it's not realistic to tell somebody they can raise chickens for no cost, or virtually no cost either (none of these comments are aimed at you). <snip> I do think it's bad advice for someone to claim you don't need more than a couple hundred dollars to raise chickens, giving a person totally new to raising chickens that that is what it will cost.
Sorry, but I still have to dispute that.
People CHOOSE to spend more, but they don't HAVE to, at least not if you are only going to keep 3-4 chickens.
Pretty much anywhere, you can fairly easily scrounge (or buy for cheap) the materials to make a simple 4x4x2 or 4x4x4 coop for considerably less than $100, often free-except-cost-of-hardware. The wood for a 4x12 run, even if you buy it full retail, is going to be less than $25 unless you *choose* to spend more. The biggest expense is $50-100 worth of wire mesh, if you have to buy it.
A year or two ago I threw together an 8x8 tractor-type pen in which to quarantine an unexpected pair of turkeys for the grand cost of "I had to use screws that I'd bought for another project". If I'd had to buy the fence mesh it would have been $50 or so, but it was stuff scrounged in past years on the general principle that you can't have too much fence wire. The wood was the better pieces salvaged from my back deck that I'd recently disassembled. In Florida or a similar climate, this 8x8 thing that I built for nearly nothing, plus a $10 tarp, would have been quite adequate housing for 3-4 chickens or maybe even more.
And it's nothing special about where I live. I've lived in upmarket suburban Philadelphia, in college towns in a number of states, and in rural areas, and although it is certainly easier to find or cheaply-acquire Useful Stuff in some places than in others, I have yet to live anywhere it can't be done. It just takes a little more patience/work/ingenuity some places than others.
It needn't look bad, either. My nearly-free turkey tractor is kind of basic-looking but could certainly have been tarted up with some paint or decor had I wished; and there are a buncha BYCers with really NICE little coops made of scrounged/leftover materials or even from pallets.
So I think it IS quite realistic to say that people get get chickens (a few, at least) for just a coupla hundred dollars upfront investment, or even less if they are lucky-and-or-diligent.
Pat, who is a bit fuzzy on how much my original 3-chicken tractor cost but it was around $300-400 and that was buying everything full retail (I had just given birth and was not in a mood to fool around), only because I "wanted it the way I wanted it". Oh, plus a $6 1-gallon waterer and the cost of the three chickens themselves
