Cost of keeping ducks

[Mamasaurusrex2]

Hello again! I'm sorry, I have lots of questions, just starting out!

What would you say is the average cost per month for keeping ducks is? I know many of you have lots of ducks, I will only have 2 (we aren't allowed more in city limits) and my husband is worried about cost of straw etc. We will be building the house and run ourselves with scrap wood. I did already check the price on all flock at our local store, though I'm not sure how fast they will go through it. Thanks in advance!!!

 

[quackiemama]

Where are you located? I found a local farmers co-op that has duck feed and pine shavings and all kinds of other supplies for much less than TSC.

 

[Mamasaurusrex2]

Where are you located? I found a local farmers co-op that has duck feed and pine shavings and all kinds of other supplies for much less than TSC.

I am in Idaho-Treasure Valley area. I have not checked TSC yet, we have a different farm supply store close to my house and that's the only place I've looked so far. Though I didn't check the price on straw or shavings. Also, I wonder if a hay bale might be less expensive?

 

[DuckyBabies]

I have two ducks as well. The start up was more expensive. We had to buy a lamp, a lot of bedding because they went through it quick, food, and niacin supplements (brewers yeast). Once my ducks went outside though, it’s gotten way cheaper. Your water bill may go up depending on if you give them a pool or not, but nothing too bad. A 50 pound bag of food lasts me a month-two months because they free range all day, and the bag of food is only like $15. I would also keep some B-complex on hand for when they get older just in case any leg problems arise, but other than that, mine are pretty cheap to keep. Only other expense is hay and plastic in the winter to wrap their coop and put in it to keep them warm.

 

[Duckworth]

I buy my straw several bales at a time from area farms that advertise on Craigslist. I usually pay about $5 per bale, sometimes less. These are the rectangular bales you might expect to see used for seating at a barbecue, not the huge round rolled bales. After my ducks are done with it, I use it in my garden as mulch or I compost it. Duck poo does not have to be composted before putting it on a garden, but also composts fine in a compost pike or bin.

 

[Steven Bussell]

If you use a pond or kiddy pool just reuse the water for your plants or trees... I repurpose all my pond water .
I went overboard and made a huge filter system. So I use only a 150 gallons of month to keep my water clean and safe

 

[DuckyDonna]

You can do the deep liter method which means you just add to the existing bedding and don't clear it out except a couple of times a year. I do take out the big poo pancakes though but it's not really necessary. In the winter time, I take the used hay and spread it around in their run to give them something other than mud to walk on but in your case, it will probably be snow.

I use hay which I get for free from a neighbor and one of those huge round bales lasts me about 2 years. I've had between 6-11 ducks and 2 pens. A 50lb bag of Purina flock raiser is about $17 and is good for every duck and that should last you a really long time with only 2 ducks. If one is a girl you will need to eventually supplement with oyster shell once she starts laying but that is cheap and will last a long time even if they are both girls. They just eat it as they need it from a separate bowl.



As @DuckyBabies said, I'd definitely get the B-complex as the #1 thing to have on hand. Then something for wounds like vetericyn. I made a priority list of duck first aid meds and bought maybe one of them every couple of weeks so it wasn't a big outlay of $$ all at once. I've got a pretty good first aid kit now even including feeding tubes.

There is a very good list of stuff that is good to know about from @casportpony and here is the link:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/suggestions-for-a-first-aid-kit-updated-2-16-2019.1150128/

 

[chickens really]

Here in Canada I pay $7 for a big bale of pine shavings. My feed lasts me a month and I'm feeding 10 Chickens and 5 Call Ducks. The feed I use is a Grower finisher feed for Chickens, Ducks, Turkeys and Geese. It's $15 a bag.
I only use straw in the winter. In summer it rots quickly due to the wet poop from Ducks..

 

[Duckworth]

Here in Canada I pay $7 for a big bale of pine shavings. My feed lasts me a month and I'm feeding 10 Chickens and 5 Call Ducks. The feed I use is a Grower finisher feed for Chickens, Ducks, Turkeys and Geese. It's $15 a bag.
I only use straw in the winter. In summer it rots quickly due to the wet poop from Ducks..

I have stopped using straw in my run in warmer months, but in winter, it seems to help insulate them and I just keep adding more over the frozen straw/poop mix until it thaws in spring and I fork it all out of there. I do stil use it in my duck house all summer, but they do most of their pooping out in their run. I have had terrible luck with pine shavings getting quickly waterlogged and becoming a stinking mass. Straw is easier for me to keep aerated and drained.

My six ducks go through a bag of feed in about a month. They do not free range. I supplement their feed with weeds pulled from my yard which they love and any past-it's-prime produce from my garden. They go crazy for tomatoes and also like Swiss chard a lot. I give them vegetable scraps from my kitchen. They eat every insect that comes into their run. I have a smelly fly trap on the ouside of their run and they eat any flies that fly into the run and the traps get the rest. I usually trap and dispose of two quarts of dead flies a week in the summer.

Pest control is another cost of keeping ducks. I go through a few bags of Sweet PDZ stall refresher per year at about $10/bag. I sprinkle it on their straw to minimize moisture and odor. More moisture equals more odor, so think about that when building your duck house and enclosures. Drainage is important and will affect the cost of keeping your ducks. I also go through a couple of packages of mosquito dunks per year, putting them in the area where most of my ducks' water drains to avoid having it become a mosquito breeding area. Spray pesticides and birds aren't a good combination, but the dunks aren't harmful to them.

For flies, I use the reusable quart jar type fly traps that you put some water into and add a packet of fly attractant. They smell bad as the attractant activates, so I have one one the outside of the run and one on our back fence. They were about $10 apiece and a package of ten attractant packs is about $10. You can get disposable traps, too, for about the same price per unit. But I trap two quarts of flies per week, which would be $20 per week for the privilege of just dropping them into a trash bag and putting them out with the trash. That's out of my price range. So I don the plastic gloves every week, fill the run trap with water all the way to the top and put a brick on the popup lid to keep it sealed so all the flies and maggots inside will drown, then move the back fence trap up to the run to catch all the flies that were coming to the now closed trap. Once everything has drowned, I put on new gloves again and empty the drowned stuff into a garbage bag , rinse it out into the bag and tie the bag closed completely (because it stinks and I don't want the bait to get on anything and attract flies). I put it out with our trash. Usually during those few hours, the other fly trap has filled up and I close and drown it, while rebaiting and hanging the empty trap on the run again. A few hours later, I don new gloves again and empty the other trap into another bag and put it out with the trash, rebait it and put it on the back fence.

I know this sounds completely gross and it is. But dealing with flies is part of keeping ducks. I welcome the spiders that set up in our run. They just can't keep up with the flies. I tried putting both traps away from the run, but I still had a lot of flies come to the run, despite that I hose it out two or three times a day. So I decided it was better to trap them where they were coming anyway. My neighbors are happy because they have many fewer flies due to my traps. Predatory wasps don't do well in our climate and are also expensive, given that they will not naturalize here and have to be replenished every month of the warmer weather. Rodent control is also important, so sealing your duck house against mice and rats and protecting their food may involve some cost, though it's usually not an ongoing outlay. Consider your own circumstances and your own sensibilities and add in the cost of pest control to your calculations.

 

[Steven Bussell]

I think I sent more money on fly control than feed