Can You Really Save on Eggs by Raising Your Own Chickens?
As egg prices skyrocket, you too may be wondering if it wouldn’t be cheaper to go straight to the source and raise your own flock. As the manager of four cute but dumb backyard chickens, I warn you that it’s more expensive than you think, but with prices skyrocketing to $1 an egg in some areas , it might be worth considering.
Every day I pull three or four gorgeously colored eggs out of the backyard chicken coop. “They are free!” I think to myself. But those eggs are only “free” if you ignore the costs of feeding, sheltering, protecting and entertaining a flock of tiny feathered dinosaurs.
Now, most people who have backyard birds don’t go the cheap route. You can definitely spend a lot of time raising fancy chickens that lay fancy colored eggs, live in Pinterest-worthy coops, and eat organic feed. By these standards, eggs are definitely cheaper to buy. But is it possible to save money on raising chickens by taking the cheap route and stocking a just-working coop with a few hardy egg layers?
Whether you can save money by raising your own eggs turns out to be a matter of scale—and no matter how high egg prices get, it will likely be cheaper to buy them from the store.
Chicks aren’t expensive, but the accessories can be
Let’s start with the chickens themselves. You can buy chicks that are just a few days old and they are deceptively cheap. Your local farm store will likely sell them in the spring and summer for $3 to $6 each, depending on the breed. These will be walking breeds of birds – Rhode Island Reds, Brahmas and White Leghorns – and that’s fine if your priority is a bird that will produce a lot of eggs and be weather tolerant. More exclusive breeds can cost up to $25 per chick.
Older birds are more expensive.
You don’t have to start with chickens. Some places will sell you pullets —chicks that are at least 15 weeks old. Although the purchase price is higher (depending on the breed, they can cost anywhere from $30 to $60), these chickens can be put straight into your backyard coop and will start laying eggs within a month or two.
Paying $30 for a chicken may seem expensive when you can get a chick for a tenth of that, but skipping the early stages of raising chickens has some financial benefits. You won’t have to buy a brooder , heater , waterer or chick feeder (which will save you $100 to $150 overall), and you won’t have to shelter your chicks inside. You can also avoid buying chicken feed and chicken grits . At 15 weeks, your chicks may be eating layer feed (adult), which is no cheaper, but at least none of it will go to waste when your chicks outgrow their chick feed.
But skipping the chick phase means you’re missing out on the opportunity to bond with your chicks. Raising my chickens inside and exposing them to my dog while they were small resulted in them being able to coexist together as the chickens grew up. If I tossed chickens into the backyard, I doubt I would have a relationship with them, and I’m pretty sure my dog would see them as mobile chicken nuggets.
You might get lucky and find someone on Craigslist or a local celebrity group who needs to rehome their chickens. These chicks are often mature laying hens and, better yet, are available for free.
Your chicken coop will be your biggest expense.
Adult hens start laying eggs at about six months, but before then you’ll have to deal with a lot of one-time expenses, the biggest of which is the coop. You can build a very simple chicken coop yourself, but it is a risk. Your birds will encounter backyard aggressors (raccoons, dogs, cats, pests and other wildlife) and your coop needs to keep them away, and a simple DIY chicken coop may not be up to the task.
The design of your coop will also affect how easy it is to care for your flock. It should be tall enough to fit into so you can collect eggs and clean the coop without bending over. How you design your laying boxes will determine how clean and easy it will be to get your eggs out every day. Your chicken coop will need winter insulation, even if you have hardy chickens. So even if you build a chicken coop, it will still cost you at least a few hundred dollars in wood, building fabric, wire, and other materials. Meanwhile, the cost of finished chicken coops varies from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Your adult birds will need not only a feeder , but also a drinking bowl. You’ll also probably want to buy them some toys, like a swing or a mirror, because even though they’re dumb, they need mental stimulation too. You’ll even have to buy fake eggs so those bird brains know where to lay them. All this will cost you another $100 or so.
Monthly expenses may increase
Remember that chickens only start laying eggs after six months, so you’ll spend at least that long paying for free chicken support. But once you get rid of the start-up costs, you will also have to deal with recurring monthly expenses, although at least by this point the chickens should be laying eggs.
Each month you will need to allocate food , sand and oyster shells or another source of calcium. You’ll also need some treats . In addition, you will need bedding material for the coop, such as pine shavings, hemp, or sand. An adult chicken eats about 1.5 pounds of food per week. They will collect sand as needed, and chicks only need a quarter pound per month, but this amount increases as your flock grows. Hens will eat as much calcium as they need, which means if there is not enough calcium in your laying feed or treats, you will need a lot of crushed oyster shells.
Don’t forget about the “soft costs” of raising chickens.
One of the reasons for the sharp rise in egg prices is that the cost of all resources (from feed to sand) has increased. Another reason is bird flu, which is now rampant in all states of America. Your backyard flock is at just as much risk as commercial birds, and keeping your birds safe will take effort. Recommended biosecurity measures include keeping wild birds out of your shared yard, keeping one pair of shoes for just in case you go into the space you share with your birds, and monitoring your flock for signs of disease. If you have cats, you might want to think twice about your backyard herd: Bird flu can be transmitted to cats and is almost always fatal .
All the extra work to keep your birds safe requires an investment of your time, and unlike a commercial egg production facility, you won’t have to regularly test your eggs for avian flu, so you’ll need to always cook them thoroughly.
Will your backyard herd save you money? (Probably not.)
So even if you stay frugal, you’re looking at $500 to $800 in startup costs for your chickens. (For my own flock of four, I spent almost $2,200 on an insulated coop, some basic toys, and all the chicken supplies.) Each month I spend $40 on food, another $65 on grubs, $15 on pine shavings, and $9 on oyster shells and sand. It’s $130 a month, which yields 90 to 120 eggs (hens don’t always lay eggs every day and are only active layers for a few years).
You don’t have to be a math genius to see it on this scale, and given the monthly costs, you’ll never save on grocery shopping, even if you were actually buying 120 eggs a month for $1 each.
Do chicken math
This is why ” chicken math ” exists. This term describes the tendency of chicken owners to raise more birds, believing that the more chickens they have, the cheaper their eggs will become.
Once you’ve covered the initial costs, going from four to 10 chickens won’t cost much more, and caring for 10 chickens is no different fundamentally than caring for four. I understand that you probably won’t need eggs from 10 hens (unless you need 300 eggs a month?), but your egg production costs will go down as you scale up, so most backyard flock owners end up selling some of their eggs back to the farm store or to neighbors. Depending on your personal start-up costs, your egg needs, and your willingness to open a store as an egg seller, there is a break-even point around here somewhere, but it is unlikely that you will reach it without significant effort.
Raising chickens is fun, even if they don’t save you money.
But “free” eggs aren’t the only reason to start a backyard flock. Despite the mess my chickens make in my yard, or the fact that they peck and scream at my bedroom window for grubs first thing in the morning, I love these stupid birds. They have become my companions and I enjoy taking care of them. They even started watching TV with me, sitting on a rose bush outside the living room window – all four furry butts lined up on a branch. Every time I get annoyed with them, I remember that they, in a sense, pay the rent: four pastel eggs every day.