Eggs US – Price – Chart

Lots of people suggesting to build chicken coop. i have one, sure it's not much work. 2 minutes every day to grab the egg and bring the food and water, but then every 3 year you got to take the hatchet, grab each chicken, cut right on the neck and then hang it with it's feet while it's bleeding out and flapping its wings.

then there are the few occasion where you miss with the hatchet and it cuts half its neck, its head hanging down, attached by a quarter of the neck from it's body with the blood jumping out and the chicken running in circle for quite a lot of time.

it's also rare but sometimes even when you cut perfectly, the chicken will manage to get out of your hand and again you got to watch a headless chicken running in circle for some time.

If you are the kind of animal loving people in city, i'm not sure it's worth it.

bonus point, in summer you get a lot of fly because of the chicken shit, they reproduce in that. you can get in there and clean it everyday but it's a lot of work, and fly traps barely works when the heat is shinning strongly on the chicken shit. fly reproduce too damn quick.

Also chicken have hierarchy where all the up top chicken will bite on the ass of the chicken under it, so if you are the top chicken you got a nice ass but the one at the bottom it has a bleedy ass and sometimes they manage to kill them.

if you got to buy another chicken to replace it, it may not be accepted by the old one and so again -> bottom hierarchy, death by ass biting lol. it's funny but it significantly decrease the economic worthiness when you got to replace you chicken once in a while.

Beside i don't know what you do with chicken corpse in city, you aren't going to put it in recycling can.

Support your local farmer.

Just to offer a different experience, we've kept chooks for years and it's been great.

However, we do have a large yard where they are free to range around – I think this is key.

In my experience there is no need to kill a chook after 3 years. Average lifespan for a chick is 8-10 years. Egg laying frequency does decrease with age, but there's no need to kill them just because they're slowing down a bit. Our oldest chook is 8 years, and laid her (probably) last egg only a few months ago.

When it does come time to kill one for whatever reason, the broom stick method breaks the neck instantly - easy and clean, just a bit of flapping around. As for the body, we just bury them if we are not going to eat them.

I think the heirarchical behaviour depends somewhat on the breed and the environment. Our chooks do have a clear hierarchy, none of them have died as a result. We have a mix of breeds - Australorp, Plymouth Rock, ISA Brown and one other mystery breed.

Flies probably depend on your environment – in Australia here we have a ton of flies already, I don't think the chooks make much difference!

Some of our chooks have a lot of personality and are almost pets, especially the early ones we basically hand raised as chicks – although you don't want to be too sentimental about them either. You have to be OK with killing them if that becomes necessary - it's still a sad time when I have to do that though.

If you have enough yard space and like the idea of being connected to the creatures that supply some of your food, I'd totally recommend giving chooks a go.

* edit: should have added, we don't keep a rooster which probably changes the dynamics too

there is absolutely a reason to kill your chickens that aren't laying - it costs money to feed them. if you don't optimize for price by slaughtering your older hens you will easily be paying > $10 a dozen for eggs.

all bets are off though if you consider chickens pets, instead of livestock.

basic economics for me: 20 chickens, a dozen eggs a day, 30 dozen eggs a month. decent non-organic feed is $20 a bag, organic is $35 a bag. one bag per week if you have the space to do daily free ranging on a decent sized chunk (half acre chicken yard in my case). Round up $0.50 per dozen for incidentals (bedding, repair, replacement chickens semi-regularly due to predation). That's $3 a dozen for non-organic, $5 a dozen for organic.

Drop productivity in half, organic eggs start costing $10 a dozen, and you have to work for those eggs. Cut productivity to 25% and you are even more expensive. In my experience, you are at 50% productivity within 3 years depending on the breed.

Also slaughtered old hens make good soups :)