Wow, no one is talking about the smell. Have you got any idea how terrible is the smell of a chicken coop? You do know that you have to get in there to clean it, right? This ain’t no fun activity. I prefer to get fewer eggs per month than to clean it myself (sometimes every day, it also depends on the weather too).
Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
81–90 of 879 posts
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s missing from all the calculations so far is the worth of the time you put in. Maintaining chickens isn’t free on a daily you spend around half an hour, sometimes more to tend to your chickens. Even by minimum wage standards, you’re spending quite a bit more just in labor than buying a dozen eggs for $2 more than what it was 2 years ago.
First, you can't put a price on food security. When you can't get these things from the market because the shelves are bare, you will still have a source available. That's a big perk that can't be understated. Also, the shelves have been bare with eggs for quite awhile. Locally here we largely only see the large packs being sold. Its been 6 months since I've seen a dozen pack on the shelves. Its far more than $2, whe…
Wow.
Relatively rural Michigan, my local grocer had a dozen pasture raised for $6 this week. Prior to that, it had been $4 or $4.50 for cage free. Plenty available.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are more on my next visit though.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#83Ok, so maybe a controversial opinion: I've been buying local, pasture raised chickens for the last 10 years. I am very fortunate to have had the income to allow me to do so. I also don't eat that many eggs (roughly a dozen a month - so it hasn't been that expensive). The price of my eggs was always between $8-$12 / dozen (including this weekend when I easily found and bought another 2 dozen). I get that I was buying…
The store is happy to lose a dollar on the eggs to get you to stop there, it's not just about the production.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#84To save money? Absolutely not. I'm keeping a spreadsheet on our 20 chickens this year. They're young, so input is very high while output is still ramping but I'm guessing it's $7-8 dozen in food costs alone (the highest end organic feed tho), never mind the initial buyin.
What is the amount of time required for all the different chicken activities? (estimated weekly average)
Yeah, the daily tasks are pretty small. Just a few minutes a day. Scoop some food, change out the water, gather the eggs.
Every so often, you need to do bigger chores, like go buy fees or fix something in your setup. A couple times a year you need to do a deep clean of the coop (throw out all the straw, scrape any poo that's collected on the floor or wherever, put in clean straw). Sometimes a chicken dies, and that's not fun, but it is something you have dispose of properly.
Ultimately, though, it's a hobby. It should be fun or relaxing most of the time or else it's not worth it. Like gardening or running a home server. If you're trying to just save money, maybe you can save a tiny bit in this particular moment, but there are surely better ways to save a few bucks.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a recent experiment, we were on the more reasonably priced organic feed until I discovered my local feed store had this stuff over the holidays, so we're trying it out. The quality of the eggs is absolutely miles above what I already considered really good eggs though. I'll probably get around to making our own someday, but I'm not there just yet.
I've seen someone just chuck a load of split peas in a plastic barrel and submerge with rain water. It naturally ferments with occasional agitation and this is supposed to be good for the chickens. So not so hard to do when you get to that point of wanting to try it.
That sounds like the level of effort I'm after, thanks neighbor.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're feeding them the wrong stuff. They can live off of cracked corn and whatever stale bread and vegetables you toss them, as well as bugs in their general vicinity. As for the initial buy, they can turn over a new generation in about 3 weeks. You can also eat the old chickens. You're looking at it wrong.
Because I'm not looking at it the way you look at it? Been at it for ten years and am perfectly happy with how it's been going.
The spreadsheet in isolation view does seem odd to farming types.
We have chickens, my father's still looking after them and he's had chooks since his birth in 1935 .. along with at least 10 fruit trees on any property we've had, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, pumpkins, and all the usual stuff that you can sow and that grows pretty well on its own (we've all had other jobs .. but this all stems from either growing acres of grain in some wings of the family or raising cattle in remote parts of Australia far from regular shops).
Point being, chickens do well on picking through big piles of rotting down compost from everything else so feed costs are low, return on having chicken shit turned into soil that can be used for the next garden bed is high, value of having bugs kept in check is saving on sprays, etc.
By all means keep a spreadsheet, I'm fond of them also, but having had chooks for decades we see them more as an integrated component of a bigger picture.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#87Build vs buy. You can be me and build an in-house flock, pay $100/mo in feed, $500 for a livestock guard dog, $100/mo for dog food, $500 for a solar electric fence, and then $500 for a few coops, etc. It'll pay off before I'm dead, I think! -- right? Right?!
Electric fence? Chickens can fly, my man...
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're feeding them the wrong stuff. They can live off of cracked corn and whatever stale bread and vegetables you toss them, as well as bugs in their general vicinity. As for the initial buy, they can turn over a new generation in about 3 weeks. You can also eat the old chickens. You're looking at it wrong.
Because I'm not looking at it the way you look at it? Been at it for ten years and am perfectly happy with how it's been going.
If you think you're spending too much on the eggs then you're not perfectly happy. I grew up with chickens and my family also grew up with them. I'm just saying, something is really wrong with the way you're doing it if you think it's not worth the money. There are ways to do it economically. What do you suppose the big farms feed the chickens to make it economical to not only grow the chickens but also package and ship the eggs profitably for all involved, cheaper than you can do it without packaging and shipping and paying middle men?
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#89Ok, so maybe a controversial opinion: I've been buying local, pasture raised chickens for the last 10 years. I am very fortunate to have had the income to allow me to do so. I also don't eat that many eggs (roughly a dozen a month - so it hasn't been that expensive). The price of my eggs was always between $8-$12 / dozen (including this weekend when I easily found and bought another 2 dozen). I get that I was buying…
Feed at a large scale operation is a lot cheaper than you’d think. The bulk of the food is soybean meal left over from oil production and distillers dried grains with solubles left over from ethanol production. The feed manufacturers make deals with those producers for their left over product for very cheap. They supplement the feed with some other stuff like oyster shells for calcium. Bone meal from meat producers, bakery meal from stale or expired bread, wheat middles from milling flour, and so on. None of them are expensive primary products but whatever the cheapest local sources are producing as waste in huge quantities. Some places will even give the stuff away because the cost of transporting is less than its worth in compost. Since the input ingredients are variable and the feed manufacturers have to plan for that, they offer the big farms steep discounts on long term contracts that fix their costs.
A chicken lays a few hundred eggs per year so they’re very economically productive and you can house hundreds or thousands of them per coop somewhere the land, water, and labor are cheap.
Although we’ve sacrificed animal welfare, sanitation, and quality to get those prices.
Re: Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?
#90We have raised a few hens at our hobby farm over the years. The eggs are nice and all, but they're actually quite fragile animals, and then you go and get attached to them and they get suddenly sick and slowly die on you in horrible ways. And veterinary care for backyard chickens is seriously problematic and difficult to get and expensive. My wife fell seriously in love with keeping chickens and it kind of emotionall…
what are they dying of? I assume it isn't weather. I was shocked when my Wisconsin coworkers said their chickens handle -10F weather no problem in the winter.