What Does It Cost You To Produce 12 Eggs?

   Many people say that the age old question is "Which came first - the chicken or the egg?". When it comes to homesteading and raising chickens, your main question should be 'What does is cost to produce a dozen eggs?" In addition to living a more sustainable lifestyle and taking more control, when you raise chickens for eggs you also need to keep an eye on expenses. In an ideal situation, you would want to produce all the farm fresh eggs that your family and loved ones can use, and do it in a cost effective manner. In addition, you would hopefully be able to sell additional fresh eggs which would help lower your costs to produce eggs of your own. It would be really great if you could sell enough additional eggs, so that you really did cover all your costs and made a profit.
   How do you do that? Let's start by knowing what it costs you to produce 12 eggs!

   From Scratch Magazine offers the following:

  "The entire conversation, however, got me to thinking, how much does it cost to produce a dozen eggs?

   Note: We’re going to do a really basic start up operation for this thought experiment. We’ll use whatever the cheapest feed available at a nearby place involving tractors and the means to supply them, but said retail establishment will go unnamed as I only give free advertising to organizations, companies and groups that I feel deserve it. The methods described in this thought experiment will not be organic and may not be the method you prefer, but h the most common methods I’ve seen that doesn’t require a huge start up cost.

   Well, first you have to get chickens. Most people i know buy chickens as chicks, and raise them to laying age. Let’s start with about three chicks.

   So, we’ll have to start with a brooder for an enclosure.

   If you’re a little bit handy, you can make a brooder all on your own with ease. If not, you’ll have to buy a brooder, a heat lamp, bulb and some wood chips (pine works fine). It’s probably a good idea to buy a waterer and a little feeder, but, to save some cash you can use a pair of shallow dishes.

   Wood chips will be a surprising expense. A bag of wood chips from a big box store costs about $3. That bag will have about 1200 cubic inches. You’ll need at least 2 inches of wood chips in your brooder, and it will have to be changed out at least every 7 days (I prefer four inches of wood chips and changing it out more often, but we’re trying to save money here).

   So that means you’ll use two bags of wood chips every 7 days, as the brooder we’re using is about 3 feet across, which means at 2 inches deep, we’ll need about 2000 cubic inches of wood chips.

Luckily, you’ll only have to keep them in the brooder for about six weeks. That means you’ll have to have about 12 bags of wood chips, for a cost of $36.

   After we have all that, we can buy our chicks. I tell everyone to get their brooder set up before buying chicks. It makes life a lot easier for chicken keepers if their chickens have a home before they arrive from the store."

Read the entire article: How Much Does It Cost To Produce a Dozen Eggs?

"Do You Know What's New & On Sale Today at Tractor Supply?"

bit.ly/RuralLife