How to calculate how much eggs are costing?

[Bonniebooboo]

I DON'T think I could figure all that. Headache just thinking about it.
@EggSighted4Life You must be a genius for figuring all that out. I am a simpleton, so I would have to just figure the feed costs ( includes vitamins etc) with egg production over the year. I am getting 13-18 eggs a day right now, so a good average for the year probably works better for me. I'm sure I would be in the hole If I calculated in everything as a business. So it is a Hobby, which always costs more than you get money wise.

 

[EggSighted4Life]

I DON'T think I could figure all that. Headache just thinking about it.
@EggSighted4Life You must be a genius for figuring all that out. I am a simpleton, so I would have to just figure the feed costs ( includes vitamins etc) with egg production over the year. I am getting 13-18 eggs a day right now, so a good average for the year probably works better for me. I'm sure I would be in the hole If I calculated in everything as a business. So it is a Hobby, which always costs more than you get money wise.

Just a MAJOR over thinker!

Also, just a hobbyist... and WAY in the whole.

I'm in agreement that feed cost (all supplements/treats/bedding) over the year, divided by how many eggs total, and multiply by 12 to figure the average cost of a dozen eggs including all seasons.

 

[aliciaplus3]

I guess I have gone a different way of keeping track ..... I found a budgeting calculator for my phone and every time I buy something, feed, or equipment, I subtract it and every time I make a sale I add the money I got in..... so far it has helped me to see how much I spend a month on my hobby....... I have had some good sales to but not quite enough to come out ahead. of course I have over 60 babies that are eating but not giving back so??? lol

 

[Hopperkiller]

I DON'T think I could figure all that. Headache just thinking about it.
@EggSighted4Life You must be a genius for figuring all that out. I am a simpleton, so I would have to just figure the feed costs ( includes vitamins etc) with egg production over the year. I am getting 13-18 eggs a day right now, so a good average for the year probably works better for me. I'm sure I would be in the hole If I calculated in everything as a business. So it is a Hobby, which always costs more than you get money wise.

Since my hens are 2-3 year old slow or not producing from my friends egg business i dont think about the costs. But they gobble pounds of grasshoppers and other bugs saving several thousands of dollars worth of trees and shrubs and rosebushes around my house. More expensive than insecticide but safer and more fun. I rescue them and they rescue my landscaping. Too hard to figure value.

PS. Dont anyone think a tightwad like me spent that much on landscaping. Thats the current value after planting and growing to the sizes they are. My house is in an old neglected wheat field so even the hackberrys on the fenceline have value.

 

[jodyman]

50# feed is about $13 and I sell about 6 dozen eggs for $2 a dozen to my friends at work. So I'm breaking even. I'm just happy our chicks are almost paying for themselves. Plus I get good, fresh, healthy, eggs.

 

[bruceha2000]

@jodyman How many hens, how many days does the 50# of feed last and how many eggs per day for that bag of feed?

 

[Faraday40]

All dual purpose birds here... I like to calculate my cost over the year since feed consumption and laying can vary so widely.

All I can say... it cost me between $2.50 and $3 to produce a dozen eggs... which I figure once laying including molt I can chalk up to 1 dozen per month per lady. Feed cost me $17-20/bag. I feed 20% protein flock raiser, which cost a little more than layer, but suits my needs well and provides the best nutrition possible.

What I discovered... I can sell eating eggs for $4 per dozen... or hatched chicks for $2-9 EACH depending on breed (though the whole dozen won't hatch). Take into account hatch rate.. brings my take not yet including expenses to $7.65 per egg. It cost me $1 per egg, including incubation (not the bator itself), hen feed, short term heating after hatch, nutri drench and so on.

So on the $2 chicks I make $1 each. On the $9 chicks, I make $6.65 each... this is already factoring in those that were set but didn't hatch. The ones that were blanks get fed back to the other animals and this isn't credited into my cost factor, so it's just a bonus savings on other animal feed.

That's an earnings of $12 per dozen eggs for mix breeds... and $79.80 per dozen for pure Marans or Silkies. If they purchase 4 or more I drop the price to $8 each. Still giving me $5.65 profit per egg for a total of $67.80 per dozen!!!

Rare breeds don't sell much... popular breeds DO sell all day long. I can't afford to sell eating eggs with profits like that... my family is lucky they get any!

