Chicken math:

You have a couple of hens and a rooster. They’re pretty chill and everything’s cool. But you can’t eat the birds you have, then you wouldn’t get any eggs… Maybe you should get more birds? You wonder what it will cost you to hatch and rear some chickens. Before you’re done guestimating, one of your hens is broody, so you let it do its business.

You starting building a secondary run for momma hen and her chicks. You forget the material price, but you do notice the text message half way through the month. It’s from the bank, you’re getting close to insufficient funds on your debit card. Anyway you move some funds around and head off to the feed store. Chickens need special feed and different feeders/water dispensers.

The chicks grow and you start to see something akin to personality. You want to optimize for size, so you wait with the harvesting. Suddenly some start presenting male characteristics. But the rest? They’re too cute and you could do with a few more eggs.

While picking up considerably more feed, you notice the text message from the bank, you ignore it and start looking at that incubator that’s on sale. It doea look neat. Next spring then hens start laying eggs again, you decide to not wait for a broody hen, and you start collecting an incubator’s worth of eggs.

When the eggs are about to hatch, finally a hen has become broody, so when most egg have hatched momma gets her eggs switched with a load of chicks. You don’t have any chicks to loom at indoors now, so maybe you should hatch a few more. You’ve heard about a different breed that you want to try out, so you find eggs on facebook marketplace and drive for 2hours each way to pay 50€ for the 24 eggs your incubator can hold. Of the 24 eggs 15 are fertilized and as you miss a single critical water refill only 10 hatch. You do note that that’s 5€ per chick. But you think to your self “hey, it’s an investment, now I have this breed and can hatch more down the road”

You keep this up, and second year you are worrying that the authorities will discover that you have more than the 30 chickens you can have without registering. You’re also on a first name basis with the clerks in two feed stores and you ask about their kids ball games when you get your weekly 80kg of feed. You try to recoup some of the money by selling eggs. You have no idea what an egg costs to produce, but you can’t get yourself to charge more than about 50 cents per egg. You don’t piece it together, but your income doesn’t match your feed budget. Your bank loves you, because even though you should be able to save money for a car and a holiday, you end up getting financing for all major purchases and going on holiday is overrated anyhow. You like to stay home, who would take care of your birds?

Anyway ⬆️that’s chicken math…