Backyard Chickens

I took on the venture of keeping backyard chickens a little over a year ago, being motivated by a neighbor friend of mine after her family started keeping a small flock. When I took on the project I had no idea how easy and how rewarding it would be! I did a few months of research on raising chicks, building a coop, proper size enclosure etc, and then we dove in. Here’s a quick overview of our experience.

The first step was building the coop; we spent about $120 for all the wood and chicken wire to enclose the chickens into a 15x12 chicken yard, and an afternoon building the coop.

Here is a photo of our chicken yard/coop. We also keep our bunnies in the chicken yard, they get along great with the chickens and they love the freedom to roam around out of their hutches.

After the coop was ready we were ready to get our chicks, we bought them from a local feed store for $1.19 a piece, and we took home 6 of them. The 4-6 month wait for them to start laying eggs was fun and flew by. The kids had so much fun, and learned so much by watching them grow, and helping to feed and take care of them. Now the kids love going out to the coop each day to bring in the loot! After eating store bought eggs all my life the taste of a fresh organic egg from your own chicken just doesn’t compare! We average 4 eggs a day from our girls.

With our current watering system we have to give the girls fresh water once a week. We also use the deep litter method in the coop, in which we just put a couple inches of fresh pine shavings over the poo in the coop once a week; this enables me to only have to thoroughly clean the coop twice a year, spring and fall.

The cost breakdown for upkeep with the chickens is as follows:

-$6 for pine shavings for the coop

-$14 for layer feed 50lb bag

-$0 for calcium supplement, since we save their egg shells, bake them for 10 min. at 350 degrees, crush them and supplement them with that.

-$12 for chicken scratch grains 50lb bag, in the winter months.

These supplies last on average 4 months, for the 5 chickens we currently have.

Total: $8/month, so about $1.25 per dozen eggs we receive.

This is about half, if not less, of what we would spend to buy organic eggs from the store. But the experience alone for our family is better than any amount of savings!