Chicken Economics

Can you actually save money while keeping chickens for eggs? Sure, as long as you do it right and ignore start up costs (which can be negligible with a little creativity). The following is "The Parable of the Two Batches of Chickens".

The first batch of chickens came about by chance. There was an old coop in the backyard from a previous group of ill-fated birds. There was a Craigslist ad for laying hens, $7. They were Isa Browns, about five months old. They had just started laying, and, as a consequence of their breed and their age, went on to lay about one egg a day each. They also went through about a $13 bag of food every three weeks. This followed a period of frustration when we first got them, as they would escape their enclosure relatively frequently to "play" with our dogs. We also chased several hens down the road. Eventually I trained them to stay in the enclosure, but a possum in their coop changed that, after which they refused to go to their coop and needed to be rounded up and put away every night. I sold them on Craiglist soon thereafter for $20. Apart from the cost of the hens, which, after selling them was only $2 apiece, the eggs cost me about $13 for  84 eggs, or a little less than $2 a dozen. Not bad at all for that quality of egg.

The second (and current) batch was more planned. I ordered a batch of 13 Brahmas online. They consisted of 11 hens and two roosters, three of which were to go to my parents. One died as a chick (of the three batches of chickens we have bought online, one chick has died from each of them). While they were chicks, I completed an addition to their coop that I thought would give them more protection from possums, and a better feeling of security in general, as they had roosting spots much higher than before. So far, no chickens have escaped, and they always go into their coop at night. The addition of a rooster was also intended to keep the chickens in one place and protected. So far, it has worked. We have two roosters and although neither are crowing, they are bigger than the hens and tend to herd them around the enclosure and keep an eye on them. If it continues this quietly, I may not even eat one of the roosters (we got two so we could eat the louder one). The second batch should provide approximately the same amount of eggs (five a day), but eat at least twice as much food. They also cost me around $80 to buy and will eat about $150-200 worth of food before they lay their first eggs. I am not going to do the math on those eggs, but suffice to say they had better be golden.

Moral of the story: If you're trying to save money, buy your chickens online as pullets (young hens). There is almost no economic downside, since they won't cost more than $10 apiece and can be sold relatively easily. The actual downside is that there is a relative dearth of breeds available on Craigslist. I chose Brahmas because I knew they wouldn't fly out of their chain link enclosure as readily as Isa Browns. Of course, smaller, flighty hens tend to lay the best eggs. And chickens can be darn hard to catch. Bizarrely, the first batch of chickens hunkered down when threatened and were thus extremely easy to catch (to the delight of the dogs). Most chickens don't do that, and I have no idea why these did. It made their frequent escapes at least bearable, although something I am still glad is over now.