Making Money with Chickens
This may not be your end goal. But if you make just enough money to pay for feed and care of the chickens, isn’t it worth checking out? To make money you could sell eggs, meat, or once they are breeding, you can sell live chicks.
Let’s consider just eggs for right now. Here is a break-down of how much money you could make from chickens. With six hens regularly laying one egg each per day, it will take two days to get a dozen. This means that in one week you should be harvesting three and a half dozen eggs.
Farm fresh organic eggs are sold for an average of $4.00 per dozen. In some areas, it could be as high as $6.00. So each week, you can make $14.00.
Feed costs $17.00 for a fifty pound bag which should last for at least a month with only six hens. So it costs you $8.50 a week to make $14.00. That is a profit of $5.50 a week or $22.00 a month and $3.66 per bird! Of course, there will be expenses like the feed you give them before they start producing, building the coops, etc. But you can see the potential.
Double the amount of hens and you can double the profits! Don’t spend the extra on cartons, have your customers supply them for you!
Of course if you want to sell chicken meat, the price range for organic chicken meat can run as high as $20 each. No hormones, no preservatives and organically grown, there is a market for it. With a rooster and an incubator, you can replenish your stock of chicks to grow every 21 days.
If you’d rather not kill your chickens, there is always a market for live chicks. You can usually sell breed specific chicks at $2.00 each. Each turner in the incubator can hold as many as 36 chicks. You could make an extra $72.00 a month with each batch. Be prepared for a slow-down in business though and be ready to add more chickens to your flock.