True cost of starting a backyard flock.

No offense meant but I would have to gently disagree with this. The only cost that a person has a reasonably large chance of HAVING to shell out significantly for is safe run fencing, but you can make a pretty good daytime-only run for half a dozen (or a dozen more crowded) chickens with maybe $100 worth of fencing and posts. So the cost needn't be exorbitant for the run. Obviously a larger or roofed run will cost a good bit more; but OTOH it is sometimes possible to scrounge much or all of the materials for cheap or free, if you look around enough.

As for the coop itself, is of course quite EASY to spend a lot but it is by no means NECESSARY. Not even if you don't have lots of stuff lying around. Scrounging is good, as is designing around the materials you have. So it can certainly be done on a shoestring if desired.

Also many people have structures that can be converted (in whole or in part) into chicken housing, so that you're back to only needing a run.

I am only posting this so that people do not get scared off by thinking that they HAVE to have many hundreds or thousands of loose-change dollars in order to have chcikens smile

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

While I agree with Pat for the most part, I would like to point out that there is also time involved.
So I would like to discuss the total cost we all spend getting started with chickens.


I will start:

Time spent doing coop/chicken research:
~ 50 hours. (This is a conservative guess. I obsessed for 3 weeks before starting the build. I also had to design from scratch so my tractor could go through a garden fence.)

Materials for coop and run:
~ $350.00 (The run was put in as a dog run by previous house owners. All I had to do was fix the gate. Spent extra on a few ideas that did not work out so well. I believe if I were to do it again I could make the coop for less than $200.00)

Time Spent building the coop and run:
~40 hours (This includes time building feeders and nipple watering system. A proper paint job was a big time eater. It always amazes me how long it takes to build even simple things.)

Initial Cost of Chickens: Including brooding supplies and feed to first egg.
$0 (I am lucky enough to have a friend with a large flock. She let me have my 4 18 month old hens for free. We had 4 eggs the next day)

Other Misc Costs:
I'm sure I will think of some.

This is just the initial cost.
About $350 and roughly 90 hours of my time, worth $1800.00 if I were work extra instead of building a coop.
Just so happens I enjoy building things as a hobby so we could reasonably cut the cost for time in half.

Total true cost for me to first egg: ~ $1250.00

I was originally going to build a recycled coop from pallets. For me though it did not make sense to spend that much time tracking down and destructing pallets since that is less fun for me than working.

Kinda scary when you think about it like that.
However I have 4 great pets and some great eggs. So I would do it again in a heartbeat.​

Chicken.Lytle :

I knew a fellow who did estimates for a living. He was amazingly accurate. Here is his method:

1. Carefully calculate cost of materials and labor in excruciating detail
2. Change labor estimate to next higher category (2 hours = 2 days, 3 days = 3 weeks)
3. Update the cost figure
4. Double the cost figure

You will probably be about 10% under final cost.

Ain't it the truth!​

Opportunity cost is the cost related to the next-best choice available to someone who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices.[1] It is a key concept in economics. It has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice."[2] The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently.[3] Thus, opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs: the real cost of output forgone, lost time, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility should also be considered opportunity costs.
Example:
A person who has $15 can either buy a CD or a shirt. If he buys the shirt the opportunity cost is the CD and if he buys the CD the opportunity cost is the shirt. If there are more choices than two, the opportunity cost is still only one item, never all of them.

This could also be getting an extra job or doing something else to make money. The value is different from one person to the next. A brain surgeon would be economically driven to have someone build them a coop because the time they spend at work is so much more valuable than my time. They may choose to build their own coop for many reasons but saving money is not one of those because the time spent building a coop would cost them more money than buying one.

It really comes down to the fact that starting a backyard flock costs both time and money. If you spend more time you can spend less money and vice versa. We all work to a balance that makes sense to us individually.
I think it will be interesting to see how others have achieved this balance.​