Why aren't chicken economical?

[Chick_a_dee]

You also need to count in your GAS to buy eggs. Maintenance on your car or truck. This is something my dad now understands. We use a lot of eggs for baking and cooking, if we had to buy from the store, first we're looking at around $2-4 per dozen, plus the cost of gas to get to our nearest grocery store that is actually open at normal hours, which would be 20km away, plus the maintenance on my truck, and of course my time.

Gas wasted during picking up feed is not such a concern, we stock pile enough feed for a couple months at a time and that is picked up when I pick up our horse feeds and goat feeds.

It's very economical for someone who bakes and cooks a lot, eggs cost a lot!

 

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

Why aren't chickens economical?

Because they're so much fun! I think it would be economical if you had like 3 or 4 Rhode Island Reds, but the danger is...that's how it starts!

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Huh? Who drives to the store just to buy eggs?

And the weight of a couple additional cartons of eggs in the trunk as you drive home with the other groceries you were getting anyway is COMPLETELY not enough weight to impact your gas consumption in any way at all.

Whether it costs you gas to buy feed depends on whether you regularly go past your feedstore for other reasons. I do, thus it costs me nothing except the extremely microscopic extra gas required to drive 100 lbs of feed home; but if you live somewhere that the feedstore is off in another direction from anything else you ever do, then the cost of getting there is a legitimate extra expense of chickens.

It's very economical for someone who bakes and cooks a lot, eggs cost a lot!

But they still cost as much or more to produce at HOME, Chick-a-dee, unless you are doing some funky mental bookkeeping where the chickens' expenses count as "pet or hobby expenses" and the eggs become a so-called free benefit. If you are feeding primarily commercial feed, and since I *know* you are putting money into refitting and now building new coop quarters for them, plus the cost of waterers and mite dust and so forth, you will find if you add it up HONESTLY that you are not getting the eggs for any cheaper than you could from a store -- quite likely you are paying more to produce your own eggs than if you were buying the store's cheapest eggs. (If you are comparing to *expensive* storeboughten eggs, the 'free range omega-whatever jumbo brown fancy gourmet' eggs, then yours probably are a bit cheaper, but the cheap ones bake up just the same...)

Pat​

 

[PunkinPeep]

I skimmed over the other responses. But here's my thoughts on it.

If you count the cost of building a coop, then you're going to have a hard time catching up by selling eggs. My coop could just as easily also be a shed, so i consider it an improvement to the property and forget about that money.

I also free range my chickens as much as i can. It's better for them, and it's better for me and my customers if they eat more of nature's food than the feed store's food.

Here where i live, i'll expect my chickens to lay most of the year, except for molting and broodiness. It doesn't get that cold, AND i have cold-hardy breeds. This spring has been the coldest temperatures we've seen in decades - or possibly ever, and my chickens just kept laying. So location probably makes a big difference.

Where i live, i also can't really sell my eggs for more than $2.00 per dozen, if they're LARGE. But that amount more than covers the cost of feed. So in my mind, they definitely pay for themselves. Not to mention how much constant enjoyment i get from having them...way more fun than a dog.

I can sell at least 5 dozen eggs per week, which brings in way more than i pay for feed. Also, i don't ever have to buy eggs again for my own use. Count that cost in.

When the spring comes for real, and the temps get warm, i expect to lower my feed costs even more - not only because there will be more bugs and grown for the chickens to forage - but also because we're planning to start raising crickets to feed to the girls. Raising crickets -once you have the crickets - pretty much costs you nothing, and they're high in protein and calcium. I also save all my egg shells to feed back to my chickens for calcium, so i don't buy oyster shell. All my girls' shells are nice and thick and hard.

Oh yeah, there's the cost of bedding. I guess it depends what you do about bedding as to what your costs will be. I use the deep litter method, and my girls are outside most of the time, so i buy a bag of pine shavings ever 2 months or so.


edited to add: if you get creative, you can change your numbers a lot. Also, when you build your coop, you can get creative too. Look on freecycle and craigslist for free or cheap supplies, stake out construction site and talk to the contractors about taking their scraps, see if you have a paint recycling operation in your area where you can get free or cheap paint, etc., etc., etc. You have a lot of options in every area of raising chickens.
I haven't crunched all the numbers, but i'm definitely satisfied that what i'm doing is totally worth it.

