Can You Really Save Money on Eggs by Raising Your Own Chickens?

[ResidentialBusiness]

As egg prices skyrocket, you too may be considering if it would be cheaper going straight to the source and raising your own flock. As the steward of four sweet but dimwitted backyard chickens, I'll caution that it's more expensive than you think—but with prices spiking as high as $1 per egg in some areas, it may be worth considering.

Each day, I reliably pull three or four gorgeously colored eggs out of my backyard chicken coop. “They're free!” I think to myself. But these eggs are only “free” if one ignores the costs of feeding, sheltering, protecting, and entertaining a flock of tiny, feathered dinosaurs.

Now, most people with backyard birds aren’t going the cheap route. You can definitely spend a lot raising fancy chickens that lay fancifully colored eggs, residing in Pinterest-worthy chicken coops and feasting on organic feed. By those standards, it’s definitely cheaper to buy your eggs. But is it possible to save money raising chickens by going the cheap route, and populating a merely serviceable coop with a few hardy egg layers?

Whether or not you can save money farming your own eggs turns out to be a question of scale—and no matter how high egg prices go, it’s likely going to be cheaper to buy them in the store.  

Credit: Amanda Blum

Chickens aren’t expensive, but the accessories can be

Let’s start with the chickens themselves. You can purchase chickens as chicks just a few days old, and they are deceptively cheap. Your local farm store will likely have them in the spring and into the summer for $3 to $6 each, depending on the breed. These will be the pedestrian breeds of the birds—Rhode Island Reds, Brahmas, and White Leghorns—which is fine if your priority is a bird that will produce a lot of eggs and be weather-resilient. More exclusive breeds can go for as much as $25 per chick. 

Older birds cost more

You don’t have to start with chicks. Some places will sell you poulets—chickens that are at least 15 weeks old. While the purchase price is higher (depending on breed, they can go for $30 to $60), these chickens can go straight into a backyard coop and will begin laying within a month or two.  

Paying $30 for a chicken might seem expensive when you can get a chick for $a tenth of that, but there are some financial benefits to skipping the early stages of chicken rearing. You won’t have to buy a brooder, heater, chick waterer or feeder, (which will save you between $100 and $150, all told), and you won’t need to shelter the chicken inside. You can also skip out on buying chick food and chick grit. At 15 weeks, your chickens can eat layer (adult) feed, which isn’t 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 miss the opportunity to bond with your chickens. Raising my chicks inside and exposing my dog to them while they were small led to them being able to cohabitate once the chickens were grown. If I’d dropped poulets into the backyard, I doubt I’d have a relationship with them, and I’m pretty sure my dog would have viewed them as mobile chicken nuggets. 

You can get lucky and find someone on Craigslist or in a neighborhood faming group who needs to rehome their chickens. Those chickens are often fully grown layers—and, even better, available for free. 

Your coop will be your biggest expense

Adult chickens start laying eggs around six months old, but before that, you'll face a lot of one-time expenses, biggest among them a chicken coop. You can build a very simple coop yourself, but that's a risk. Your birds will face backyard aggressors (racoons, dogs, cats, vermin, and other wildlife) and your coop needs to keep them out, and a basic DIY coop might not be up to the task.

Your coop's design will also impact how easy it is to tend to your flock. It needs to be tall enough to walk into so you can collect eggs and clean the coop out without having to stoop. How you design your laying boxes can determine how clean and easy it is to pull your eggs every day. The coop will need winter insulation, even if you have hardy chickens. So even if you build a coop, at minimum it’s still going to cost you a few hundred dollars in wood, construction fabric, wire, and other materials. Pre-built coops, meanwhile run from hundreds of dollars to thousands. 

Your adult birds will need a waterer as well as a feeder. You’ll also likely want to buy them some toys like a swing or mirror, because even though they are dumb, they need mental stimulation too. You'll even need to buy fake eggs so these bird brains know where to lay. All of that is going to cost you another $100 or so. 

Monthly costs can add up

Remember, chickens don’t start laying eggs for about six months, so you'll spend at least that long paying out to support freeloading chickens. But once you’ve dispensed with the startup costs, you’ve got recurring monthly costs to deal with too—though at least the chickens should be producing eggs by that point. 

Each month, you’ll need to budget for food, grit, and oyster shells or another source of calcium. You’ll also need treats of some kind. On top of that, you’ll need material for the bedding in the coop, like pine shavings, hemp, or sand. A grown chicken eats about 1.5 lbs of food a week. They’ll grab grit as they need it, and chickens only need a quarter pound of it a month, but it adds up as your flock grows. Hens will eat as much calcium as they need, which means that if there isn’t enough calcium in your laying feed or treats, you’ll need a lot of crushed oyster shells. 

Don't forget the "soft costs" of chicken raising

One of the reasons egg prices have skyrocketed is that the cost of all the inputs (from feed to grit) have gone up. The other reason is bird flu, which is now raging in every state in America. Your backyard flock is no less at risk than commercial birds, and ensuring your birds' safety is going to take work. Recommended biosecurity measures include keeping wild birds out of the shared yard, keeping one pair of shoes exclusively for when you're walking into a space you share with your birds, and ensuring that you watch for signs of sickness in your flock. If you’ve got cats, you may want to think twice about a backyard flock— bird flu can be transmitted to cats, and is almost always fatal.

All of the extra work to keep your birds safe comes at a cost of your time, and unlike a commercial egg production house, you won’t be routinely testing your eggs for bird flu, so you’ll need to make sure you always cook them thoroughly. 

Will your backyard flock save you money? (Probably not.)

So even if you keep things very lean, you're looking at $500 to $800 of startup costs for your chickens. (For my own flock of four, I spent almost $2,200 for an insulated coop, some basic toys, and all their chick gear.) On a monthly basis, I spend $40 for food, another $65 on grubs, $15 on pine shavings, and $9 on oyster shells and grit. That’s $130 a month, which yields 90 to 120 eggs (chickens don’t always lay an egg every day, and are only active layers for a few years).

You don't have to be a math whiz to see that at this scale scale, and considering the monthly expenses, you'll never save money over buying from the store—even if you actually were buying 120 eggs a month at $1 each. 

Do the "chicken math"

This is why “chicken math” exists. This term describes the tendency of chicken owners to add more birds, with the idea that the more chickens they have, the cheaper their eggs will become.

Once you’ve got the startup costs covered, going from four to 10 chickens isn’t that much more expensive, and taking care of 10 chickens isn’t fundamentally different from taking care for four. I realize that you likely don’t need the eggs of 10 chickens (unless you do need 300 eggs a month?) but your per-egg production costs will go down as you scale up, which is why most backyard flock owners end up selling some of their eggs back to the farm store or to neighbors. 

Depending on your personal startup costs, your egg needs, and your willingness to set up shop as an egg salesperson, there is a break-even point here somewhere, but it's unlikely you'll reach it without significant effort.

Chickens are fun to raise 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 cause in my yard, or the fact that they peck and scream at my bedroom window first thing in the morning, demanding grubs, I love the stupid birds. They have become my companions, and I enjoy the tasks of caring for them. They’ve  even taken to watching TV with me while perched on the rosebush outside the living room window—all four fuzzy butts lined up on the branch. Every time I get annoyed with them, I remember they do pay rent, after a fashion: Four pastel colored eggs, every day. 

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