How much do your eggs actually cost? Whether you're looking to get into chickens, or just saw our post on Facebook, or you already have chickens and want to get into the actual math behind your animals to figure out how to price your dozen. Let's break it down, with honest numbers for an average hobby farm.
Basic costs for ten chickens:
We're going to assume chickens will lay 8 out of every 10 days. A bit high, but still realistic to use here. The simulation asks for your average egg production.
-$0.11 / egg for feed.
Chickens eat about 0.3 lbs a day, and a cheap 50 lb bag in my area is $14.50.
-$0.00 / egg for water.
Chickens only drink about 212 mL a day, which comes to 0.05 gallons. For $5.00 / 1,000 gallons of water (city water prices), the price is so small it isn't enough to list here.
$0.23 / egg for time. A farmer's time is one of the most valuable things they have. For minimum wage ($7.25/hour) and only 15 minutes a day, we can
$0.02 / egg for bedding. Skimping out with only one bag of shavings from Tractor supply a month...
Some long-term expenses that people don't think about:
$0.02 / egg for a coop, if the coop lasts for ten years, can hold all of the chickens, and costs $500.
$0.01 / egg if your chickens were $10 each, and lay for two years.
$0.04 / egg for vaccines, AI/PT testing, or other annual testing
$0.01 / egg for maintenance or other additional costs ($45/year)
All those little things really add up! That's $0.45 / egg or $5.35 a dozen. Just to cover costs here, no profit, with everything going well.
And you may think those numbers get better as you go industrial, but how many people do you know that would clean out chicken pens all day, every day for minimum wage? Other factors that aren't considered as you grow: marketing, gas to get equipment, interest for loans for equipment, and everything else involved. There's a reason so many of the egg farms are built into larger organizations that can afford to cover even the start-up costs.
Final Thoughts:
Farming is a hard life. There's a bottom line, and often it means that when things get hard, you sacrifice your well-being and paycheck for your animals. So, support local. Recognize the value in anything that comes from animals, and the unsaid costs behind the scenes that often goes unnoticed. Change the mentality. One dozen at a time.
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