I'm sure it cost me less feed and such to produce the Silkie eggs... but for those ladies I have to take into account their extreme broodiness.

And I offer to take back any males for processing, for free as a community service... with the understanding they will NOT be returned to my flock but become food for my family and pets or for someone else's. I maintain biosecurity as much as possible, not bringing them back to MY property though. And we get the bonus of extra meat, including Silkie's that only costed me processing labor.

After that... ladies get sold early in the season after their 2nd molt once they've returned to lay for $25 each with some good laying still left in them. Considering this I get to replace all my birds with pullets at essentially no new cost and got eggs/chicks all that time. If I grow some out for myself, any who weren't selected for breeding get sold for $30 each at point of lay, which cost me about $10 to raise them.

I haven't ever shipped and don't currently have NPIP. But can still say that eating eggs are fun... but hatching eggs are profitable! I haven't sold any hatching because I am making sure I've got this. But if and when I do... they will likely be $12-20 per dozen for mix breeds (OE) and $40 per dozen for pure.

Note MOST people drive at least 90 minutes each way to my location... and haven't ONCE heard anybody complain or even ASK about my price being negotiable!

This year has been the most exciting!

Good luck with your egg business.

I

All dual purpose birds here... I like to calculate my cost over the year since feed consumption and laying can vary so widely.

All I can say... it cost me between $2.50 and $3 to produce a dozen eggs... which I figure once laying including molt I can chalk up to 1 dozen per month per lady. Feed cost me $17-20/bag. I feed 20% protein flock raiser, which cost a little more than layer, but suits my needs well and provides the best nutrition possible.

What I discovered... I can sell eating eggs for $4 per dozen... or hatched chicks for $2-9 EACH depending on breed (though the whole dozen won't hatch). Take into account hatch rate.. brings my take not yet including expenses to $7.65 per egg. It cost me $1 per egg, including incubation (not the bator itself), hen feed, short term heating after hatch, nutri drench and so on.

So on the $2 chicks I make $1 each. On the $9 chicks, I make $6.65 each... this is already factoring in those that were set but didn't hatch. The ones that were blanks get fed back to the other animals and this isn't credited into my cost factor, so it's just a bonus savings on other animal feed.

That's an earnings of $12 per dozen eggs for mix breeds... and $79.80 per dozen for pure Marans or Silkies. If they purchase 4 or more I drop the price to $8 each. Still giving me $5.65 profit per egg for a total of $67.80 per dozen!!!

Rare breeds don't sell much... popular breeds DO sell all day long. I can't afford to sell eating eggs with profits like that... my family is lucky they get any!

I'm sure it cost me less feed and such to produce the Silkie eggs... but for those ladies I have to take into account their extreme broodiness.

And I offer to take back any males for processing, for free as a community service... with the understanding they will NOT be returned to my flock but become food for my family and pets or for someone else's. I maintain biosecurity as much as possible, not bringing them back to MY property though. And we get the bonus of extra meat, including Silkie's that only costed me processing labor.

After that... ladies get sold early in the season after their 2nd molt once they've returned to lay for $25 each with some good laying still left in them. Considering this I get to replace all my birds with pullets at essentially no new cost and got eggs/chicks all that time. If I grow some out for myself, any who weren't selected for breeding get sold for $30 each at point of lay, which cost me about $10 to raise them.

I haven't ever shipped and don't currently have NPIP. But can still say that eating eggs are fun... but hatching eggs are profitable! I haven't sold any hatching because I am making sure I've got this. But if and when I do... they will likely be $12-20 per dozen for mix breeds (OE) and $40 per dozen for pure.

Note MOST people drive at least 90 minutes each way to my location... and haven't ONCE heard anybody complain or even ASK about my price being negotiable!

This year has been the most exciting!

Good luck with your egg business.

I was just about to mention basically what you said.

I have English Orps. They're not the best layers, they eat/poop a lot, but the eggs are huge. I do sell some eating eggs to friends & neighbors for $4/doz. (That's far less than the going rate at Whole Foods but more than Walmart. People who want cheap eggs, won't want mine anyway. The customers who are used to paying $6-$8/doz fight at the chance to get mine.) I also label each egg with the hen's name & date laid. My neighbors love to stop by & meet the hen who made them breakfast and sometimes the neighbor kids will even request a specific hen's eggs. I really only sell eggs at times of surplus, and I've never had a problem selling them.

