I do not understand the mathematics behind the dilemma. I’m assuming only the firts chicks cost money, because down the line they will breed.
But feeding them, housing them - vitamins and doctoring costs a lot of money.
So anyone with couple or more chickens - how much does it cost to have them on the table? And realistically how many eggs do you get?
Those chicks at the supply store are for small hobby farms. The rotisserie chicken comes from a big factory farm. That factory farm either doesn’t have to pay for chicks at all (they just breed their own), or they buy them for a fraction of the retail cost by buying them in bulk directly from suppliers.
All of the comments about loss leader and factory scale vs. hobby farming are huge factors. Another is the predatory nature of poultry farming in the US. I don’t know about Costco, but the other major producers, like Tyson and Perdue, have an extremely abusive relationship with contract farmers.
https://sentientmedia.org/contract-farming-makes-corporations-rich-and-family-farmers-broke/
Not to mention the breed of chicken matters immensely. The ones that are grown for meat are, in my opinion, nearly an entirely different species at this point and wouldn’t survive a year on a hobby farm.
We found several chicks that fell off a Tyson truck and added them to our flock. They all grew to be nearly featherless, fat, grotesque birds that’s broke their own legs because their bones couldn’t keep up with how quickly their meat grew. They did all die in under a year.
That’s horrifying…and entirely unsurprising. :(
They also taste like trash. To those who’ve have never had non-mutated birdmeat the difference is wild. The factory farm stuff almost tastes rotten in comparison.
Buy fertilized eggs and incubate them. Let them scratch through your compost and eat the grubs. Don’t worry about the economics unless you’re starting a factory farm.
Hmm, I didn’t even think about buying fertilized eggs!
Thank you for the info (that they exist and it is friggin logical for this market to exist)
You’re not ready for Chicken Math, buddy.
Chicken math:
You have a couple of hens and a rooster. They’re pretty chill and everything’s cool. But you can’t eat the birds you have, then you wouldn’t get any eggs… Maybe you should get more birds? You wonder what it will cost you to hatch and rear some chickens. Before you’re done guestimating, one of your hens is broody, so you let it do its business.
You starting building a secondary run for momma hen and her chicks. You forget the material price, but you do notice the text message half way through the month. It’s from the bank, you’re getting close to insufficient funds on your debit card. Anyway you move some funds around and head off to the feed store. Chickens need special feed and different feeders/water dispensers.
The chicks grow and you start to see something akin to personality. You want to optimize for size, so you wait with the harvesting. Suddenly some start presenting male characteristics. But the rest? They’re too cute and you could do with a few more eggs.
While picking up considerably more feed, you notice the text message from the bank, you ignore it and start looking at that incubator that’s on sale. It doea look neat. Next spring then hens start laying eggs again, you decide to not wait for a broody hen, and you start collecting an incubator’s worth of eggs.
When the eggs are about to hatch, finally a hen has become broody, so when most egg have hatched momma gets her eggs switched with a load of chicks. You don’t have any chicks to loom at indoors now, so maybe you should hatch a few more. You’ve heard about a different breed that you want to try out, so you find eggs on facebook marketplace and drive for 2hours each way to pay 50€ for the 24 eggs your incubator can hold. Of the 24 eggs 15 are fertilized and as you miss a single critical water refill only 10 hatch. You do note that that’s 5€ per chick. But you think to your self “hey, it’s an investment, now I have this breed and can hatch more down the road”
You keep this up, and second year you are worrying that the authorities will discover that you have more than the 30 chickens you can have without registering. You’re also on a first name basis with the clerks in two feed stores and you ask about their kids ball games when you get your weekly 80kg of feed. You try to recoup some of the money by selling eggs. You have no idea what an egg costs to produce, but you can’t get yourself to charge more than about 50 cents per egg. You don’t piece it together, but your income doesn’t match your feed budget. Your bank loves you, because even though you should be able to save money for a car and a holiday, you end up getting financing for all major purchases and going on holiday is overrated anyhow. You like to stay home, who would take care of your birds?
Anyway ⬆️that’s chicken math…
A lot of times, rotisserie chicken is a loss leader.
You don’t start a chicken farm with Tractor Supply chicks is the answer. Even if you did it that way, you’re not really losing out much in the grand scheme of things.
Tractor Supply chicks are sold as glorified pets.
Fun fact: it costs next to nothing to ship chicks through the USPS because of heavy subsidies for the industry. You literally just buy a crate from a wholesaler to start a broiler farm.
They are just soo cute!
In my mind I would not have more than a dozen birds.
And I am really thinking about the old ways of keeping chickens, when every house had their dump (basically a compost pile) and the chickens did half of the work with it.
How did it actually work, what went into the trash - what did chickens get out of it (bugs, worms) - did they had to manually turn the dump, or did they just let it rot the used in the spring…
Haven’t done any research on it - it is more of a thought experiment.
I recommend the book Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. Author Jennifer Reese talks about the costs and hassles associated with raising chickens for the eggs, among other food subjects.
Really hates canning though, or at least found it not worth it. I personally enjoy canning because I get to choose what is in them.
Canning is great if you find yourself with a windfall of free produce. Otherwise I’m kinda inclined to agree: canning isn’t worth it unless you enjoy the process and consider it a hobby.
Before doing this, you may want to checkout the Farming while Beige youtube channel (blackbirdcoop).
In some of his videos he provides a very honest description of the work involved.
$5 is selling at a loss at this point.
Beans are cheaper and don’t require killing a sentient creature.
Oh fuck off.
What I said was 100% factual.
It’s simply not economical to raise chickens. It’s like brewing beer: very labor-intensive, expensive, and heart breaking when they die, which they are very good at. It’s not a hobby to save money, despite what people tell you. The eggs are great though.
They’re also extremely sweet creatures when hand raised. They’ll come running and want to be picked up and everything. Eating them or having them die is awful.
bulk raising chickens in the millions is a totally different cost per animal ( is bulk slaughter and roasting them), than what you pay at a supply store
Yep, that’s why I am asking of how much they cost for a regular backyard chicken coop.
Had some friends that tried doing that about three years ago. They finally gave up (and moved) recently.
Gave away their 15-20 chickens, coop, fence, etc. IMHO, they are much happier now.
The cost of feed, mite treatment, lice treatment, bedding, vaccinations, etc were much higher than anything they claimed to “save”. And that’s not counting all the time and labor they put into it.
Found this with a simple web search: https://coopeduplife.com/backyard-chicken-egg-production-cost-statistics/.
Interesting! Thank you for your answer!
The husband of a couple we know have a few chickens in a coop in their back yard. Definitely pets, but they do get eggs.
The major difference between them and a “normal” person is the wife is a veterinarian, so he pretty much has the healthcare of his birds covered.
Glad it worked out for them! I think the main reason “normal” people have trouble is that they don’t understand all the issues involved.
For example, my friends didn’t realize they had to de-lice and do other things for them. Also didn’t know to buy “laying feed” for them to be able to lay eggs.
If people want to do it as a hobby/pets/know where their food comes from/etc that’s great. Just realize what you are buying into.
Yeah, I couldn’t do it myself. The closest we got was our guinea pigs, but they are friends not food.
