Article on backyard chickens, false economics?

When you raise the chickens yourself you are most likely feeding and treating them better than a factory farm. Therefore the eggs are fresher and more nutritious - cage free or organic eggs around here can be betwee $4 and $5 a dozen. Plus if you have your own roosters you don't have to buy more chicks and there should be chickens to butcher. To me the best economic reason to have chickens isn't the immediate savings but the long term security of having food.

During the warm months of the year our chickens feed themselves on bugs. They pay for themselves this way. The eggs are a free benefit. The chickens save me from having to weed and do insect control as well as making life more pleasant.

During the coldest part of the winter I have to use a little electricity for a light for them, carry a little water to them and feed them a little layer if I want eggs. They also eat meat which is left over from slaughter. They more than make up for this since I eat them. They warm my belly through the winter in stews and soups.

Done this way the chickens are inexpensive to free and a positive for home and farm. How it works out for anyone all depends on the choices they make.

Cheers

-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
Save 30% off Pastured Pork with free processing: http://SugarMtnFarm.com/csa
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project: http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

My original hen house cost only a few bucks for nails... the rest was salvaged or scrounged.

Costs are irrelevant to me... If the grocery stores collapse, my food supply will still exist.

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

You all do understand this was in the New Haven,CT Advocate not the Mayberry Piccayune.

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

I do not make money on the chickens, and I don't ever expect to. I do make money on ducks though, and I will be building my flock back up this year. I do not sell eggs, but I do sell ducklings and the odd chicks from extra eggs that wind up in the incubators. Peace of mind is expensive, but I'll gladly pay it. I'm broke most of the time, with being a full time student and all, but I have found out that the bread store will sell a full rack of expired food for $10. A rack will feed my small flock of chickens and ducks for nearly a month, along with some scratch and pellets.

If I could keep the chickens out of moms flower beds, mine would be free range. As it is, I have a handful of bantams that have a knack for survival that stay out, but everyone else is locked up.

The numbers in the article don't make sense - not very good proof-reading.

I've concluded that few things one does outside of their occupation makes sense economically if you consider all factors, including the value of your time. If I spend an hour a week doing chickens to get $5 worth of eggs - surely I could have made more at my job.

So, everyone should just work more overtime, or get another part-time job and forget all their hobbies or do-it-yourself projects. Just earn the money and pay others to do what is their job. More efficient that way.

But, of course, most of us want to do something besides our primary occupation, so the question is which way will we waste money, and how much. The fun for me with chickens is to minimize how much I lose.

However, most chicken owners I know try to lose money by doing the following:

Keep roosters around, which are very poor layers.
Breed your own mongrel chicks which become poor layers.
Own larger hens which use feed to maintain body mass instead of egg production.
Let them roam free and not be able to collect manure.
Fail to put light on them in the winter - feed for nothing.
Buy somebody's older hens - age unknown.
Keep a hodge-podge of hens, age unknown, and which ones laying unknown.
Fail to cull because you either don't like to kill them, or don't know which ones are laying.

On the last point, the last few years I've gotten leghorn (white eggs) and red-sex link(brown eggs) hens, split 2 of each into pens and keep track of egg numbers. If, for example, I'm only getting one brown egg out of a pen, I separate one of the brown egg layers for a few days to see which one is not laying (goes to soup).