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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice to see more people allowed to keep backyard chickens (hens at least, since roosters can be noisy). Since getting some at our place I’ve been surprised how fun they are to have around and easy to care for. Our compost from the kitchen goes to them too, which could help people divert scraps from the landfill or from being picked up (big gas usage) for municipal composting. Their waste is also great fertilizer for gardens.

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I'm a huge proponent of backyard chickens and had them for years, but they are, generally speaking, not a "more cost effective" way to get eggs, at least in north america if you are feeding them mostly store-bought feed. Then again, this change in egg prices may change that.

But they're great for redundancy (more & varied egg supply reduces the impact of supply chain shocks), to get the best quality eggs you can, and because it's just fun & rewarding.

They are probably not "worth it" when accounting for the care required, but I get feed for about $20 a bag and a scratch block for $20 every 3 months or so for 4 chickens who generally give me an egg/day each. 4x30x3=360 => 360/12=30 dozen eggs so that works out to less than a dollar per dozen which is below market cost 5 years ago.

He did the math

I am curious about that statement. Feeding chickens store bought food that is. I grew up with chickens being the garbage disposal. They will eat anything and everything. They are the cheapest animal to raise for food. (Except maybe cattle on the old west when you could parasite off the public land.)

The argument against backyard chickens would be health considerations i'd say, not cost. Curious.

Eggs are very, very cheap. Building materials and time are not. Obviously the upkeep costs for laying hens is super low, but it's the startup cost that turns most people off the idea. Eggs are about $3/dozen where I am. You have to eat a _lot_ of eggs before it's actually a net positive endeavor, probably many, many years worth.

My parents have a coup on their hobby farm which my dad built on the weekends. It looks great and the eggs taste even better. That said, they were never under the impression this was a way to _save_ money, the math just doesn't make any sense.

Can confirm. I am in New England. The startup cost was about $1000 for me, including coop, coop reinforcements, chickens, feed, and various misc equipment. I have 8 hens and basically if I sold a year’s worth of eggs I could break even. That’s sold, not eaten, because I could sell for roughly double the grocery store price.

So realistically the difference is that I get fresh eggs every day, I never run out, and they are fun.

What did you spend $1000 on? I just bought some wooden beams and wire mesh. The chickens eat whatever we didn't finish the night before. Though I usually scoop in some extra rice or pasta knowing we have chickens.

They lay their eggs in basically anything. Mine sit in a Aldi crate on it's side.

Spent $150 on 8 chickens from a reputable farm, which included their starter kit (heater, feed, feeder, water, etc.). Was overkill but they made it super easy. Could have saved some money on Tractor Supply chickens but also got cool breeds and all great layers.

$600 on the largest coop Tractor Supply sold. It is just barely big enough for all the chickens but it does work.

The rest on reinforcement hardware since I have hawks and foxes all over my property. Metal mesh and wood to reinforce all around the coop. Also things like sand to fill the bottom of the coop, anchors to keep it down, etc.

Over time I spent a bit more to replace some bullshit hardware of the coop.

I could have saved some by building the coop from scratch but also this one has a nice design that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own without seeing how the chickens actually behave.

At least in my experience, we don't produce enough food alone for the chickens. They certainly get 100% of our food waste, but they would starve if we didn't supplement them with store-bought food.

Depends on size of family and size of flock, and amount of land available to graze.

Most "back yard" chicken operations do not have adequate area to graze more than a bit. Even if you do, you'd probably need feed to get eggs regularly. I've never heard of anyone raising layers without feeding them.

Couldn’t you just not mow your lawn and let the chickens eat all the bugs?

Not in the winter.

They eat so much that I don’t think you could. In the wild, a chicken lays an egg every few months to once a year. Domesticated laying hens lay an egg a day or so. Imagine how much energy it takes to convert bugs into a 60 gram egg.

Yes. It is always a good idea to rotate them over different areas to give the land a chance to repopulate (and their excrement helps attract bugs in the meantime). A lot of people have a coop that has two doors on opposite sides to different runs for this purpose.

I just did some very casual back of the envelope math for my backyard flock. Assuming worst possible outputs and highest monthly costs, it works out to the equivalent of $5/dozen. In my area, roadside stands and/or grocery store “free-range, organic” eggs have been more than $7/dozen for years now. My gut tells me that over the time we’ve had these chickens, our actual break even would be closer to $4/dozen once our startup costs (coop, feeders) were repaid. We eat them, we don’t sell them, and we have fun with the chickens so I haven’t tracked any of it very closely.

These numbers are very close to what we’ve found with our flock.

I'm sure you recognize the same dynamics we have in our small flock - we had 7 birds, then later went up to 10. There is a down time for the molt, and production is slower in the winter. These birds are now essentially three year olds, so I expect there to be a drop in production. Yet all that said - we're still conservatively averaging 3 eggs a day. So you extrapolate out an average of 100 eggs / mo (again - even that is really conservative) and $50/mo on feed/supplies (and let's be real - that's generous, it's probably more like $30/mo typically) and the numbers play really well for backyard chickens.

