How much does feed cost to raise Hens?

[Junkmanme]

My 20 chickens cost me $50 and some change this month. I am going to be at least 1 bag of layer pellets short if they keep eating as they have this month. It has been cold and they NEED the food to battle this COLD. They have ALSO been feeding (scratching) off a bale of alfalfa in the yard.

The folks with 3 chickens who figure $9.00 per chicken per year have got me wondering.......

Are they feeding their chickens from a "year-old" bag of layer pellets?

Didn't make sense to me.

-Junkmanme-

 

[TrystInn]

We go through a 50# bag a week of poultry feed - 15 ducks (Rouens, Runners, Swedes, Anconas, Khaki Campbells), two huge Rhodies and 6 adolescent Black Copper Marans. My birds free forage in the yard, which in the Pacific Northwest means: snails, slugs, alders and blackberry bushes, as well as kitchen and garden scraps.

So 15 ducks + 8 chickens = 50# a week if you forage

 

[midd2005]

so i'm trying to figure out whether i should keep all 7 of my supposedly female chicks or pare it down to say 4ish (i'm only supposed to have 2 in my area. ssssshhhhh). i only really want to keep 7 if i can justify the costs. otherwise, it's just my husband and i eating eggs and at a max we are cruising though 4 dozen eggs a month.

i figure our 7 chickens (4 BR and 3 LB) will net us max 11.5 dozen eggs a month.

our chickens will be mostly stuck in a 80 sf run with very occasional use of the front yard, depending on their eventual flying capabilities. so, this means, no free range bugs and greens but some kitchen scraps and extra garden food.

i'm hoping that they will eat no more than 1/3 lb of food a day. my chicks will eventually be some big mommas so given that it's always warm here, i'm hoping that 1/3lb a day is accurate. this puts us at 10 lbs of feed per chicken per month which equals 70 lbs of feed a month. other people's previous posts with 7 chickens claim to only go through 50 lbs of feed a month, which would be awesome but i'm gonna stick with 70 for now.

the good news is we should be able to sell our eggs for $5-5.50 per dozen here. the bad news is their organic feed costs $40 per 50lb bag. seeing other people's posts about feed costing $8-13 just about kills me. course i can sell for a lot more too so maybe it evens out. maybe.

so anyway, 70lbs of feed at 40 bucks a bag = $56 in feed costs per month.
11.5 dozen x $5.50 =$63.25 in gross

course we eat the 4 dozen which would otherwise cost us $5.50-8, depending on the source. so really in sales we would only be making 41.25, but we are saving the cost of our buying them so in that sense we clear out ok.

this of course does not factor in all the feed costs before they hit laying age or the material outlay for their coop and all. but we would have spent most of that anyway just for the experience of having chickens as pets. i suppose if they stay alive and health and lay for 2 years we might just barely break even on all that.

i'm thinking it's at least not crazy to keep 7 vs 4.

 

[tobin123]

Quote:
WHERE ARE YOU AT AND HOW R U GETTING THAT MUCH FOR YOUR EGGS??????????????????I WOULD LOVE TO SALE FOR THAT $$$$$$
I am having a hard time selling right now but if I go back to the FArmers Market Iwill get $2 a dozen but I like your price better.We are trying to fihure our PRICE WISE is it worth to keep so many girls or what to do>

 

[justinwrites]

Holy dead threads batman. Sorry about waking this one up. I didn't read the date.