Perfect time to build chicken coop.
Also eggs price is increasing globally witch is not good.
replies(7):
I joke that they are the most expensive organic eggs you can buy. ;)
The California Dept. of Food and Agriculture has numerous alerts on their site regarding H5N1 spreading in non-commercial backyard flocks.
Just keeping predators out alone is an ongoing effort, weather events damaging it, then the smell/near constant cleaning, sick chickens/vaccinations/health checks, and you better figure who is doing all of this if you ever want a vacation or are sick yourself.
If you're a full time farmer, this is just your normal day, and a personal chicken coop isn't even a blip. But people with no farming/livestock experience don't even have an idea of what they're signing up for. I've known two different people that didn't last two years and were out thousands.
And when the price of eggs go back down, taking it out is also work.
PS - Check local zoning/rules; for example some have size/chicken limits or require it to be XYZ feet from the property line (due to smell/noise).
10 years back, we were getting eggs at something like 25c/egg in feed costs. But we had a bunch of birds that only laid every 2 or 3 days, so they were no where near as efficient as a first year dedicated layer. OTOH, they all had names, we had most of the egg colors, and the bantam eggs were so cute. And the one hen that basically only laid double yolkers.
16% in 2024 for the uk, but thats probably due to heating costs/the odd cull
I've personally not seen a massive spike this year
And you can get an automatic coop door to make your life easier.
Also their bedding makes fantastic compost for next year's veggies.
It's a nice system.
That could be a side-effect from slower winter laying though since we don't use an artificial light.
Chickens suck because they poop on everything, and it dries into a glue-like substance caked onto things. The straw ends up caked in poop, the walls get caked in poop, the floor gets caked in poop, the chickens poop on each other. Getting it off requires a paint scraper, and getting way closer to it than you want. It's also liquid-y. It's a lot like bird poop on your car, but bigger because the bird is bigger.
The horses were less bad. Their poop was fairly "clean" as far as things go. They stayed pretty structurally intact (it's basically a ball of half digested fiber, kind of like a hairball) so it wasn't a big deal to get them with a pitchfork, and they were almost exclusively on the ground. It's not a job I wanted to do, but it wasn't awful. The heat in the non air conditioned barn was honestly worse than the work.