Comment by alabastervlog
3 days ago
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 ;)