about the costs of my chicken hobby. I guess it is the accountant or mathematician in me. I stumbled across an article from Scratch Magazine that came up with some figures.
The author assumes that a person purchased chicks and then raised them as egg producers. I actually got my original full grown chickens for free (thank you Mr. Jackson) but just recently I bought 6 chicks so I now my costs have gone up.
The author estimates that for 3 baby chicks the costs of their purchase and upkeep for the first 6 weeks of their life is $185. He has figured in wood chips, heat lamp and bulb, starter feed, etc.
At six weeks, chicks get moved into the big coop. He estimated the cost of a coop for three chicks is $530. Let's just say that my first coop cost about $150 and I have had two more coops and added two dog pens for fencing since then. Mike built the last coop so I could walk into it which makes it more of a shed. Bottom line, my coop expenses are way higher than Scratch magazine projected.
According to Scratch magazine, 'Chickens produce the most eggs during the first year of laying, decreasing by 20% or more every year (this isn't a hard and fast rule, as some hens lay very well almost their entire lives. Some, on the other hand, lay much less.)' For calculation purposes, Scratch magazine, used 265 as the number of eggs a chicken would lay in a year. I looked at my stats which include the ducks and I average 229 as the number of eggs laid by one of my poultry in a year.
At this point in the article, the author calculated feed for three years of raising chickens and came up with a total cost of keeping chickens of $985. That means that the cost for 2385 eggs (265 eggs per 3 chickens for 3 years) is $0.41 per egg. So a dozen eggs cost $4.92 to produce.
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