Can you MAKE MONEY with chickens?

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I base it off of this:
If 1 bird eats 1/3 pound of feed every day times 365 days is 121.6 pounds per year. Here a hundred pounds of feed costs $23 and multiplied by 1.216 is about $28. If a chicken gives you 250 eggs per and you sell them for $2 a dozen you are selling 20 dozen eggs for a total of $40. That is a $12 profit per year when they are laying good but you should also consider the cost of raising them from chicks which would be about $5 until they start laying.
 
stoneunhenged said:
Actually, as luck would have it, the leading laboratory for determining the "genetic fingerprint" of a bird is only about 15 miles from Greenfire Farms. I've talked to them about genetically fingerprinting some of the rarer Orpingtons. Here's their website:

http://www.avianbiotech.com/

Right now many of the chicken breed clubs are struggling to survive because they don't offer a clear service to the poultry community. What would happen if each club ran a registry for its breed? This is how it could work. The breed club would create a panel that reviews pictures of chickens to be submitted to the registry. Each birds that conforms to the breed standard would be allowed to initially be registered. Those birds would be closed banded with a numbered band and a registration certificate would be issued. When the young from those birds are hatched and sold, they could be registered on line for free (or some minimal charge) by their new owners, and so on. Before long you'd have a database of owners and breeders and birds that conform to the breed standard. When you want to buy breeding stock, you can go on line and determine not only where to go to buy the stock, but whether the birds you buy will have a high inbreeding coefficient. And, the breed clubs would flourish because they finally have a valuable role to play in the process.

What I described is exactly what we were able to do for the red wattle hog. Greenfire Farms developed the prototype online database, and now there are 1,179 red wattles (see how precise a database can be?) registered online. You can instantly go online and draw the family tree for your hogs, and you can do a hypothetical mating between any two registered animals and determine the degree to which their young would be inbred. How cool is that?

If we do this for chickens, we will immensely improve the quality of the breeds and increase the value of the birds. And, it can be accomplished at a very reasonable cost.
Click to expand...
Here is how it works in rabbits. Once the rabbit is mature (varies depending on breed, but must be of the age considered adult for the breed) it is examined in person by a registrar. Registrars are trained and certified by the ARBA, I'm not positive but I believe they have to renew every so often. The registrar confirms that the animal is the correct weight for its breed, that is a recognized color and has no disqualifications. The breeder must present a 3 generation pedigree, the ancestors do not have to have been registered, but there are special designations for every generation of ancestors that are registered (red, white and blue pedigreed means that every rabbit on the pedigree was registered). The rabbit has to have been tattooed in one ear by the breeder. The registrar fills out the registration form and tatoos the registration number in the other ear. The breeder pays the registration fee and gets a carbon of the form, the registrar sends the original to the ARBA and they send the breeder the registration paper with the special seal on it.

I personally prefer this system as opposed to the dog system where every dog in a litter can be registered whether it meets the breed standard or not. With chickens there might have to be some things done differently and as in anything there will probably be some unscrupulous people that will lie and cheat to make a buck. I hope they are few and far between and disappear from the scene as quickly as possible.

With birds leg or wing bands that could be permanently attached would be needed. yes, it is still the breeders word that the egg/chicks you buy from them are from the birds they say they are, but you are depending on that now anyway. I found in the rabbit fancy that 99% of the people out there were friendly and helpful, especially to newcomers. I think chicken people are the same way.
 
I have heard somewhere that chickens droppings is the best fertilizer there is.. I think that thats true. A lady once told me she buys it for her garden.. I wonder if you could bag it and sell it? Its a nasty job but you could most likely earn some money off of it. Please correct me if i'm wrong!!!
 
Great ideas! I am just starting with chickens as a hobby. But was looking into the possibility of supplementing my income. Until your ideas actually occur it looks like its just a hobby for me. That's Ok.
 
Catfish267 said:
I base it off of this:
If 1 bird eats 1/3 pound of feed every day times 365 days is 121.6 pounds per year. Here a hundred pounds of feed costs $23 and multiplied by 1.216 is about $28. If a chicken gives you 250 eggs per and you sell them for $2 a dozen you are selling 20 dozen eggs for a total of $40. That is a $12 profit per year when they are laying good but you should also consider the cost of raising them from chicks which would be about $5 until they start laying.
Click to expand...
is this per chicken?
 
Hello,
I tried really hard to make money with my hobby chickens and ended up turning a flock of 10 into a flock of 50. I found that making your own feed helps ALOT and having feed in a metal bin so no pesky rodents eat there share. I purchased a ''American standard of perfection" poultry book and started trying to raise heritage breeds, which worked but what really helped me was standing by farm supply type stores and asking people to share there favorite breeds. After I was done, I found there was a demand for a few breeds so I got, breed, and fixed the kinks and advertised on poster boards, Facebook, kijiji, and I guess it would have been possible twitter and pintrest. I got my self way more customers than I could handle so I breed more birds and added to my flock. (When I would increase my flock I would usually try to get eggs from poultry show winners.) after I was making a "little" money I wanted hobby ducks. once the ducks started laying I would get eggs from every duck every day (I'm not joking). I did what I did with the chickens but I ran into a slit problem, when the ducks where hatching at the beginning they would pip, but would have a eye sized yolk still attached to the shell and would die because of that. After discovering it was because of tempicher and humidity I had very few that hatched that way, and found that ducks made more money.
I hope this helps (I'm sorry for any spelling errors and such)
good luck!
ya.gif
 

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