Selling Chickens (8 Ways Your Backyard Chickens Can Earn Their Keep!)
If you have chickens, you’ve probably figured out by now that they can get quite expensive. Selling chickens can help your backyard chickens earn their keep! With a combination of cutting costs and actually making some side income selling chickens from your backyard flock, you really can come out ahead!
In this article, I’m going to talk about both. You’ll find 4 practical tips on cutting the cost of keeping backyard chickens, and then I’ll go over 4 ways that you can actually make money from a small flock, mainly by selling chickens!
4 Ways to Save Money with your Backyard Chickens
We’ll talk about selling chickens in a moment, but first, these practical ideas will help you cut the costs of your egg production!
#1: Look For Local Feed
Especially if you are spending a lot on high quality organic or non-GMO feed, shop around for the best price on feed. Check with different feed stores and look for a local producer you can buy directly from.
It’s important to me to avoid GMO’s and unhealthy additives in my chickens’ feed. In my area, certified organic feed sells for around $30 a bag, often more!
For a while, I went in with other chicken owners to buy organic feed by the pallet from a farm several hours away. That was able to cut my costs by $5-$6 a bag, but honestly, it was still cheaper to buy eggs from the store!
Now I buy non-GMO feed from another local farmer for $11 a bag. That is cheaper than most of the conventional feeds at my feed store, and really makes chicken keeping more economical. Although not 100% organic, the feed has no unhealthy additives, is soy free, and fits my budget so much better.
Shopping around and keeping my ears open for local deals has definitely made a huge difference in my feed bill!
2022 Update:
With the recent supply chain constraints, feed has gone up everywhere. The $11 feed I was buying skyrocketed to $18.50 last year! Now I am buying whole non-GMO field peas, wheat and barley from the same buyer to mix my own. I mix 1lb field peas, 3lbs wheat and/or barley, 1/3 cup fish meal (you can buy this affordably in bulk if their is a Fertrell dealer near you!) and a handful of calcium. Since chickens can’t eat whole peas, I soak this mixture in a bucket for 24 hours before feeding.
This brought my feed bill down to $16.50 per 50lbs, for all non-GMO feed. I also purchased a $30 hand crank grain mill to grind feed for chicks (non-GMO chick starter went up to $26 for 40lbs!). The chicks get extra fish meal and no calcium.
With the extra feed costs these days, selling chickens to help my flock earn their keep is even more important!
#2 Scavenging For Free Chicken Feed
You might be able to find a supplement for your chickens’ feed right in your backyard! Many weeds, such as dandelions, alfalfa, clover, lamb’s quarter and more can supplement 10% or more of your chickens’ diet. That means saving 10% on your feed costs! Just make sure any weeds you are feeding have not been sprayed with toxic chemicals.
If you have a garden, you can gather the weeds you pull into a bucket for your birds.
If you don’t care whether it is organic, grocery stores will often give away produce that is past its prime, such as soggy lettuce, limp carrots and stale bread. Check with local grocery stores for a free source of feed!
Feeding Milk to Chickens
If you have milking cows or goats, the extra milk is a great feed for chickens. It is high in calcium and protein to boost egg production. When I had a milk cow, extra milk made up about 1/3 of my chickens diet. They can also drink expired milk from your fridge!
Recycling Kitchen Scraps
You should already be giving your chickens the scraps from your kitchen. If not, you are missing out on a great way to recycle your waste and reduce the feed bill! Wilted lettuce, carrot peels, apple cores, squash seeds and bread crumbs all make great chicken treats!
Free Ranging
If you don’t have too many predators in your neighborhood, letting your chickens free range can cut back quite a bit on the feed they consume. They will peck around, eating weed seeds, insects and worms. Since we have a lot of predator problems, we only let the chickens out on days we are home, but boy do they have fun! They also are a huge help at eating the hordes of grasshoppers that descend on my garden each summer!
#3: Grow Some of Your Chicken Feed
If you are a gardener, there is a wide variety of crops that can be grown just for your chickens! From root vegetables to squash for the winter, to greens and sunflower seeds, these can really help to make a dent in your feed bill!
Chickens tend to just peck at raw veggies. While this is a great way to entertain them, if you seriously want to supplement their feed, try cooking a batch of produce for them every day or two.
My favorite easy chicken feed to grow is winter squash. It is a productive, low maintenance crop that will store for the winter without any special care. Whenever I have the oven on anyway, I stick in a whole squash or two for my chickens. When it has cooled, I throw the whole thing out there, seeds and all for them.
By combining free feed sources with selling chickens from your flock, you can really make your backyard chickens economical!
My favorite, low-cost combination of feeds for my chickens is 1/3 milk from my cow, 1/3 winter squash and 1/3 regular chicken feed.
The important part when mixing up what you feed your hens is to keep the protein level around 16-17%. With too little protein, they won’t lay well. Since my chickens get so many veggies, I supplement with either a handful of fish meal (60% protein!), or add some non-medicated, non-GMO chick starter into their feed (20% protein).
For a list of 6 easy to grow crops for your chickens, check out this article!
