Tomorrow I will be going out to buy building materials for our chicken coop, so I thought I would tally up how much the chickens have cost so far:
25 chicks $ 85.00
Brooder guard $ 4.19
50kg organic feed $ 50.60
1 bale pine shavings $ 5.50
Heat lamp & bulb $ 38.44
Feeders & waterers $ 31.34
Total expenditure so far: $ 215.07
Which comes out to roughly $8.60 per chicken. Which isn’t all that bad when you consider that organic, free range chicken goes for at least $5/lb, and that we’ll be putting twelve 6-pound birds in the freezer come October (which comes to $360 worth of chicken.) And then there’s the eggs that the hens should start laying around then, too.
I’ve only used half of the original 50kg of food – the second bag will probably last 3 or 4 weeks, and then I’ll be switching them to “regular” rather than “baby chick” food, as well as starting to supplement with minerals, etc.
The coop is not going to be cheap to build, the price of plywood, two-by-fours, screws and cinder blocks having gone up along with everything else. But I figure that, as with all good accounting practices, I get to amortize the cost of the coop over 10 years or so.
If I was being very accurate, I’d have to add in the extra electricity that the heat lamp (which I turned off for good two days ago) cost, but trying to figure it out would give me a headache.
Like anything else, the start-up costs are large, but once we’re through the first year, the running costs should be minimal. The hens will lay eggs, and some of them will incubate chicks, and some of those chicks will go to the freezer, and so on. The coop should last for years, and I’ll be growing more and more of the chicken’s food myself (in addition to letting them free-range).
That’s the plan, anyway.
out here 
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