Eggs are expensive and chickens ain’t cheap

The price of eggs at the supermarket is high – as is everything else – but let me tell you, the cost of raising chickens ain’t cheap.

At the time of this writing we do not own any chickens, but that will soon change. When Sandy and I moved to the Bryan/College Station area last summer, our goal was to turn our little 2.76-acre homestead into a hobby farm. We spent a lot of time and treasure getting the ground ready for the first phase of our project. In the last couple of weeks we have tilled our two gardens and are now transplanting the vegetable sprouts we raised in our kitchen and in our greenhouse.

In the meantime we have been slowly building a chicken coop. It’s basically a big wooden box on stilts built with old pallets, discarded plywood, leftover 2x4s, and some old wooden fence slats. It has that old, rustic look and feel that you get at really good barbecue restaurants that are decorated in repurposed barn wood and rusty corrugated tin siding.

Even using freebee scraps of wood we have had to sink a small fortune into it to buy nails, screws, roofing materials, hinges, latches, and 4x4 boards to make the stilts. We built it inside a 10-foot by 10-foot chain-link dog kennel the previous owners of our property left behind. About all we have left to do is wrap it in hardware cloth to cover the sizeable gaps we left for ventilation. When all is said and done, our scrap pile chicken coop will cost us upward of $300. And we still don’t have chickens.

The other day we shopped around for chicks at several places and wound up at Tractor Supply, where we utilized a Christmas gift card to purchase brooder box supplies, bedding, and some feed. That set us back another $80 – and still no chickens. After shopping around, we have come to learn that the price of a baby fuzzball chick is about $4-5. We want at least a dozen, so that will come to about $60. When you figure in the cost of more feed and bedding throughout the spring and summer, we will have spent about $500 before we even see the first egg.

Fortunately, we are doing the work ourselves, so we don’t have labor costs involved. Hobby farming itself is a real labor of love. It’s therapeutic to be outside working the soil, planting vegetables and trees, using power tools to build things, and appreciating the nature all around you. Now that we’re getting things in the ground, nature is becoming a bigger concern. We will need to put fences around the gardens very soon to keep the critters out.

I enjoy having wildlife on our property, but I don’t want them eating the fruits of our labor. We get excited when we get deer sneaking up to drink from our pond, but now I’m leery of them with the seeds and sprouts in the ground. In a couple months when the chickens christen the coop we will have to be vigilant against varmints such as raccoons, opossums, and certain snakes. I’m pretty sure the red-shouldered hawk living nearby will be a concern as well.

When we do finally buy our baby birds, we are being very picky about the breeds. We want chickens that can handle the hot Texas summers and also produce a whole passel of eggs. That narrows it down to just a few types and they’re not easy to come by yet. I’m thinking we may have to special order them, especially if we want to avoid getting roosters. The chicks at the stores are not always sexed, so you can’t tell what you’re getting. They also tend to be hybrids, and we’d prefer to have hearty, traditional breeds such as black Australorps and barred Plymouth Rocks.

In doing our shopping and research, we have learned that a lot of people are getting into backyard chickens. We’ve been told that the number of people buying chickens and chicken supplies is up significantly this year. It’s not only chickens that are popular. We’re on a bandwagon of people buying ducks as well. They’re a little harder to keep than chickens, but we have the advantage of owning a small pond for them. So, once the chickens are going we will turn our attention to ducks and building a duck house. They will be followed by rabbits.

Eventually in a couple years we hope to add alpacas or maybe goats and/or sheep. No pigs! I hate raising pigs. I’ll buy bacon but I won’t raise it.

I’m also thinking very seriously about getting back into beekeeping. If you can keep your hives alive it can be a very profitable venture. The trick is keeping the bees going. With so many pesticides and industrial crops engineered to be pest resistant, it can be very difficult for bees to survive. I live in an area where those threats would be very minimal.

I’ve rambled on long enough about things other than chickens. The thing is, farm fresh eggs from pasture raised chickens are not only better for you than the plain white eggs in the store, they taste a whole lot better. The up-front costs to get started may be high, but eventually they will pay for themselves in terms of dollars, good nutrition, and a great experience raising them. I can’t wait for September when I’m selling fresh eggs to customers or cracking them into my omelets.