When food costs rise, many people start thinking about producing their own food, like growing vegetables. Egg costs have been skyrocketing, so it’s natural that people ask whether it is cheaper to own chickens or buy eggs. Someone with a brood of hens who enjoys a daily batch of freshly laid eggs may have told you that by raising their own chickens, they save a lot of money on eggs. Don’t listen to them. Unfortunately, it’s still much cheaper to buy eggs from the store than to have your own laying hens. Procuring hens, providing a safe habitat, brooding space, and feed, is very expensive!
Let’s say your neighbor tells you that his 12 hens provide 6 or 7 eggs a day and around 3.5 dozen eggs a week! This may be true. There are a few things your neighbor isn’t telling you, however.
Initial Startup Costs to Raise Hens
Startup costs for a dozen hens will be from $500 to $1000. The average hen starts laying eggs at around 4 to 5 months old. After this, they will typically lay eggs for 3 to 4 years. However, they will be at their peak production for only two years or so. After this, their egg production will begin to fall. By the time you break even on the initial cost, your hens will have gone through their peak egg-laying period and will have already begun to produce fewer eggs.
The Cost of Chicken Feed
Meanwhile, you will still be buying feed and will have to spend money and time on maintenance and care. A dozen hens will need about three pounds of feed a day. Yes, that much! How do I figure that?
The average hen will eat around 1.5 pounds of feed per week. For a dozen chickens, that’s 18lbs of feed per week. But some of the food will be wasted. So, you can expect to need around 3lbs of food a day. That all comes to over 1,000 pounds of feed per year. On the low end, that’s at least $300 worth of food per year. Add that $300 bill to your initial startup cost. Even if we assume your startup is $500, you’ve already spent $800 in your first year.
Assuming your hens give you a consistent 3.5 dozen eggs a week in that first year, with the current average price of eggs being $5, you are already out 100 bucks. But wait, there’s more.
Keeping Your Hens Warm in the Winter
Depending on your region, you need to get your hens’ coup ready for winter, especially if you live in a particularly cold climate. Tack on a few extra hundred for insulation, additional bedding, and perhaps even supplemental heat. Now lets include another few hundred for incidentals because, we’re dealing with live, and quite fragile, animals here.
Then, after around two years, your hens will begin laying fewer eggs while the feed and maintenance costs remain steady or increase. As the years pass, you lose more money keeping your hens. In the end, the hens will cost much, much more to raise and protect than it would have cost you to buy your eggs from the grocery store.
In the End, Owning Chickens is Not Cheaper Than Buying Eggs
If you buy the cheapest store-brand eggs you can find, consistently, you may be able to break even while getting eggs from your hens that are exceedingly more tasty and high-quality than those store eggs. But, once you factor in the trouble and expense you are going to, you’d have to wonder why you weren’t just buying more expensive free-range eggs.
Sure, small-scale chicken owners will tell you their eggs are the best eggs in the word and no eggs bought from a store can touch them. But, do they also tell you they are saving loads of money?
If you do decide to raise your own hens for fresh eggs, remember that having the ‘bloom’ intact doesn’t make them invincible. For the best safety and quality, you should still follow proper storage rules. Here is the science on why unwashed eggs should still be refrigerated.
People With Pet Chickens are Not Usually Business-Minded
Most people who raise their own chickens do not actually keep an accurate log of the money they spend, nor do they compare this to the price of eggs. In other words, they do not treat raising backyard hens like a business. They simply assume that they are saving money. While some hen-raisers say that you will save money after your initial startup cost is “paid for” by egg savings, they fail to take into account the egg-lying cycle of a hen, additional expenses, especially in cold climates, and the fluctuating price of eggs versus the quite constant expense of taking care of chickens.
In addition to these oversights, sources claiming that raising your own chickens for eggs is cheaper than buying eggs often severely overestimate the average price of eggs in the U.S. Perhaps they report the average price in their own state, or rely on inaccurate statistics.
I haven’t even considered the difference between buying baby chickens or POL Pullets (POL = point of lay), which changes the initial startup cost. It’s also possible to end up with some roosters instead of hens, accidentally.
Unless you wish to procure hundreds of laying hens and spend thousands on a startup so that you can sell the eggs the hens produce, raising chickens is a hobby. The only viable reason to do it is because you love chickens! Large-scale egg producers can raise hens much more economically than you can. There is no way that a person with a small back-yard flock can produce eggs that are, on average, cheaper than buying eggs from the store.
If you do raise your own chickens, you may wonder whether your chickens will produce brown or white eggs and which is better. It doesn’t make a difference. But, its quite possible the eggs from your own chickens will be much better tasting because of what you feed them, especially if they are allowed to free forage in plenty of space.
