53 | $13.99 |
| Turkey, ground | $10.00 | $13.81 | $20.00 |
| Turkey, sausage | $9.00 | $13.88 | $17.75 |
Think about what actually sits at each end of that range.
At the bottom is sausage made the fast way. A seasoning blend ordered off a distributor list, mixed into ground meat by machine, run through as quick as the line will go. It is cheap to make and it is quick to make. There is nothing wrong with it except that it tastes like everyone else's, and the price says so.
At the top is a product somebody designed. A recipe worked out, tested, and changed until it was right. Real ingredients prepped fresh instead of shaken out of a bag. Mixed, stuffed and linked by people who know what the batch is supposed to look like. It costs more and it takes longer, and customers pay it, because they cannot get that sausage anywhere else.
Both of those are sitting inside the same average.
What the average is really measuring
Worth understanding before you price off it
Here is the part that catches people out. Ground chicken averages $14.73 a pound. Chicken sausage averages $14.85. The two are only $0.12 apart.
The data
| Item | Avg $/lb | Multiple of whole bird |
|---|---|---|
| Tenders | $17.01 | 2.28× |
| Breast, boneless | $15.76 | 2.11× |
| Thighs, boneless | $15.61 | 2.09× |
| Sausage | $14.85 | 1.99× |
| Ground | $14.73 | 1.97× |
| Breast, bone-in | $12.40 | 1.66× |
| Thighs | $11.42 | 1.53× |
| Leg Quarters | $9.34 | 1.25× |
| Spatchcocked | $8.66 | 1.16× |
| Cut into pieces | $7.58 | 1.01× |
| Wings | $7.52 | 1.01× |
| Whole chicken | $7.47 | 1.00× |
Turkey says the same thing. Ground turkey averages $13.81 and turkey sausage $13.88, $0.07 apart.
Read that the wrong way and it sounds like sausage is not worth the trouble. Read it properly and it tells you something a lot more useful. An average sitting that close to ground is an average full of sausage that is barely more than ground. That is what most of the market is selling. It is not what sausage is worth. It is what commodity sausage is worth.
What moves you up the range
Four things, and not one of them is the bird
The recipe. A blend off a distributor list is available to every producer and every plant in the country, which is exactly why it prices like it does. A recipe built for your product is not available to anyone else. Ours are researched, tested and adjusted long before they reach a customer.
The ingredients. Fresh apples diced the morning of the batch behave differently from dried apple in a premix, and they taste different. Real garlic, real herbs, natural casing. Read the ingredient panel on something at the bottom of that range, then read one from the top. The list tells you the price before you look at it.
The hands. Hand mixing and hand stuffing are slower than the machine version. They are also how the mix stays even and how the links come out the same every time.
The name. This is the one producers leave on the table. Sausage is a category. A named sausage that only your farm sells is a product, and it is the reason somebody drives past three other stands to get to yours.
What actually goes in it
Read your freezer, not just the price sheet
The other half of this is inventory, and it is where a price sheet will steer you wrong.
Take boneless thighs. They average $15.61 a pound against sausage at $14.85, so on paper, grinding a boneless thigh throws money away. In your first planning year, with an empty freezer, that is exactly right.
Four slaughters into a season it can be completely wrong. If you are sitting on six cases of thighs that are not moving, those thighs are not worth $15.61 a pound. They are worth whatever you can actually sell them for, and that answer is usually sausage. A cut that will not move has no price. It has a storage bill.
Drumsticks are the standing example. Hardly anyone moves drums, so drums go to grind by default at $7.64 a pound. But drums on their own are nowhere near the volume needed to carry a ground line plus three sausage products. If you are building a real value-added line, plan the whole thing at once: which cuts sell, which ones never do, what volume that actually leaves you, and how many products that volume can honestly support.
Let your sell-through decide the grind list, every season. Not the price sheet you read in January.
What we charge, and why it holds
Our own numbers
Our chicken sausage retails at $15.50 a pound and our turkey sausage at $19.25. The chicken sits above the national average. The turkey sits above the top of the entire reported range.
Those prices hold because the product earns them. Customers are not weighing our sausage against ground chicken. They are weighing it against the sausage they bought last time, and the one they liked is the one they come back for. That is a recipe question and a consistency question long before it is a pricing question. It just ends as a pricing question. That work is available to any farm that brings birds here.
The Call
Sell what is in it, and price above the average on purpose
If your sausage is worth more than the average, do not let the average set your number. Build the price from the recipe and the ingredients that actually go in it, publish it above $14.85, and put the ingredient list somewhere a customer can read it. The producers up at $22.67 are not raising a different bird. They are selling something nobody else has.
Then make sure the work behind it backs the price up. A blend off a list and a recipe built for your farm come out of the stuffer looking much the same. Only one of them is still yours next season.
What to do with this
Two practical steps
Put your price above the average on purpose. $14.85 is the middle of a market carrying a lot of seasoned ground. Decide where you sit and why, then publish it and hold it.
Build the grind list out of your freezer. Look at what is not selling four slaughters in, not at what the price sheet said in January, and check that your volume honestly supports the number of products you are planning.
Talk to us about the value-added side
Steadfast Farms is a USDA-inspected poultry plant in Bethlehem, Connecticut, slaughtering and processing chicken and turkey for farms across New England. USDA inspection means the birds you bring us can be sold retail, wholesale and across state lines.
If you want a sausage that is yours rather than one off a list, that starts with a conversation about recipe and ingredients, not a line on an order form. Tell us what you are holding, what is not selling, and what you want on your table next season, and we will work it backwards from there.
Email service@steadfastfarms.com or call (860) 302-7847.
Sources & method
- USDA AMS, National Pasture Raised Poultry Report, 2026 Quarter 2 (April to June), released 26 June 2026. Direct-to-consumer prices reported by 66 pastured producers nationally, plus one aggregated state report. National figures; the series carries no Northeast breakout. Next release 25 September 2026.
- Every AMS average quoted here falls inside its own published low to high range, checked on extraction. Where a range is quoted it is the reported low and high for that item, not a forecast.
- Steadfast Farms' own retail prices are as at July 2026. Product photographs were taken in the Bethlehem plant in September 2026.