Elizabeth (Hi!) and Franz (also hi!) brought up the issue of chicken costs. This seemed like a good time to post a complete breakdown. Which isn’t very hard, because Excel is my favorite thing in the whole entire world, and I have been tracking every expense from the beginning.
I also write the date on each egg, so that I can be sure to eat them in order.
Construction costs: $481.07
Consumables (feed, scratch, and bedding): $427.36
Equipment (waterers, feeders, brood lamps): $59.82
My medical bills: $239.00
Donation for Ethel’s cremation: $10.00
As you can see, chickens are pretty affordable if you only count the consumables. If I hadn’t broken my wrist, or built their housing, I would be down to only .35 per egg.
(Incidentally, I got off cheaply by building my own from scratch. A chicken tractor kit will cost around $2,000, and you still have to put it together yourself.)
It’s hard to guess a chicken’s natural lifespan. Most of them meet a premature end. (I initially typed “meat.” Freudian typo.) I have heard of chickens as old as ten. Most chickens only produce well for the first two years, and their egg production tapers off sharply after that.
How sharply?
Unfortunately I didn’t think to start tracking their eggs by month until January 2010. They started laying in August 2009.
Of course, that chart is somewhat misleading. I only have three chickens now, and I’m pretty sure one of them (Harriet) isn’t laying. Here is a chart that’s adjusted for the number of eggs per laying hen.
If you only looked at this chart, you would think things were going pretty well!
Basically to sum it up: Keeping chickens to save money on eggs is like knitting to save money on clothes. It doesn’t really work out that way, but you get a MUCH better product.
(Maybe some other day we can discuss the relationship between price suppression and cruelty: sweatshop labor for clothes, and battery cages for hens.)
…and factory farms for milk and beef, and cubicles for accounta–, er, sorry, got off track for a second there.
The charts made me laugh — they both look like bouncing balls. My head automatically did the bounce thingy when I looked at them.
Oh Erika! You cracked the $1 per egg boundary! I’ve been waiting!!!!
I meant to chart my hens’ cost per eggs too, but I got off track. Now we’ll never know. Nobody is laying at all at the moment. I think the cold has frozen their cloacas shut. It was five Celsius here this morning, and yesterday was the coldest day in …. not sure, but it made the news! I must KNIT FASTER!!!!!!
Well, the housing costs can be amortized nearly forever – you could still be using the same housing on your next batch of chickens (after these ladies pass on to that Big Coop in the Sky) and the batch after that…
And the product is worth every penny.
(Love kmkat’s comment, btw!)
I buy organic free range eggs and they are expensive. But the real payoff is probably in you satisfaction that you did it yourself! My grandpa had hens for years and those eggs were delicious.
I don’t suppose anyone understands the cost per egg any more than they understand the price per sweater. People of the Olden Days did that! Clearly it must be free.
Gayle’s right about the depreciation of the henhouse. So would that be considered a rental unit or…….