Happy Monday!
Today I want to crunch the numbers about raising chickens. We have had laying hens for four months now, but it is still a bit early to tell how the first generation of chickens born in the property will fare. Today, I will look at what I know and maybe update in a few month.
Starting costs
We bought 10 hens and a rooster, for an average price of $12. $132.
We transformed a small thatched beach hut into a hen cage, with wire, more palm tree leaves for the leaking rook and some construction blocks to build nests. $150
Our lovely handyman helped us and so did another worker for half a day. $18.
Total starting costs $300.
You can also chose to buy chicks who are a few weeks old, for less than $1, but there is no guarantee they will survive to adult age and in the meanwhile they’ll just eat and do nothing for a few month until they start laying eggs. We chose to have hens that were laying after a week or so of adapting. One of them died tragically, eaten one night by an animal.
Ongoing costs
The main cost is food. A 100lb bag of corn enriched with vitamins (no hormones) costs just under $30. They go through one per month, but we also have two turkeys, two ducks and a couple of geese eating from there, the hens come to $25/month.
They also eat anything you throw at them, vegetable peels, old leftovers… and will eat bugs and worms during the wet season, it is really dry at the moment for them to find more than a few flies to eat on our land.
We do not need any shots since they aren’t in contact with neighboring animals, you may need that if you are in a rural region with other chickens nearby.
Return on investment
After 4 months, we are getting an average of 6 eggs per day. When the hen is hatching, she stops laying the usual daily egg, and some lay every other day instead of daily. A caged hen egg costs $0.17, $0.20 free range. If we went strictly for eggs we could earn $36 per month gross, $11 after food costs.
$132 profit/year is a 44% yearly return on our $300 initial investment.
But we are more interested in raising chickens for meat. We eat 2 eggs each for breakfast, leaving 2 eggs a day to reproduce. There is not way of knowing if the egg has been fertilized by the rooster, and a hen will hatch 15-18 eggs for 21 days. After that if the egg is not ready she will abandon the nest and leave you with eggs that you can’t eat, they either have a small chicken inside or are rotten. We throw a lot of eggs.
I don’t know if this is because of the hot weather or because we don’t track our eggs well and they are already bad when the hen stops hatching, but out of the 15 eggs, we have gotten 7, 5 and 5 chicks so far. It is a low rate according to my neighbor, you should get at least 12 chicks per bed. The first bed of 7 had 3 casualties, the second is intact and the last one had 1 dead chick, leaving 13 chickens so far. Early mortality is frequent, although none of ours has died from sickness, they were killed by workers or other animals.
You can eat a chick between 4-6 months, assuming they make it this far. One of the oldest ones is weak at the moment and we doubt he will survive. Which is why I can’t give exact numbers on the return.
But the added food for the chicks is negligible and after four months, we have
- 13 chicks, a $2/head value, soon to be worth $7.5/head at 6 months and $12 if we keep them for a year. $26
- eaten 2 eggs a day plus occasional eggs for baking, etc. for 4 month $104
We made $130 and spent $100 on food. $30 profit, 10% of our $300 investment (30% annually).
In 6 months time, if all those chickens survive, an no other is born (both things unlikely but should even out) we will have
- 13 chicks at $7.5: $97.5
- 130 eggs/month for consumption $156
We would make $253.50, spend $150 on food, leaving a $103.50 profit, 34.5% return on our $300 investment (69% annually).
Things are looking much better when you try to raise chickens and not just eat the eggs. But this means you have to kill your chickens, something I haven’t managed to do yet, or have a way to butcher them somewhere.
We usually have fried chicken once a week when we go to the supermarket and don’t eat chicken at home until ours are big enough. And like a pyramid those chickens will lay eggs and hatch, so if we wait before we eat them we can get a better return.
family picture
Time to open a chicken empire?
Not so sure. Raising chickens is fun, but this is a small facility and my salary is free. My profit is $100 over six month with 10 adult animals, so even to afford my $200/month handyman I would need 120 animals to break even. They would not fit in my beach hut and building more nests is expensive. The land is expensive to buy or rent. BF’s father was in the egg business and had hundreds of thousands of birds, it was a very lucrative operation, but in between, I am not sure there is much more to raising chickens than a household hobby.
The health rules have to be crazy too, to sell eggs to a local shop. I would always be afraid the egg comes out bad, or someone gets sick, even when I pick the eggs up daily I always smell them before cooking.
