Please tell me there's someone with small egg biz that makes a profit

[DanIndiana]

I know you can't get rich, but is it possible to have a small one person operation that could at least net you $10k or so. I don't think I can resist the desire to start a small egg business, but it sure would be nice to have something to show for it. What about breeding and selling chicks?

 

[Katy]

Depends on what you consider small and if you have to start from scratch with all your facilities.

 

[briteday]

Again, what you you consider "small?" And what will your start up costs be?
We have ~30 hens (commercial egg producing breed) and one rooster. Our start up costs were very minimal since we looked for free items on Craigslist. We sell our eggs for $3/dozen, produce maybe 100-150 chicks each Spring (sexlinks so we get $4 pullets, $1 cockerals), purchase a few hundred from a fantastic hatchery that produces unique commercial strains that our feed stores do not carry so that we can sell them at about 2x the purchase price (buy in bulk, the price goes down), raise some up to sell at POL (cost of chick plus $1/week for food and labor), and finally sell our previous year's hens in Aug/Sept ($10-15 each for known good egg layers, $5-7 for less productive hens).

Our income from eggs always covers the feed bill with about $10/month left over. The sale of chicks and hens nets more profit. We had a total profit last year of $150 dollars. Not exactly the $10K you're looking for. But if you extrapolate that out, and figure that you would be buying feed at drastic discounts in bulk...I'm guessing that you would have to have 1000 chickens or more to make that kind of money. That's a lot of chicken poo to deal with!

I'm sure there are people on the forum who have this type of operation and can confirm or deny the numbers. But that would be my educated guess. And remember that some jurisdictions are going to have laws regarding the keeping of large numbers of livestock, the waste disposal plan...and that most importantly you have to have the customers to purchase your eggs and recycle your chickens.

 

[rancher hicks]

As with any business it's location , location, location. Here in Syracuse , NY you'd have a hard time. Lot's of folks have chickens and some i'm sure are feeding non productive or low productive layers. Older birds. You can't go to high above the store prices. Many have specialty breeds like my self.

Some folks don't care. Only reason I sell eggs is folks know I donate the money to charity. Chicks can be had cheaply and in my case cheaper than the hatchery. We have to many stores that carry feed and sell chicks once a year. Folks don't know what's what and a chick to them is a chick. Cheap is the thing.

Even on this forum folks will buy a breed cheap from the hatchery with little regard to it's true breed. A buff orpington from hatchery doesn't make a difference even if it is a skinny scrawny thing if it's cheaper than what I breed. You want a Delaware that's a cross fine.

Terminal breed what's that? Unhealthy production bird? Huh? Some have no idea what they're getting.

Folks buy at auctions here and have no idea what they're getting in the way of unhealthy birds. Biosecurity, what's that?

So here no you can't make a profit and if you break even then that's good. Having and setting up a coop for six birds is cheap enough.

 

[Kim_NC]

We make money from ours....about 1/3 of the $10K you're looking for. We keep 70-80 layers at any given time, sell chicks, POL pullets and meat. I'll add a basic financial model for you below...but a couple things first.....

- We cull birds. Figure out who the best layers are, cull any poor performers. Our standard is a minimum 5 eggs per week in warm weather. If a hen lays less than that in warm weather, she's not profitable for Winter.

- No hens over 2 1/2 yrs old. We only keep good broody hens who will raise chicks for us past that age. All others are processed and eaten by us, or sold as stewing chickens @ $2.99/lb.

- Light at 14 hrs/day. In Fall, Winter, and early Spring when the days are shorter, we substitute with lights to get a reasonable, profitable level of production.

So, some BASIC numbers targeting $10K then, considering layers alone........

- Based on eggs sold at $3.00/dozen. We sell at farmers markets and have no problem getting that price here in NC.
- A hen will eat 4 -5 oz feed per day, depending on breed and weather. For us that equates to $1.25 cost per dozen eggs based on price of feed here. That leaves us $1.75 profit per dozen on average. (Winter is less due to lower production, Summer is higher due to higher production.)
- Of course, free ranging helps, but depending on climate they can't get enough to eat year round and be profitable that way. They'll need layer pellets in cooler months, and definitely for Winter.

- 250 hens x 75% lay = 187.5 eggs/day (That's average, we get 90% for Spring and Summer, and 60% in Winter with light supplement.)
- 187.5 eggs per day / 12 = 15.625 dz per day
- 15.625 dz per day x $1.75 ave profit = $27.30 per day ave profit
- $27.30 per day ave profit x 365 days = $9964 profit per year

That much said there are of course the housing costs, etc to consider. We cover these by using recycled and/or cheap materials, hatching chicks and POL pullets which we sell, selling young roosters from our hatches as meat, etc. What we get from chick, POL and meat sales covers our materials and feed costs to raise each year's new layers.

So, you'll need a lot of birds and will have to run a tight ship to get the $10K you're looking for. Start out small....maybe try to go 1/4 that size. See if you like it and then expand.

 

[Katy]

You already got some answers in this thread you started back in February.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=447573

 

[DanIndiana]

Thanks. I know I started a similar thread before. I was really wanting to find some smaller operations, like some of you folks. I can relate much more to 80 birds, or maybe a couple hundred. Do any of you mix your own feed? I don't know if it can be much cheaper than Purina. It just seems that when you look at the expenses, feed is the only thing to try to reduce really.

 

[ralleia]

I doubt you'll really be able to save much money by avoiding buying feed, but an exhaustive text on the subject is "Feeding Poultry" by G.F. Heuser. It is over 600 pages long and describes poultry nutrition requirements and seeming every possible component that could be used to feed chickens that you probably never thought of--components like ant eggs, locust meal, hoof meal, etc. It doesn't so much tell you what to do, but tells you about possible risks, whether it has been used before, effects, etc.

I've been slogging through some of the pages and will use it to figure out the components for some "chicken pasture" planted between the windbreak trees I'm putting in this spring.