How much food does a chick eat before point of lay?

[bock]

I am doing a project for school where I have to apply math to the real world. I am going to find the loss/profit from my my chicken egg business. However, I have no idea how many pounds of starter a chick eats before they begin laying. Is there an approximate amount I could use for the equation? To give you an idea, they began free ranging at about 8 weeks of age and have been since. Before that, they only had short visits outside, and were otherwise only eating Flock Raiser. We have several breeds, including brown leghorns, barred rocks, black austrolorps, and easter eggers. I hope that helped give an idea, thank you!

 

[OldChurchEggery1]

You can google feed conversion rates and find information for industrial-scale broiler and egg operations. An extension office's website could also probably help you for this. These charts will likely show a commercial leghorn's point of lay numbers, so your own flock's efficiency would be much lower than anything presented.

 

[Fred's Hens]

There are too many variables for a "clean" mathematic formula. Different breeds create the X factor here. Getting a chick to POL, if she is an ISA Brown or Leghorn of commercial stock is far different than getting a heavier, slow developing breed like a Sussex to point of lay. With that caveat, I can give you some figures to perhaps plug in.

A flock of 10 (nice number to do the division) takes me 250-280 lbs of feed, on average, to get to point of lay, IF the chicks are ISAs because they will come to POL right at 17-19 weeks, without fail.

Those weeks from 19-26 feeding a heavier breed is more costly. The bird is large and eating 4-5 ounces each per day, for another 8 weeks to get to POL. Thus, I often takes 340-350 lbs of feed to bring 10 more traditional birds to POL. Hope that helps some.

 

[bock]

That helped a lot, I will just try to get an approximate. Thank you!

 

[cmom]

An Excel file has been posted: You can make changes to it to suit your needs...
https://www.backyardchickens.com/media/chicken-egg-tracker.xls

 

[chicken farmer 1997]

17 lbs