We are into our 4th year with chickens. We started out with 6 RIR hens that we got for free at point of lay, because the owner was tired of paying for the feed and not getting eggs. We got the first egg about 24 hours after we brought them home and put them in a plastic dog crate in the pasture until we could slap together a coop, with leftover (read: free) lumber laying around. People started asking if we would sell eggs. So it ended up we were selling all the eggs they could lay and we weren't eating any eggs ourselves! So each year we have increased our flock, rotated and re-homed hens as they became less productive, made friends and bartered with people that have incubators to make more chicks for egg production and to sell for profit, ...and we now are settled at about 25 hens per year. Last year 2010, we had a profit of $147 after feed and supplies are accounted for. And now we have eggs to eat ourselves too! We also have enough to share with the local Food Bank, barter with, give as gifts / thank you's. And we still have people on a waiting list most of the time for egg sales. But I've reached my limit on how many birds I will keep.
We enjoy the time outdoors and it beats the cost of a gym membership. Obviously the chicken project quickly outgrew it's original coop. But we control costs by finding free or nearly free alternatives. The new coop is an 8 x 10 shed that someone wanted moved off their property...you move it, it's yours ...free. It was a project to move an already built shed...but my husband managed it somehow. Our chickens have about 1/4 acre of fenced pasture, all of the commercial layer feed they can eat, plenty of mealworm treats that we raise ourselves, vegetable scraps from the garden and table scraps from the kitchen, fresh clean water provided by the new nipple buckets that we made with the profits from our chick sales this Spring, ...seems like a pretty good life for them. When they cost more to feed than they can make in eggs the locals are happy to pay a bit for "yard art" to impress their friends and are thrilled to get an occasional egg...yes, a little strange but true. So I find that my girls live out their days in even better surroundings than I provided for them! And we get to visit them because often the families are still buying eggs from us...strange, but true!
Profit can be done, but we approach it from a productive standpoint and they are like any of our other livestock...not pets. We keep records and a spreadsheet to track production and costs. We enjoy them as we do other livestock, it's why we live where we do so that we can have animals, but they still live in the pasture.
