Keeping Chickens

So, we’ve been keeping chickens for a good 8 years now … we’re on our 3rd flock unfortunately due to a couple of fox incidents, and one of the new flock (only got them as young birds in March) died last week for unknown reasons. (Not avian flu, the rest of the birds are healthy, phew!) However other than these things they have been easy to care for, quite fun to have pecking around us and warbling away, and great for giving us eggs. They also provide great fertiliser for my veg as every now and then I dig the top layers of mud out of their run and add it to the compost (don’t use fresh chicken poo, it turns out it’s corrosive to vegetable leaves!!), and of course they convert some of our other food waste to good quality egg protein.

Recently however I’ve begun to wonder if they are financially worth keeping or if it’s just a ‘nice thing’ we are able to do. I think I started wondering as this “nice thing” is becoming more of a chore now that I’m the only one in the family who cleans out the shed. So I thought I’d do some maths and share it with you. As it turns out, the more I think about it, the harder it is to calculate.

Chicken Costs:

• Each chicken costs us around £15-20 to purchase .. in total over 8 years we have purchased 18 chickens at a cost of around £300
• A bag of feed costs about £10 and lasts us 2-3 weeks with 6 chickens
• the straw for the shed costs £5 and lasts around 3-6 months depending on if the chickens are roosting inside or outside
• the initial outlay of chicken wire and wood to create the run (we are using a shed in the garden that had already been converted into a coop, but needed to add a fox free run to it), feeder, water holder etc. came to around £100. If you needed to buy a chicken coop and wanted it as easy as possible with an attached run etc you’d pay £150 -£300 for a wooden one depending on size.
• the extra bits such as a pink chlorine smelling powder, vermex pellets, anti-redmite spray, egg shell improver probably cost another £10 per year … although the chlorine powder was about £40 and we are still on the first tub.

So initial outlay of run, feeder, water holder, first 6 birds, first lot of straw/feed/health+cleaning products comes to around £250-£300

Since then the ongoing costs (including new birds) have been around £260 per year

Cost Savings:

Now, these are many and varied, and actually are quite difficult to quantify. Everything from the obvious ‘not buying eggs’, to the fact we eat less meat and fish (because we are eating eggs), to taking eggs instead of wine when we go round to friends for dinner. I would say this last one feels a bit ‘cheap-skate’ but I nestle them in a nice box – usually one from the veg box scheme – with a bit of straw and everyone oohs and aahs and seems to appreciate them. Sometimes something a bit different with a bit of thought is rather nice.

Below are the main costings I can work out.

• Eggs of the welfare and environmental level I would buy (and that our chickens are kept at) cost 20p-30p each in the supermarket. Our 6 chickens between them provide on average 5 eggs a day for the first 2 years, then dropping off to 3-4 eggs a day for another year or two. So each chicken in it’s productive life provides us about 900 eggs…. or around £200 of eggs. This was loads more than I thought! … x 18 chickens means that if we’d bought the same number of eggs (which realistically we wouldn’t have done) we’d have spent £3,600 on eggs in the last 8 years
• Meat and Fish we haven’t bought … really don’t know, but I’m going to guess at 2 less portions per person per week (including cold meats etc). Cost saving could be anything from £5 to the occasional £30 in a week.

My maths says this is around £800-900 a year (allowing for the fact we might not have bought so many eggs) … giving us a true saving of at least £500 per year!

We have also eaten 4 of our chickens as they were killed by a fox on a very very cold day, and then left on the ground and we found them within an hour. I’m not sure there was any cost saving there as we were a bit unprepared so had them gutted and plucked by the local butcher at a cost of £6 per bird, and there was not really a huge amount of meat on them. … Saying that it was the tastiest chicken stew I’ve had this side of the Channel.

So, it looks like it really is financially worth while. I guess when I look at that, the cleaning isn’t actually as bad as I think it will be, every week when I go out to do it. If anyone else was thinking that they might explore the idea, then for slightly more initial outlay there are some great “easy clean coops” if you don’t happen to have a disused and converted 8′ square shed at the back of your garden.

I’ll leave you with some pictures – they are quite cute really.