Because we would eat a chicken per week and our usual four eggs a day, the size of our production is perfect, we do not have to sell, this is just another item from the grocery bill that we don’t have to buy. Any bigger operation would involve distribution costs, losses when you can’t sell it all, marketing and communication costs, etc. eating up the profit.
Do you have chickens? Ever thought about it?
This post was featured in the Carnival of Wealth and Norwegian Girl, thank you!
If you were to raise more chickens would you need to buy more roosters to keep the genetic pool diverse? I would imagine in-breeding would lead to more problems.
Also, have you figured the savings from not buying eggs/chicken at the grocery into the value of your hens?
Interesting type of investment as always Pauline.
At the moment 1 rooster does the job for the 9 hens. When the current 13 chicks are adult, we will eat the males and keep the females for eggs, I don’t think that is too much of a problem, but maybe if there are less survivors from a batch of eggs we may have to get another rooster. They are very proud and I don’t think that two roosters would do well together, we will probably eat that one and get the new one to breed.
Good point. I suppose they’d fight over territory and the best hens. It’d probably be a bad investment.
Do you make Coq au Vin?
yes! that should be his fate sooner than later, as he seems aggressive with the younger ones (that we think are male and he feels threatened already).
Do you know about floating a egg in water to see if it is fresh?
I’ve occasionally thought about gardening before, but livestock is where I draw the line. All my chicken and eggs comes from the supermarket. Way less effort, even if I have to pay a bit more.
they take about 1 hour per week, which is less than I spend watering the plants, and my garden is an epic fail so far, so for the time invested, chickens are much better in my case. They do come with problems though, if you leave the house etc. thankfully the handyman can take care of them if we aren’t around.
I tried gardening in our tiny patch outside our flat last year and it was an epic fail also!
Definitely interested in Chickens though, but we have no room for them, when we get a house with a small garden I am going to try it. Glad to hear it is a smaller time investment than the gardening, that is music to my ears! We have friends who have chickens and they really enjoy keeping them as well.
it’s pretty fun, although if you have a rooster, say goodbye to sleeping late, he starts singing at 530am!
Ha ha! I can sell my alarm clock then? Even bigger ROI than I originally thought 🙂
Great post! I was really interested to see the costs associated with your chickens. I wrote a similar post a few weeks ago (linked in CommentLuv below). Our chickens are for egg production only, and living in the city we are only allowed to have 5. Having backyard chickens has become a really ‘trendy’ thing in the States. (Martha Stewart even wrote an article about it in yesterday’s paper.) Sounds like production for meat and reproductive sales is the only real way to turn a profit for a small operation. It was interesting to look at the costs of chickens through your experiences. I’m really enjoying following you on Twitter.
Thank you Jon. I have seen articles about people in the US have hens for eggs in the city, on the roof or a small garden, I am happy to have more space though, for the smell. We don’t need to clean more than once a week.
When my dad grew up in the 50s, my grandparents had a small farm, so they had a lot of chickens, but I think that was for survival and self sufficiency, rather than to earn money. I guess if I ever found myself living in the countryside with a big property, having chickens would be a fun thing to do, would be nice to have fresh eggs to breakfast each day! But I´ve never thought about it as an income source..
me neither, it is fun to have them around, and I like that it is one less thing to put on the shopping list.
My grandparents used to have chickens and turkeys. I loved those silly birds:) We also love getting fresh eggs from a farm. In fact, that is all we eat now. Like a few of the other comments, I also draw the line at raising livestock 😀
The eggs are much different than what you get in the supermarket, even free range, chances are they are at least a week old when you buy them. At the farm you can get them fresh and tasty.
I live up in South Dakota in the summer to escape Las Vegas heat .We eat chickens ,eggs and beef raised in the property .When I return the food is horrible …no flavor,no taste or desire to continue to eat this processed crap ….Buying land in AZ to raise Chicken,sheep and goats …Cattle wont have the good pasture land that works out best …just shrub so we wont being raising any .BAWK BAWK BAWK……
I would totally own chickens if I could! When I live in Vermont over the summer we have around 6 acres…I could do it then, but then what?? We have a farm right down the road…we get our eggs there. You are really going for it, Pauline!
They don’t require much maintenance but you do have to feed them or be sure the land provides enough for them to eat. Maybe you can buy a couple of hens at the beginning of summer and have them for dinner at the end!
My grandparents rose some chickens as well as a few other birds. We would love to do it just for the eggs as our kids eat them every morning for breakfast, though we can’t raise livestock where we live. 🙂
It would be a great project for the kids to watch and take care of, too bad you can’t.
