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?
I have a small flock and it really depends how much you can DIY, but I’ve spent several hundred on their yard setup and equipment (food and water buckets, water heater for winter, etc.) and thats very cheap materials. This is because I live in town and part of the license stipulates they are in a fully enclosed area, not able to roam. I also built their overnight run out of 1/2 in galvanized mesh, to keep them safe from night predators, and that was expensive to do.
If you live out in the country you wont have that problem with the required fencing, but you will have predators, and if you don’t properly account for those you wont have any birds to harvest.
Chickens take several months to reach full meat bird size. The feed is like $20/50lbs and 6 go through 1-2 bags per month. I heavily supplement their food with kitchen scraps from all the people I give eggs to, so we all waste less and they have incredibly healthy eggs, which reduces their feed consumption substantially, but that feed cost is always there.
My chickens are not meat birds, mostly because I’m not allowed to have a rooster so i cant’t get hatching eggs for free, it’s not really worth repeatedly buying eggs for that purpose. I get 4-6 eggs per day every day from my 6 hens, and that is a LOT of eggs. I average a dozen every 2 days or 15 dozen per month. I supply five households with that, with occasional extra to a few others. If you plan to raise birds for eggs, make sure you have people lined up to take them before you get the birds. Tons of people have backyard flocks these days so its much easier to get eggs from random people.
If you want an economical option, i suggest raising quail. They are ready for culling at 6 weeks and while you get a lot less meat from each bird, they are much faster and cheaper to get to grown, if you get good at incubating the eggs, and keep your own breeding covey. They are also incredibly easy to slaughter and clean, mechanically speaking. Tools include very sharp scissors and a bucket and that’s all. They also only need 3sqft/bird to be happy (you’ll see 1 sqft thrown around but that’s industrial and their standards are trash, even 3 is a bit low, but they don’t seem to mind, because it means a 10-bird covey gets 30sqft of floor space), unlike chickens which need a lot more.
Thank you for your answer!
I haven’t even thought of quail! growing up we always had whole eggs in the chicken soup - you just cracked them on the side of the soup plate and ate it with the soup.
That sounds like a lot? We have 5x the amount of birds you have and buy 2 bags of food and a bag of cracked corn every month & a half.
I don’t really pay a ton of attention to how fast i go through it, just estimating, hence the range. :) They eat a lot more in winter tho.