Are chickens deserving it ?
Are the egg and heart you get worth the cost of a hencoop , the cost of provender and the cost of sentence it takes to manage a good deal ?
I ’ve been keep chickens for almost a decade now and , despite my best attempts , thus far the answer is …
Well . I ’ll let you decide for yourself , but I know my answer . Here are the big problems .
A Coop Costs Money
If you have predator , you ca n’t just throw off up some 2 x 4 ’s and chicken conducting wire . No , you want hardware cloth , conceptive walls and roof and perchance even a concrete flooring .
If you ’re favourable , handy and a good scavenger , you might spend about $ 200-$300 for a solid slight chicken coop . If you ’re not , you spend a couple times that .
I can corrupt farm eggs for $ 3.50 USD per dozen – but hey , I get them cheaply because I last in the third world . You ’re likely to compensate $ 6.00 per 12 .
That ’s fifty cents an egg . That means the chickens in a $ 250.00 coop must produce 500 eggs to devote off their substantial estate .
But hold back … there ’s more !
Chicken Feed Has a Price
A 50 lb traveling bag of commercial-grade chicken feed costs around $ 16.00 . Each lay hen will consume around a 1/4 lb of provender per day . In 200 days , you ’ll need to purchase another old bag . If you have one hoot , that is . It crop out to about $ 0.08 cents of provender per Bronx cheer , per day . That ’s not so bad .
But …
Your Time Also Has a Price
What is your clip worth ? $ 7.50 per hour ? $ 15 ? $ 50 ?
If you were Donald Trump , it would n’t make sense to keep chickens unless you wanted to do so as a hobby . Chickens are certainly better party than Congressmen and have higher IQs , so I could realize if he did determine to bring up a flock .
But we ’re talking about your sentence . Let ’s say it ’s worth $ 15 per time of day .
You want to establish a coop , buy provender , permit the chicken in and out , collect orchis , feed and irrigate the birds , plus hunt predator .
take on forethought of a mass does n’t take all that much metre , usually . Maybe a quarter time of day a day .
That works out to 1.75 hours per week , or $ 26.25 of your meter at $ 15 per time of day .
At that charge per unit , you could easily buy a 12 eggs every two days from an constitutional wimp farm … and keep your clip .
And This is in an Ideal World!
You might decide keeping chickens make sense for you even after these routine … but what about expiry from predators ?
blend in out to the hencoop in the middle of the night after being woken up by the dying squawks of a murdered cock is n’t fun . Discovering the fox that kill the cock has also mangle all your pullets is even less so .
At our place strikebreaker dig into the coop and kill our chicks :
A lot of people suggest build up a stronger coop , poisoning the skunk , raising the chicks off the ground , etc .
Yet that costs more money . Why would I spend the clip and drive when I can just corrupt orchis from down the road for a few buck a dozen ?
I answer some of the commenters in this follow - up picture :
So – are Chickens Worth It?
I ’ve raised wimp for eggs and meat and I appreciate the manure and the work they do with composting ; yet overall …
No . Heck no .
The “ ideal ” of chicken has always failed to lock with the realness of chickens .
If I let the skirt freerange , they ’ll wreck my newly planted gardens and often end up as predator dung .
If I box them up in a Gallus gallus gulag , they need more provender and produce abject quality eggs .
I ’m sure there ’s a room to keep birds that makes monetary sentiency , but I have n’t plant it . I ’m noJoel Salatinand we do n’t even own our homestead here , so … considering tractors , henhouse , Gallus gallus runs , hardware textile , feed , fourth dimension … the numbers do n’t add up .
A lot of us have it off the ideas of birds – or we care chickens the way we wish our dogs .
I do n’t want positron emission tomography . I want eggs that are higher calibre and cost less than the ones I can buy locally .
That is n’t encounter , so the birds have to go . I ’ll bet if you crunch the numbers on your own homestead , you ’ll see the same monetary drain I do .
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