 

[HEChicken]

Quote:
Yep, that's what we did too. We got a straight run of chicks and the roosters didn't go to waste. We used the head/feet to make the best stock ever. The only difference is that we also made stock out of the bones. We even cooked up the combs/wattles/gonads etc - there was almost nothing thrown away.

 

[PunkinPeep]

Quote:
Yep, that's what we did too. We got a straight run of chicks and the roosters didn't go to waste. We used the head/feet to make the best stock ever. The only difference is that we also made stock out of the bones. We even cooked up the combs/wattles/gonads etc - there was almost nothing thrown away.

The only think i haven't figured out how to use is the feathers.....but i'm working on that one. I would be just giddy to have a pillow that i stuff with my own chickens' feathers. I have to figure out how to clean them well.

I feed chicken bones (i know i know, but she does NOT choke on them) to my dog, along with the head and intestines when i butcher. Everything else gets used by us.

 

[Mac in Wisco]

Quote:
I wouldn't compare them to the cheapest eggs. I commonly see eggs around here for 89 cents a dozen because the stores are using them as a loss leader. I used $3 per dozen in my example because that is the cost of premium "All Natural Eggs" in the stores here, which is the closest to most backyard produced eggs.

By my breakdown, which includes a significant of money invested in a coop and equipment, the cost is still under $2 a dozen or two-thirds the cost of a comparable carton of eggs in the store. Yes, it takes a while to recoup the cost of the coop. You have to spread the cost of the coop over its expected lifespan, ten years in my example.

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
I wouldn't compare them to the cheapest eggs. I commonly see eggs around here for 89 cents a dozen because the stores are using them as a loss leader. I used $3 per dozen in my example because that is the cost of premium "All Natural Eggs" in the stores here, which is the closest to most backyard produced eggs.

It depends on whether the person would really, genuinely, honestly be buying that kind of egg, though. And most BYCers who I've seen comment on that question seem to say that they would not -- they prefer the excellent quality that you get from backyard chickens but if they were buying store eggs they'd buy the cheapies. I realize stores use them as loss leaders, but the bottom line is still that you can purchase eggs with *pretty much* the same properties as homemade for the same or cheaper than you can produce them yoruself.

For a person who really, genuinely, honestly would only ever buy premium eggs, then as I said, the backyarder is usually beating the price by a bit.

Same thing with the cost of chicken meat. If you would seriously only buy meat comparable to what you raise at home, homemade is usually cheaper (typically "by a large margin"), but that does not seem to apply to all that many people.

I figure that if I ascribe major construction projects like roofed runs to "capital improvements to property", I am paying slightly less than premium egg prices for my eggs (averaging year-round, and this includes keeping some less-productive birds and roosters, for various reasons), and am producing meat at less than the cheapest it ever goes on sale for here (but Canadian chicken is never sold as dirt-cheap as in the US, for whatever reason).

JME,

Pat

 

[Kim_NC]

Quote:
Good point here. And it's not just dogs and cats - lots of people keep rats, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, horses, and a host of other pets which they feed and expect nothing from. If one is going to keep chickens as pets, then one should give them the same considerations of being uneconomical pets (who happen to give eggs on the side).

Quote:
I think they can be, but most backyard flock owners don't manage their birds for high production. Bagged feed is expensive, is it overpriced though? Probably not. There are too many feed suppliers in competition with each other for anyone to overprice the feed. The extra cost comes from processing it into pellets or crumbles (vs a fresh ground mash), bagging, storage, marketing, and transportation.

Here is a breakdown I did in another thread about whether or not it is possible to make a profit selling eggs:
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Let's take a look at a flock of 15 production hens, Leghorns or Red Sex Links, not a mix of dual purpose breeds.

Production 365 dozen / year

15 hens @ an average 80% lay rate will lay 1 dozen eggs a day.

365 days = 365 dozen eggs

Cost of Hens $150
Without going into the costs of raising them, lets say a point-of-lay hen (20 weeks) costs $10, that's a bit on the high side and you could even raise them yourself for cheaper.