That said - we have had a lot more coop expenses than expected, because our neighbors wanted to be jerks about it and I wanted to keep the peace. So realistically the "savings" we would have had in egg costs have likely been eaten up or significantly reduced by having to rebuild / move our coop.

They're only cost effective if you raise them cheaply, like free rotten pop up camper with plywood tacked on as a coop and letting them get a proportion of their calories from your yard that you also don't mow. And that's why they're not allowed everywhere "upscale".

You can lay eggs without a rooster, but if you do, one of the hens will become dominant and needlessly bully the other hens. This will stress them out and you’ll get health issues in your hens.

Source: I come from a farming family.

I have 6 chickens in my back yard right now and this is not a problem and hasn’t ever been a problem in the years I’ve had them.

Same experience here. They get along really well, no fighting at all.

I'm glad it works well for you. My grandpa (when he was alive) and uncle swear otherwise. Might be because they have significantly more chickens than that.

Does the dominant rooster not cause the hens similar stress for some reason?

In our experience, hens sometimes get into squabbles and the rooster is often the one who breaks up the fight. More like a peace keeper.

Are we still talking about rooster and hens? Reminds me of work enviroment.

I guess it happens less if you don't have that many. The rare time it happened were a perfect occasion to cook "Poule au pot'

Sometimes a hen will actually transition into a rooster, with spurs, rooster coloration of the feathers, humping of other hen, calling other hens when a treat is found, etc.

The value of a rooster from me experience is protection. Last week I went out to close up the coop and found blood all over the place. Turns out my poor rooster (Cluck Norris, natch) was covered in blood and had clearly been in a tussle defending the hens from a predator. Perhaps a cat or a bird of prey. He is totally fine now and I am quite thankful that he was there.

Yeah, we get fox, opossums and weasels here. The roosters do a good job of fussing their day up.

For the opossums, it's a stand off, the rooster just acts tough and makes a lot of noise so you can hopefully show up and scare it off. Weasels are annoying as they'll destroy eggs. Fox are particularly problematic though. They'll easily kill a rooster and are very quiet and conniving.

They are also much more ethical compared to the factory farms and caged chickens. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the eggs are of higher quality.

While I'm all for people having chickens, they do need to have lot size requirements. If you think your neighbors dog is noisy in the morning, just wait till they have a flock of chickens.

I lived in a condo where the upstairs neighbors kept chickens on their deck. That was not my favorite neighbor.

Hens are extremely quiet. Roosters not so much.

Our neighborhood has 7000 sq ft lots. My old neighbor had 3 hens and a rooster. Technically, I don't think the rooster was allowed. One day the rooster stopped crowing and I was happy. Other than his early morning call, we never would have known they had those birds except the few times I saw them get out and walk down the street.

I've been sitting on an acre in a city that allows backyard chickens, thinking about it but doing nothing.

I think this is the catalyst I need to get started on a coop. If anyone has any plans or pointers for a coop, or raising chickens in the SW, would be much appreciated.

You really don’t need much for a coop at all. When we bought our property it had a tool shed that we converted and it turned out to be way too big for our flock of 12. You could honestly use a large dog house. There are lots of plans online and Reddit has a very good chicken community with answers to any questions you might have.

All that to say: the minimum threshold for starting backyard chicken keeping is very low. I’d recommend jumping in as cheap as possible and upgrading later if you find you enjoy it.

just make sure you have a good lock on your coop and the bottom is closed off (aka not just a frame sitting on the bare ground). raccoons are very good at getting into coops.

You can buy pretty cheap coops at stores such as Tractor Supply that will house half a dozen chickens or so. They're great for people starting out because a number of things, that you might not be aware of, have been integrated and thought through. Also, backyardchickens.com is a popular site for all kinds of advice that we've used to research different chicken matters. In short, it's pretty easy to keep chickens, but you have to do it regularly and with love.

We're on half acre and do a flock of 6 in an enclosure behind the shed. My main piece of advice is get all the infrastructure before the birds. Pay someone to build you an enclosure. Hardware cloth, NOT poultry netting/chicken wire. You need a few nesting boxes and a dry roost for them to sleep. Look up "deep litter method". Woodchips are free, high carbon bedding chicken poop is high nitrogen. The result is incredible compost. Anyway gl.

It's less fun with bird flu.

Correct me if I am wrong but bird flu is spread between birds in a flock, and so industrial, heavily concentrated flocks are breeding grounds for bird flu? So backyard chickens being more diverse, smaller flocks, would increase food security and reduce spread?

Not exactly. Free birds can still spread the flu from one location to another, e.g. by dropping excrements.

Right, but if you don’t mix flocks, how do they get their excrements from one backyard to another that is distant?

Chickens aren't the only birds that carry bird flu.

I meant wild birds.

You have to contend with wild birds passing diseases to your chickens.

Maybe they're illegal in the suburbs, but if they're illegal in US cities then that clearly isn't enforced, I can find backyard chickens in any city I go to (not especially common in most neighborhoods, but they're there).

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