Economics of having chickens: getting started

Posted by louisa on Thursday 1 July 2010 in chickens, frugal | 1 comment

After 18 months of waiting, we *finally* got some chickens on Tuesday. This post is the first in what I imagine will be an occasional series about the economics of having chickens.

Despite my tight-fisted frugal heart, having chickens at home isn’t about getting cheap eggs. It’s about getting good eggs from well treated and well fed chickens. It’s about food metres and not food miles. It’s about using up an otherwise hard to make productive bit of ground. It’s about introducing more diversity into our garden and harvesting poop for fertiliser. And it’s about living with some fascinating pseudo-dinosaurs – learning about them, looking after them and laughing at them because they’re such fun, odd things. But while those things are almost priceless, they do have a price.

Back when I first got giddy about the idea of having chickens, I read a great page about the economics of having chickens – breaking it down to the cost per egg over the first year (when there are higher capital costs but potentially high egg production) and in future years (smaller capital cost, slowing egg production etc). It was great – but can I find it now? No. I hate Google sometimes. But I’m going to work out something similar for myself and this post is the first stage of that.

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Chickens!

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 30 June 2010 in chickens | 1 comment

Yesterday, I alluded to needing a quick dinner because we were going to be busy doing exciting things (the casserole was yummo, btw) – well, the exciting thing was this: we got chickens!

We’ve been planning to get them for about 18 months and a chicken-facilitating garden was on my desirable-but-not-necessary list when we were looking for our house. In anticipation, I read loads about them and went on a course about keeping chickens in April last year, and got super excited about having them ASAP – then the house purchase got delayed and delayed and delayed… When we eventually moved in, it was late autumn and we couldn’t do that much in the garden. Then our plan from just having a random coop and a wire fence around the bottom of the garden evolved into levelling up a section of earth and building Fort Chicken (pictured below) – and, well, we’re slow and disorganised, with a billion other jobs needing doing at the same time.

But anyway, anyway, they’re here now. We went for point of lays – more expensive than hatching eggs or day old chicks but better for first timers and when we expand/replace in the future, we can look at those options, letting our existing chickens do the hard child rearing work for us*. Following a recommendation from a friend, we went to Edward Boothman near Silsden to get them and brought four home last night. Fort Chicken’s coop can apparently hold 15(!) chickens but we think the space in there and the run is more suited to 6-8 — we’ll get settled in with these girls then get the others as POL in the late summer/autumn (spring chickens come of age).

These girls are ISA Brown/Warrens – Edward’s recommendation for first timers as they’re good layers (300-325ish a year each!) and have friendly personalities. I’d like a few different types eventually but these are good to start with. Names to be confirmed when we get to know them but likely to be either chemical elements (if we follow our main pet naming scheme) or Buck Kar, Stanley Chicken (my best friend’s grandfather’s name), Warren Buckland (a lecturer of mine at uni) and Warren’s Song, Pt. 7.

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