Where I make some $ to actually help pay for our hobby is by selling chicks. Our DD kept coming up with new 4H projects that always involved hatching. Of course, we then had to sell all the hatch results. That's when I decided to invest in some quality birds. Purebreds are much easier to sell. I sell them straight run for the 1st 4 weeks. The price goes up when I know it's a pullet and the extra males get processed. Sure some people will want to get $2 chicks, but that's what feed stores & hatcheries are for. When someone takes home some of our chicks, they usually come back for more the next year. I've had people buy chicks from 6 different states! (I do not ship)


When the kids want to try out a new breed, we buy hatching eggs, keep the 2-3 favs & sell the rest to make back our cost of the eggs. Again it's a hobby, so a good hatch rate and a little profit in spring is needed to get us through the winter.

Another fun thing I do is sell hatching eggs to the schools. I help set up their incubator, set the eggs, bring in a live chicken for a Q&A, and make myself available around hatch day in case of emergencies. Most teachers don't want to keep the chicks, so I often end up selling those too when they're done. Every spring I do about 4-6 classrooms, so it's a busy time.

 

[bjmoose]

Don't forget to include your coop costs. :-D

I don't know a lot about raising chickens, but I do know a fair amount about small business accounting. And you have to amortize your fixed costs - which is just a fancy way of saying dividing those costs up over a period of time.

Now, I'm at the extreme small end of for 'backyard' chicken raising - and I just built a cute small coop for six hens. I totally focused on building what i wanted, and NOT on building a frugal coop. This was a hobby project for fun, and *not* any kind of money making venture. But I get the impression that's not uncommon in the backyard chicken hobbyist set.

But lets use it as an example anyway.

Anyhow, the coop cost, in round numbers, for materials only, around $600 (totally ignoring my time, but that's not uncommon in "sole proprietorship" small businesses...)

So, if I'm calculating my egg costs, I need to amortize that fixed cost of $600 over some time interval. Tax and accounting rules give us varying time intervals to use. But a really convenient interval is to consider the entire 'producing' lifetime of the six hens. If I say they're all reasonably good layers, producing 500 eggs in a lifetime before they're "retired," then I'll get 3000 eggs from them before my coop building cost is depreciated

And I can use that number for my cost calculation - conveniently sidestepping a time interval. (Talk to your accountant before you do this for real- it's really just a *shortcut* for illustration purposes!)

But consider that "coop" cost, without feed or *anything* else, represents a cost of $600/3000 or 20 cents per egg, or $2.40 per dozen - just for HOUSING those chickens.

And NOW add feed, and all the other expenses.

My point is, simply, when running a business, you must remember to consider ALL your costs. So if you're doing this with an eye to selling eggs and making money, then you need to run your entire operation *very* efficiently.

From a coop construction perspective, this means you would need to build the largest coop (in sq feet) as possible as inexpensively as you possibly can. If you're looking for numbers, we tend to say our chickens should have four square feet of coop space each. So to keep the "coop cost" under, say, 5 cents an egg, shoot for construction costs of (.05 * 500) / 4 = $6.25 per square foot.

Now, if I were following my own advice, I'd try to build a coop for six hens for a target price of $150, including materials and labor. :-O But it turns out that for me it's just a hobby. So I count value *totally* differently: by dividing dollars spent by hours of fun obtained. So in this case, I got about 12 days of enjoyment of my "construction hobby" for the relatively modest expense of $600. In other words, I kept myself entertained for about 50 bucks a day. AND I had a chicken coop left over at the end. (See, using *this* logic, it's an *advantage* to work slowly... :-D ) Anyhow, your mileage may vary CONSIDERABLY.

Long story short - you'll never, ever, *ever* be able to compete with the cost of grocery store eggs produced at large scale factory farms. The best you can do is compete with local "farmer's market" type prices for small farm free-range type eggs.

 

[aart]

I also label each egg with the hen's name & date laid.

How do you pull that off...do you really know which hen laid which egg??

You have a very cool thing going, great marketing, and great skills to be teaching your daughter and at the schools. Either she's tiny girl or that cockbird is HUGE....Beautiful! Kudos great post.
Now, do you keep meticulous records as to costs and sales ...or not so much?

 

[aart]

Such a wide range of cost accounting!
From amortizing all infrastructure to hopeful guesstimates.