I do not understand the mathematics behind the dilemma. I’m assuming only the firts chicks cost money, because down the line they will breed.
But feeding them, housing them - vitamins and doctoring costs a lot of money.
So anyone with couple or more chickens - how much does it cost to have them on the table? And realistically how many eggs do you get?
You don’t start a chicken farm with Tractor Supply chicks is the answer. Even if you did it that way, you’re not really losing out much in the grand scheme of things.
Tractor Supply chicks are sold as glorified pets.
Fun fact: it costs next to nothing to ship chicks through the USPS because of heavy subsidies for the industry. You literally just buy a crate from a wholesaler to start a broiler farm.
They are just soo cute!
In my mind I would not have more than a dozen birds.
And I am really thinking about the old ways of keeping chickens, when every house had their dump (basically a compost pile) and the chickens did half of the work with it.
How did it actually work, what went into the trash - what did chickens get out of it (bugs, worms) - did they had to manually turn the dump, or did they just let it rot the used in the spring…
Haven’t done any research on it - it is more of a thought experiment.
If you have the space they are easy pets. How many eggs depends on the breed. But 3- 5 eggs a week is usually the range. I’ve had outliers that would lay 6 a week.
In summer mine would eat hardly any food, I could gomonths off a 50lb bag as they would just eat everything in the yard. Problem with them free roaming like that is “predators”. We have coyotes and foxes here in Tennessee. Never once has a fox or coyote killed one of my chickens. Every chicken I’ve ever lost has been a neighborhood dog that has gotten loose.
So you have to ask yourself, how many chickens do you allow the dog to keep coming back and killing before you shoot the dog? Will you shoot the dog? If you don’t think you could shoot them, then you can’t protect them. Because the dog will get out again, it knows there are chickens there it can play with/kill.
My parents had 12 chickens for a few years! They’re not bad pets, nor bad starter farm animals!
Compost piles need to be churned constantly or else you’ll just have an oxidized layer on top that makes the further inwards material petrify rather than decompose. If you have hard winters, the pile will eventually freeze, so it’s super important to have it covered, and still churn it in winter so the microbes raise the temp as much as possible. Also, if it’s too dry where you are, microbes won’t break anything down.
I was thinking about them in the historical setting. They just piled up kitchen scraps and other organic waste (there was basically very little non organic waste back then) and they just let it pile up. Chickens were a huge part of managing it, it became basically zero waste circle.
I’m not going to jump into farming anytime soon - I have enough problems just trying to keep some sorrel saplings alive. I haven’t managed it yet. But thankfully I still have some seed left…