You have some really interesting and diverse investment ideas Pauline – I love them all! I think that a chicken empire may be a little less exciting than your coconut farm, but it still looks like a great way to eat cheaply.
I don’t consider it as an investment (the $120 worth of hens aren’t part of my net worth hehe) but it is great to control what you eat and even better that the numbers add up.
I’ve honestly never considered it because it’d be illegal where I am now, but I love your thoughtful financial analysis. My take away is that it might be a nice hobby, but not worth the investment to start selling eggs on a small scale.
I like to know where my food comes from and it justifies the effort. Unless you are able to sell locally a bit of your production, I don’t think it is worth going bigger than what you can eat.
I love your farm business concept. Actually, I am planning to have a farm in the near future. How about eggs production and meat production? I think this is also viable business.
Like I explained, the costs would increase considerably to have a small production to sell, but I think it is a good business if you own some cheap land and can have a bigger scale business.
You mentioned it at the end, but I’m not in love with your numbers because the cost of time isn’t included. I’d love to see what your $130 profit would be wen divided over the time spent.
I spend 5 minutes a day refilling their food stall and giving them water, then leave with the fresh eggs. The handyman spends 20 minutes a week cleaning the cage, so that is 1 hour/week in total. $100 profit after 6 months for 24 hours of work works out to $4.16/hour, less than what I’d want for my time but more than the handyman’s salary. The work will remain the same once we have double the number of birds but I don’t know how much chicken we can eat per week!
CF used to own chickens as a kid. I think it’s a great was to be more self sufficient, but not really top make money. You’re saving money though, which had a similar effect.
Exactly, it is a small saving on the grocery bill. We also save on cereals and other breakfast options too since we mainly have eggs to avoid them going to waste.
I’ve thought about it, but we don’t have room for a chicken coop in our yard (and I don’t know if it would be legal in our town). I do have friends who raise a small number of chickens and they love the fresh eggs. Like you, they haven’t used them for meat yet. As far as turning this into a profit maker, you need to scale big. But if you are primarily interested in healthier meat and eggs, then you can maintain a small operation and aim at self-sufficiency. You will likely save money in some aspects, though you are giving up time. The primary benefit, however, is healthier and better tasting meat and eggs. There is a nice benefit in that!
exactly, taste/health and self sufficiency is the main goal. They do taste incredible!
The only real risk in this situation is your ability to bring these chickens to their untimely demise. They only lay eggs for 12-18 months, but will live for 15+ years…
So if you can’t do the deed, then you’re going to lose money in feed for 12-15 years of feeding hungry birds that don’t lay.
NB: a good friend of mine has been keeping small numbers of birds for some time now. His comments after cooking the chickens: “This is the BEST *&$^#%(*^#$ chicken I’ve ever tasted!” His family and extended family have long careers in the wine and restaurant business so I trust his exclamation on this…
Happy chickens who eat bugs, scratch in the dirt and run around will make for the tastiest meat you’ve ever had.
The only lay for 18 months? I thought it was more like 4-5 years. We have a handyman who will butcher them, and have had a few birds from the village brought to eat, they really are tastier than your average chicken. But I would like to do it myself, not because I enjoy killing something, but because I want to own my decision to eat meat.
Our chickens lay fine. They are 6 years old or so. They rest quite a bit in the winter and then POP! They are spring chickens again! Now, if that would only happen to me . . .
My wife and I thought about getting some chickens, but I think our dogs wouldn’t like that. We can’t have any roosters in our area, only hens, so we would just be dealing with the eggs, non fertilized. Thanks for breaking it down Pauline.
no feathery surprise when you break an egg for omelets at least, but you would have to add the costs to replace the hens after a few years instead of breeding your own. Strange they let you have hens but no roosters. I am sure the dogs would love to “play” with the chicks and that is a sure recipe for disaster.
Very informative post. Have you thought about bagging the chicken poop to sell as fertilizer or using it yourself? This could be another way to increase your profits.
Selling poop from 10 chickens wouldn’t really be an option but I may use it later for my gardening, I just have a very black thumb and nothing has grown so far, so no need for poop!
I could never do it myself really unless it was just a pet or to just lay eggs. My one cat is enough animal for me. 🙂
I thought I couldn’t either, now I catch them, even witnessed one chick cracking its egg, I thought it was all gross at first but you get used to it.