Cost of Feed $434
4 lb hen eats around .25 lbs per hen @ 68 degs. Let's assume you don't heat the henhouse and they eat ad libitum @.33 lbs per day.

Bagged layer ration @ $12 a bag = $0.24 a lb

.33 lbs x 15 x 365 days = 1806 lbs per year

1806 @ $0.24 = $434

Electricity $13
Production hens need supplemental light. These 15 hens in a small coop will need a 60 incandescent lamp or the equivalent CFL at 14 watts. We'll assume that it burns 16 hours a day, even though it could be turned off during daylight hours.

14 watt CFL x 16 hours per day x 365 days = 82 kWH

At a high rate of $0.15 per kWH (I only pay $.10), then that's $12.30

Housing $120 per year
I built an 8x8 coop with wood floors, windows, and a shingled roof for around $800. This was using high quality materials purchased from the local DIY store. Covered run cost another $200 and I probably had around $200 in additional fencing, waterers, feeders, and supplies. So around $1200. This is just under $20 per square foot, which is in line with costs for most ag production structures, such as a large layer barn, or a hog barn, give or take a little.

Depreciating that over 10 years (IRS calls this a Single Purpose Agricultural Structure and allows a 10 year depreciation schedule), then that is $120 a year.

Total Cost $717

Cost per Dozen $1.96

Sell these eggs @ $3 / dozen and you've made a profit of ~ $1 a day or $365 for the year.

If your time caring for these hens is 20 minutes per day to feed, water, collect eggs, then you've made $3.00 an hour.

Caveats
You can't eat all of your profits. On the other hand, if you sell at $3 / dozen and keep every third dozen for personal consumption, the enterprise pays for itself and supplies you with eggs. Your share of the eggs would be your profit.

This was using fairly conservative numbers. Costs could be tightened up a little.

Does not include any losses. If you use an industry standard of 5% loss you'd need a extra hen to meet that production.

Expenses are tax deductible. If you deduct these expenses and any sales tax paid as business expenses, the cost of production is actually less because you are not paying income taxes on that money. That can cut costs from by 15% or more, depending upon your tax bracket.

I'm in agreement with these concepts. I posted something similar in another post a few weeks back. Our cost here works out to $1.25/dz on an annualized basis (better in Summer with higher production, higher in Winter with slower laying.)

I also think it's quite relavent to compare them to the cost of premium, all natural commercial eggs. If one is willing to pay for backyard eggs to have them - then it's legitimate to compare them to a similar commercial (albeit inferior) product.

We also do several other things to keep cost down which other backyard flock owners are not willing to do. We hatch chicks, feed-out and eat the excess roos. We cull poor layers, and do not keep layers past 2 1/2 yrs. Etc.

One other caveat we get - in addition to the profit on our egg production, the eggs also draw business for our other products like produce, pastured beef, chicken (broilers) and pork.

SooOOOooo...in my mind it still boils down to whether one's expectations are reasonable or not. If we expect to raise and keep pets while eating eggs, then accept the cost like we would any pet. If we expect it to be economical, then treat it like a business and raise premium eggs at a profit.

 

[bibliophile birds]

personally, i think feed AND our products are undervalued. if commercial producers had to pay the real, actual price of feed, and consumers had to pay the real, actual price of our eggs and meat, we'd realize that we're coming out way ahead. commercially made feed ingredients are so heavily subsidized that even that $10 bag of feed is super cheap.

my goal with my chickens (and the rest of my farm) is sustainability. so i'm factoring in the invisible prices of commercial fuel consumption, soil toxicity around giant chicken houses, unfair wages and unsafe working conditions in processing plants, destruction of small farms and the environment to grow cheap corn, ridiculous shipping of foods all over the world, etc etc etc.

i pay $30 for 50 lbs of feed. it's organic and soy free and all the ingredients come from small farmers. the company that makes and sells it is a small business run by passionate individuals, not a giant corporation. i can ask just about whatever i want for my eggs and meat since they are organic and pasture raised (i don't overprice, but i know i could). factor in the health of people who regularly eat whole, natural, farm-raised products, and i just don't see how the grocery store could beat what i have to offer.