Buying ducks eggs....how much $ is reasonable?

[TattooQ27]

DH and I are going to keep a few extra ducks when our order comes in next month, with the intention of having a couple of breeding pairs. We are hoping to have a breeding trio of Ancona's and a breeding trio of Khaki Campbells and then we will also be selling out mutt eggs (Pekin crossed with either Blue Swede, Welsh Harlequin, or Cayuga).

If you were to be really interested in these breeds and you really wanted to buy eggs from each of these groups, what is the most you would happily pay per egg, not including shipping:

1) Purebred Ancona eggs

2) Purebred Khaki Campbell eggs

3) Assorted mixed breed ducks (basically they free range so you would get whatever egg you get)


We are thinking we could possibly make arrangements to separate the Pekin drake and put him in with one of the females if someone had a request for a specific cross bred duck but we aren't sure how we would work that at this point. For right now, we are just trying to get an idea of how much money people would want to spend on purebred Ancona eggs, purebred Khaki Campbell eggs and Pekin x eggs.


Thanks!

 

[Katy]

Price would depend on the quality of the parent stock. Are you getting them from a hatchery? If so, the quality probably won't be that great. If on the other hand you're getting them from a breeder the odds are better that you'll have some that people would be interested in buying.

 

[CityChicker]

I agree with Katy. It depends a lot on the quality, especially with the Khaki Campbells. I have never seen them sold by the egg, but since you want the price by the egg, I would say probably about $1.50 to $3.00 per egg for the Campbells. The lower price would be for hatchery quality. The higher price would be for breeder/show quality stock (if you had really exceptional stock, possibly more). Of course, it is very hard to say. It depends so much on quality and your market. Eggs seem to go though for roughly 25%-50% of the duckling price most places (closer usually to the lower of the two).

Anconas you could get more for and there is probably not as wide a variation in price. I would say you could probably get $3-$4.00 an egg pretty easily somewhere like Ebay. As far as mixes, especially random mixes of multiple breeds, I personally would not pay anything for (nor do I charge anything for them when I have them).

 

[TattooQ27]

Quote:
Well we have some coming from Cackle Hatchery and then we have some from a breeder but if the amount that we can sell the eggs for is a drastic difference depending on where the breeding stock comes from we are happy to sell off what we are getting from the hatchery and use that money towards buying good breeding stock from a breeder.

If you wouldn't mind, could you tell me what you personally would pay for the eggs from hatchery ducks as opposed to breeding stock from a good breeder?

Also, is there any way to tell the difference between hatchery stock and breeder stock because as far as I know all of the original breeding stock locally originally came from hatcheries. The breeders kept the best and bred them together to keep the good qualities going. Would there be any reason that I couldn't keep the best of what I get from Cackle to use in my breeding program?

I am new to this so any advice you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Katy]

I only have call ducks and have never bought any duck eggs so I really can't say what I'd be willing to pay. Chickens I can say I've paid several times per egg as I could have gotten hatchery chicks for.

It is cheaper in the long run to shell out the money for good breeder birds than it is to raise many generations of hatchery birds continually culling to get what you could have started out with in the first place.

If all you have locally is former hatchery birds I'd look elsewhere for some good birds unless they have been culling and breeding for many generations....then you might get some good birds to start out with.

It's fine if you sell eggs from the hatchery stock as long as you make your customers aware of what kind of birds they are buying from.

 

[TattooQ27]

Quote:
Thanks for the opinion! We were thinking that we would probably be happy to sell the purebred eggs for about $2/each. We are thinking in terms of price per egg in case people want to custom order instead of having to buy 10 or 12 or whatever. I have had a couple local orders for the mutt eggs and generally they only want between 2 and 5. I have been selling them for $1.00 each and no one has balked at that yet so I might just stick with it for now.

Thanks again!

 

[TattooQ27]

Quote:
Thanks for the advice!

I think DH and I are basically hoping to make enough money off the sale of the eggs to pay for the ducks. We would own the ducks either way but if they help pay for themselves we can keep more of them, we would like 10 total. Our yearly costs for the 10 ducks would be about $600. According to Dave Holderread's Raising Ducks book, on the low end we should potentially get about 1,360 eggs a year so if we sold each egg for about $0.45 then we would be satisfied.