Raising chickens isn’t in the cards for us (although the girls would probably adore the baby chicks) but it sounds like a good investment for you thus far. Our cat, Prince, is about all the pet we can manage at this point. 🙂
The girls would love them, but then you have to explain why it’s chicken for lunch haha!
My great-grandparents had chickens but the city has since changed the code, which essentially makes it impossible to have chickens where their house was. I am 99.99% certain my house would not be allowed to have chickens based on zoning regulations. With that being said, in your case I would totally have chickens! Looks like it can pay off, even if the profit is small (on a dollar basis, not percentage).
I don’t view it so much as an investment as a way to eat healthy animals for the price of supermarket meat/eggs. If I can ever butcher them!
I’ve joked about getting chickens for the backyard to live around the lake, but Mr. PoP had experience with chickens growing up and he says the smell is atrocious and definitely not worth trying on property our size. The amount of cleanup you’d have to do would definitely not be worth the time cost considering that we don’t even eat that many eggs!
The smell is quite strong if you have them on a small patch. Ours run around all day and don’t smell, but when I leave them for a day or two in the cage they do smell.
Chicken P__P in the rain is BAD!!! We site them at least about 60 feet from the house! And there’s still a whiff from time to time. But the EGGS!!! MMMmmmm. The meat I can take or leave, and the butchering is hard work. So we are thinking of switching to pure egg production. It is also GREAT FUN to share eggs with family and friends during the wild egg season, which is beginning here in central Wisconsin!
I had no idea there was an egg season, I thought it was based on the age of the hen, then they started laying an egg a day then they stopped. Maybe because Guatemala has a mild weather all year they don’t stop?
For being someone who crunches numbers, I did relatively little before deciding to purchase my baby chicks. We now have ten hens that lay eggs daily. So far have required little effort and are part of the family. We have enough eggs to eat everyday AND we sell a dozen or so a week so they are self-sustaining at present which we never intended on. I don’t know anything about raising them for meat but I would imagine that would be a little more profitable.
I don’t think anything else is required, just the strength to butcher them!
Pauline, this sounds more like a way to be self sufficient rather than an investment. Have to say that my grandmother had chickens and she never made much from them – the mortality is too high. If I were you I’ll buy some more palm trees (btw, you have been giving me dreams of following in your footsteps with this one).
it is not an investment per se, but unlike my big gardening fail, it is nice to see that the cash flow is positive. and the entry costs are not even the price of one coconut tree!
I don’t know if I could ever be in the chicken raising game, but it’s fun to read about all your different types of investments. Sometimes we get too caught up in stocks, bonds and real estate and forget that theres a whole world of investment opportunities out there.
at least I can eat chicken while the stock market bounces up and down!
I’ve got about $120 invested in our chickens. We bought them as pullets and spent $2.00 each for a total of $20.00. They turned out to be white plymouth rocks and are nice and healthy and give us huge brown eggs. They started laying when they were around 6 months old. Almost one a day per hen. the henhouse and fixing up the pen cost us about another $100.00. Since then it’s been $15.00 a month in feed. We eat about 2 1/2 dozen eggs a week and during the warm season we have a surplus of eggs. the math isn’t great, I put almost as much into feed as we save on eggs. But it’s fun, and you can’t beat fresh eggs. If we invested in an incubator we could probably make our money back in a few months by hatching and selling the chicks (One of the pullets turned out to be a rooster).
Interesting how you have more during the warm season, I don’t know what that would translate to here. Fresh eggs really make a difference.
My bosses have a huge yard and a bunch of chickens (can’t remember what the limits are on keeping chickens if you live in the city – maybe like 3?) and the idea of having a steady supply of eggs is tempting! I have never lived with animals of any kind, but might consider it once we have our own place.
it is a fun hobby, but a smaller garden means more poop cleaning to avoid the smell.
I’ve never had chickens, nor do I know someone who has, but I am curious about this. I think it would be a lot of fun, too! But something tells me this isn’t an option living in Boston… 🙂
I saw people had some on their balcony in Portland but apparently city rules vary. I wouldn’t do it in the city, too much maintenance for a couple of eggs.
In my old neighborhood where I lived as a child I used to get woken up the rooster at 6:30am everyday! I used to hate waking up that early but looking now at least I got to school early
haha I don’t hear them anymore, just got used to the noise. They can be a great alarm clock!
