Comment by ezekg
3 days ago
Build vs buy. You can be me and build an in-house flock, pay $100/mo in feed, $500 for a livestock guard dog, $100/mo for dog food, $500 for a solar electric fence, and then $500 for a few coops, etc. It'll pay off before I'm dead, I think! -- right?
Right?!
As usual when the MBAs get involved the build price magically becomes 10x what the actual cost is.
That's why you don't send your chickens to business school
hahaha, thank you, I needed a laugh :)
The MBAs know how to value the actual costs. Most people for example, ignore the cost of their own labor and the opportunity costs of the whole affair.
What’s missing from all the calculations so far is the worth of the time you put in. Maintaining chickens isn’t free on a daily you spend around half an hour, sometimes more to tend to your chickens. Even by minimum wage standards, you’re spending quite a bit more just in labor than buying a dozen eggs for $2 more than what it was 2 years ago.
First, you can't put a price on food security. When you can't get these things from the market because the shelves are bare, you will still have a source available. That's a big perk that can't be understated.
Also, the shelves have been bare with eggs for quite awhile. Locally here we largely only see the large packs being sold. Its been 6 months since I've seen a dozen pack on the shelves.
Its far more than $2, where I live a pack of eggs is competing for a pound of pork or choice beef.
Last Saturday iirc it was 23.99 for 24 eggs, and there were only two packs on the shelf (both with broken eggs).
I would agree, except it’s not food security. Eggs not necessarily a mandatory food source. Like you said, if a pack of eggs is the same as choice beef or pork, then eat that? Both are nutritionally better options than eggs.
If we really want food security, we’d each probably need at least a 10 acres of land per person in the household, grow our own vegetables and grains, raise chickens, have our own cows/pigs/goats, and more.
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Wow.
Relatively rural Michigan, my local grocer had a dozen pasture raised for $6 this week. Prior to that, it had been $4 or $4.50 for cage free. Plenty available.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are more on my next visit though.
500/month for a dog? 500 for solar?
Do you need a consultant?
Need one? He must be one.
For starters nobody uses an electric fence for chickens. You have them for cattle because they’re so big building a fence sturdy enough they can’t just push over is expensive.
Yes they do: https://www.premier1supplies.com/poultry/fencing.php?fence_i...
> For starters nobody uses an electric fence for chickens
Good lord man!
They're for keeping the foxes out, not the chickens in!
Are we forgetting chickens can fly? Why are we using fences
Livestock guard dogs are expensive, especially trained ones.
Nope, sure aren’t. Unless you want to buy a fully-trained dog, then sure.
If you plan to raise chickens, but also plan to buy a 5k dog, you probably aren’t mentally prepared for raising livestock.
Did you factor in the cameras and 10g Ethernet you ran to the coop for ‘future proofing’? Hehe. It’s ok to have hobby, and if you get eggs out of it, even better.
Electric fence? Chickens can fly, my man...
Ummmm.... that is why you clip their wings.
(Though clipping one wing is more fun, that way they flap about in circles).
Even if you clipped their wings in such a way as they couldn't fly anymore, they're still short and covered in feathers which are probably not conductive. The electric fence wouldn't work for many reasons. If you're sure they can't fly, you also don't need it.
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Even without clipped wings, my chickens only try flying over the electric netting/fencing when my livestock guardian dog gets a bit too "playful".
Let's say you have 40 chickens that lay 1 egg per day. Egg prices are $5 a dozen. You tell me.
It depends. Is your name Gaston?
I am roughly the size of a barge…
Acurio??
And you aren't even factoring in a keeper/guardian, that's a full-time wage.
That's what daughters and sheepdogs are for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNO3VgE8rnI
You can do it a ton cheaper, depending on how pretty you want it to be. Like, you can scrounge up the materials for a coop damn near for free, and you shouldn’t need $100/m in feed if they’ve got an outdoor run with grass and you feed them kitchen scraps, unless you’ve got an absolute shitload of them.
Most folks do get upside-down on it, but it’s because they want a cute instagram-ready coop or substitute money for effort. And they aren’t willing to butcher and eat them after a couple years when they stop laying consistently.
Handle your chickens like country folk and you’ll do ok. Handle them like suburbanites, maybe not so much.
You can do it cheaper, but it's work. I kept a few chickens for years, and it takes time to clean out the coop, to move the run when they've scratched up the grass. You've gotta be there in the morning to let them out, and in the evening to close them in. The eggs you get from them are much yellower, which is nice and probably better for you, but is it worth it? After 15 years I decided "not anymore"
My Dad says "a hen always dies in debt"
Oh, I don’t want to do it because I know how much work it is and how gross and dumb the damn things are. But expensive? Only if you make it expensive.
The nice thing about sitting on my ass all day for work is during playtime its nice to get up and do something rather than couch potato myself in to non-existence.
For the HN crowd: treat them as cattle, not pets ;)
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