Cost of chickens, and return.

Now.... before we had these ladies we used to buy 1/2 dozen eggs every fortnight or sometimes every month because the price of eggs (and we only buy organic animal produce) was up to £1.82 per half dozen which is just too expensive.

This past week and a half we have had 2 eggs everyday, not that we are complaining of course, far from it. As I type, we have 8 lovely eggs sitting in the kitchen ready for another tortilla and a few poached eggs for lunch.

We worked out that so far the chickens have cost us...
Chicken wire - £14
Fixings for chicken house - £4
Wood for the chicken house - £0 (all reclaimed wood and off-cuts from other peoples building projects)
25kg bag of chicken food - £8.50 (we use about 250g a day maybe, so that bag will last a while)
Chickens - £20

Total £46.50

... at 30p per egg (as that is what we were paying for organic eggs from the supermarket) I make it 150 eggs before we start getting them for free (or minimal cost of feed)

... at a rate of 2 a day plus the 2 weeks we had the girls when they weren't laying yet it should be a total of around 3 months... which I think is a pretty fantastic return - assuming of course that neither of the ladies get ill or croak it before then, which is unlikely unless a dog or fox gets them.


To add to that the chickens are decimating the slug population and pooping for scotland, all over our veg beds :D adding to the growth prospects of our veg this year.

So there we go, our chickens have hopefully increased productivity of our veg beds, killed a lot of our worst garden pest, are living in a nearly free house and run, giving us something to watch when having our coffee, educating E in our food chain and within 3 months we will be getting fresh eggs for free. :mrgreen:

Thanks for reading ;o)