Wow, and I thought I was a numbers nerd, lol. I think it’s great that you can raise the chickens and eliminate food from the grocery budget. Like you say though anything could happen at any time so it’s all risk with the chickens. A friend of ours has 3 chickens in her back yard in the city. She says she gets eggs often and paid around $12 per chicken and she had a chicken run built in her back yard. She says it’s worth it for her after food to keep them for the eggs.
It is not a niche to get in for the money, and yes there are risks, although we don’t have any bird flu zone nearby and so far the survival rate is pretty good. A neighbor got all her birds stolen though!
Knowing me, I’d name the chickens and never want to eat them. They would live out their days fat and happy and I’d be on the hook for whatever expenses. I do like to eat chicken, but I don’t think I could take it through the whole cycle of life, even if it is the healthiest way. My grandma used to wring their necks, cook up the chicken and make pillows and mattresses from the feathers. Times sure have changed.
The village nearby still lives like this, and killing an animal is very serious for them. It took months of effort, they like the bird like a pet, and they have no other choice but to eat it. I like that respect and perspective. Meat is a luxury for them, we just go to the supermarket and buy it without thinking.
While I won’t be getting in the Chicken business, I enjoy the analytical nature of this post! Definitely not the run of the mill personal finance post, and I learned a few things here. Interesting stuff.
thank you!
You always have the most creative ways to make side income! Great idea.
well, it is more a healthy option to eat than side income but nice to see we aren’t losing money by doing it.
Wow, Pauline. I can honestly say that I haven’t thought of this. I’m sure our townhome association would frown upon it, but I sure would like to get my eggs for free. Keep sharing with us, and perhaps I can adapt some of them to fit our situation! 😉
It is quite cool to have them running around all day, the little chicks are adorable. But they do go everywhere, destroy plants and poop where they please. Pretty sure it is a no from your HOA.
You know, you always hear about free range chickens. Well, we have what we call our ‘Hen Hilton’ coop, plus a nice big run. We use a dutch door, which is left open at the top. Guess what? The chickens like their coop. Very, very occasionally, one gets out and all its efforts seem to be to figure out how to get back in with their buddies. They have scratch grain, whatever plants they can reach, our organic kitchen scraps, weeds from the garden… They are not true free range, but they don’t get killed by predators, they definitely are content and so are we. I HATE chicken poop underfoot! At least before it’s composted in a heap for a couple years and is spread in the gardens! We love having chickens and I don’t think we’ll ever be without them unless we get too lame when we’re old.
Yes, they’re pretty cool to have around. Do you have a rooster too? I just had to kill my rooster because it was making too much noise and my guests were unable to sleep at 3am when the rooster would start. New plan is to have only hens, until they get old, eat them and buy new ones.
My wife pulled an April Fools joke on me recently by sending me a picture of baby chicks at the pet store and saying she bought them. I was actually pretty mad that she would do something like that without talking to me first. I want to raise chickens, just not right here. Luckily it was just a joke!
haha she got you! it is a good one to pull, seems really possible.
Pauline, you just brought back the experience I had in our province when I was a kid. We raised chickens, swans, ducks, and a lot more. My grandfather taught us because we had a farm. He used to be one of the major suppliers in the province.
We have raised meat chickens for the past 3 years. We don’t have enough space to do more than a dozen. We’ve thought about doing a second round in mid-summer but haven’t yet. It’s fun, especially for our kids, and while we don’t save much compared to cheap chicken at the grocery store, the quality is better and it’s nice to know where your food comes from. I’d like to have layers some day so this article is great for understanding the cost.
Great, informative post! I’m planning on raising chickens in the future, once we reach a point of semi-retirement. It looks like you can’t count on any considerable income from the endeavor, but it will help us save money when we become semi-retired/semi-financially independent.
We have a big garden and I would love to try chickens, but Houston doesn’t have very friendly urban homestead rules, so nothing but dogs for our house.
Wow! Thanks for the financial breakdown! My brothers family wants chickens and this is good information to pass onto them!
The hardest thing is that if you go away on vacation, you’ll need a reliable chicken-sitter—and they can be scarcer than hens’ teeth!
Hey Pauline,
Thanks for the detailed breakdown on all the profits and loss in your chicken venture. It really does help to see the actual costs, since most other chicken owners have just told me that it pretty much evens out in the end, but there’s never been actual proof. One area that I think there could be profit in raising chickens is in raising chicks for folks that don’t or can’t do it themselves. There are a lot of people who want hens that are at an egg laying age, and are willing to pay a premium for them. A coworker of mine does this and seems to do pretty well. Thanks again for your detailed post!