OUCH!

[Rusty Hills Farm]

I just got back from the feed store, where I just got hit with another feed cost increase. Laying crumbles now cost $10.05 a bag! This means it costs about $40 a month to feed my 10 hens! Locally large eggs are $2 a doz. so this means it now costs more to feed them than their eggs are worth. That's insane!

Is everyone in this same boat or are some of us still breaking even?

I wanted more chickens this fall, but now I' m not sure I can afford to feed them!

 

[RioLindoAz]

OUCH!

 

[Rusty Hills Farm]

LOL we must be cross-posting!

H

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Quote:
No, I think there was a misunderstanding, you're good.

Oh, BTW, we pay $15 a bag in the suburbs.

 

[Becky89*]

My local feed dealer is costing me 11.00 and bag, that might be different because I get the pellets but still I live in a small farming area and the price worries me too.

I have a total of 13 birds all together and a get three bags of feeed every month. My birds are free range and that helps decrease the amount of feed that i give them each day but I am going to still have to sell my brown eggs for 2 75 or something like that. People know that my birds are loved and cared for so they like to come to me for eggs before the go to the store.

I get 6 eggs everyday because my hens are getting old and I know that this will be my last group of laying hens, because I don't want to make things any harder on my mom for when I leave in mid June for college.

I hope that helped some

Becky!!

 

[gumpsgirl]

I just bought a 50# bag of crumbles yesterday and it cost me $12.75 a bag! It sounds like you are at least doing better than I am in the way of prices.

 

[Rusty Hills Farm]

I cannot believe the prices. A high of $15?!? Zowie! And here I thought I was doing so badly by spending $10 to produce $7 worth of eggs!

What is biting me in the patootie right now is my sales pitch of how much money we'd save by getting our own chickens again. And we really were going to save, too, because locally the price was $6.50 a bag. Now my Omolene is up over $14, making the whole feed bill more than $300 a month now. Pretty soon WE are gonna have to give up eating just to feed our gang!

It's scary when raising our own anything is no longer cheaper than buying it in a store.

 

[erthymom2]

One way I intend to help control my costs for raising my chicks/hens is to look at differant sources for food stuffs.

A friend who is raising her own chickens tells me she goes to the schools and asked for their left-over food - things they toss out from the prep. work, like salad stuff, stale breads, spoiled fruit, outdated milk and cheese.

these food stuffs have not been eaten or thrown out after being served - this is the stuff before the kids get it that is usually tossed out bacause its not part of the final meal.

Some schools WON't "recycle" this stuff to you - have no clue why, they just say "we can't-it's district policy".

She had to make a mini-sales pitch to the superintendant with a committment to supply some eggs in the spring to the elementary grades as a kind of barter/swap to get what she needed.

She picks the stuff up three days a week from the schools back dock area and puts it into three differant garbage cans at her coop, then feeds her chickens.

I think with the on-going gas/prices/food issues , this is a great idea that could catch on in other locations as well.

 

[Buster]

Quote:
How much do your feed bags weigh? If it's 50 pounds your girls are wasting a lot of feed. My 10 hens and one roo were only eating 100 pounds of feed every six weeks in the dead of winter with free choice all the time supplemented with table scraps. You may want to look into a feed system with less waste.

 

[Linda in San Diego]

For many years my school's sixth graders attended a week-long camp for "6th Grade Outdoor School". Part of the program was to get students to pay attention to how much they put on their plate but did not eat. The plate scrapings were put in a bucket and weighed - it was the ORTS score. We tried to get as low as possible at each succeeding meal. The Orts bucket was then taken home by Mama Bear (if not her, then one of the camp teachers) and fed to her hens. Once she retired, that program stopped.
I will have to talk to my district superintendent and see if he will allow the prep kitchen located on my site to save their orts for me. Maybe if I start a 4H class for the afterschool program...LOL