Victory Garden: Chickens!
I’d been thinking about raising chickens, but had resigned myself to doing something about it next year to give myself time to build a coop, etc. Earlier this week, a friend was informed that she could no longer keep her chickens, so she contacted me to tell me that she was willing to hand me chickens, coop, run, waterer, feeder, and her remaining feed if I would come and pick them up.
It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
The picture above is of the breed that I will be raising - White Crested Black Polish. The breed “dates to the sixteenth century” (unconfirmed) and has more recently been used as a show animal. These chickens are one year old and have been laying consistently for a while now. We already have takers for any eggs we can’t “dispose” of and the general upkeep of the chickens is relatively inexpensive.
The thing that I found very interesting is cost of upkeep versus the price of eggs at the supermarket in my area. The cost of straw, per bale, is $6 and 50 lbs. of chicken feed is $14. You also feed the chickens scraps from the table to add variety to their diet, so you’re not only feeding them chicken feed. You also need to provide scratch and oyster shell - scratch to help them digest and oyster shell to increase their calcium intake so that they can produce better eggs. The scratch and oyster shell is a minimal cost, coming in at around $10. Chicken feed/scratch/oyster shell then costs about $24. This all will last you for six months. Hay is a more monthly expense, so you are going to be purchasing a bale of straw about once per month. The total cost for six months of chicken upkeep now tallies $42 for six months, which is $7/month. Assuming that the chickens will continue to produce three eggs per day, if I would sell the chicken eggs to cover my monthly costs the math would look like this:
90 eggs per month = 7.5 dozen eggs per month
7.5 dozen eggs per month = $1 dozen with 1/2 dozen left over
That’s three chickens being fed a diverse diet that includes bugs, kitchen scraps, and feed. My effort is 15 minutes per day to feed, water, and clean out the coop which I can charge for, but I benefit from the outcome so I don’t feel right charging for that in this context.
The fact is that paying $2.50 at the supermarket for a dozen eggs seems really exorbitant when you realize that the actual outlay for care and feeding of chickens is not that expensive. When you’re looking at a large-scale operation, it’s even cheaper since you can purchase everything in bulk and that drops the price significantly.
I may not be as glowing about this after a few weeks of shoveling chicken poo, but I am excited about the prospect of this. I have already started talking to people about historical poultry practices and breeds so I can learn more about the context that animals had in the middle ages/renaissance, which I find particularly interesting.
This promises to be A Great Adventure and I am excited about taking those first steps.
Tags: chickens, victory garden