#4: Soaking Your Chickens’ Feed
Did you know that soaking your chickens’ feed can increase the absorbable protein, reduce waste, and save on feed costs? It’s also a natural probiotic!
Soaking your birds’ feed is easy to do, and a great way to get the best bang for your buck when it comes to store bought feed!
I simply put a few scoops of feed in a five gallon bucket each day and cover it with water. The next day I dump it in an old crock pot that sits in the chicken coop. The chickens go crazy over the wet feed!
You can find out how to soak your chickens feed here!
4 Ways to Make Money Selling Chickens
And finally, what you all have been waiting for, how to actually make some money off that backyard flock!
Most if these ideas for selling chickens will work even if you have just a small backyard flock and limited time!
#1: Selling Eggs
Selling eggs is actually not my favorite way to make money from my chickens, although farm fresh eggs can sure make for some happy neighbors! Selling chickens themselves is generally far more profitable, so we’ll cover that in a minute!
Make sure to figure in all the costs into the price of your eggs. It isn’t very helpful for your pocketbook to sell extra eggs for less than it costs to produce them!
You can estimate the cost of feed by averaging the number of eggs you get each month, and comparing that to your monthly feed bill. For example, if you get, on average, 6 eggs a day (more in the spring, less in the winter), that makes 15 dozen per month. If you spend $30 per month on feed, then the feed costs $2 per dozen eggs.
Add up the cost of feed, replacing older hens, electricity if you use lights or heat lamp in the winter, etc.. If your feed costs $2 per dozen eggs, and you estimate that replacement hens and everything else cost about $1 per dozen, then the actual cost of your eggs is $3 per dozen. If your eggs cost $3 per dozen to produce, you’d probably want to sell them for a minimum of $4 a dozen to pay for your time.
If you can’t get these numbers to work out economically, try selling chickens or hatching eggs instead.
#2 Selling Fertile Hatching Eggs
Costing about the same to produce, selling fertile hatching eggs can potentially bring in quite a bit more money than selling eggs for the table. Fertile hatching eggs typically sell for $1-$5 or more per egg, depending on the breed.
The benefits of hatching eggs are that they sell for more money than eating eggs, and are less work for you than selling chickens.
If you are planning to sell hatching eggs, you’ll want to make sure that your flock is healthy, and that the hatching eggs are purebred. You can still keep multiple breeds in your flock if you make sure that you only have roosters of one breed with recognizable eggs.
For example, you might have hens from several breeds that lay brown eggs, one breed that lays blue eggs and one breed that lays white eggs. If you only keep a rooster from the white laying breed, you can still have purebreds when you save the white eggs for hatching!
To have the best success selling hatching eggs, do some research to find out which breeds are most in demand in your area. You can also sell fresh hatching eggs on online forums or on eBay, a good option if you have a rare breed. They need to be individually wrapped in bubble wrap for shipping.
It’s a good idea to incubate a few eggs yourself before selling them to ensure that they are fertile.
Selling chickens’ eggs is less work for you, but harder than selling chickens when it comes to keeping customers happy. That’s because there are so many factors affecting how well the eggs will hatch. Usually if the eggs don’t hatch for your customer, it was either a problem with their incubating method, or a shipping issue. But they will still blame you!
#3: Selling Chicks
Purebred chicks can sell for anywhere from $3-$30 or more, depending on the breed and local demand. A broody hen can hatch out 8-12 chicks at a time, or you can use an incubator.
Look for a breed that is in demand in your area. You can sell chickens by advertising baby chicks on Craigslist, local online farm boards and bulletin boards.
You can get a book and learn how to tell whether chicks are male or female, but keep in mind if you do so, most buyers will want females. That means you could be stuck with a lot of male chicks. Extra male chicks can be raised for meat if you are willing to go to the hassle. Large hatcheries typically kill extra male chicks as soon as they hatch!
I’ve found it’s best to sell chicks straight run (mixed males and females), as long as you stick to a breed that is rare in your area. For the more common breeds, buyers would rather buy all female chicks from the feed store.
To hatch chicks you can either use broody mama hens, or get an incubator. I do both!
Hatching Eggs with a Broody Mama Hen
If you are wanting to hatch eggs under a broody hen, some of the best breeds include Silkies, Aseels, Orpingtons and Cochins. Most dual-purpose breeds will hatch out eggs occasionally if given the chance.
A broody hen doesn’t need to hatch her own eggs, you can give her eggs from other breeds if you choose.
Aseels, which are extremely difficult to find (hatchery Aseels/Asils are not normally purebred) and can hatch out 3-4 clutches of eggs a year. This breed is aggressive and requires some special care.
More common breeds to use for raising chicks, such as Orpingtons will typically only hatch one clutch of eggs per year and not every hen will go broody. But if you have ten hens from a broody breed and five of them hatch one clutch of eggs, you could expect around 50 chicks, not bad at all!
You can read more about hatching eggs under a mama hen here, with tips on how to do it! Some years we hatch all of our chicks this way!
Hatching Eggs with an Incubator
Incubators give you the advantage of choosing the day your chicks will hatch and closely monitoring everything. There are so many options for incubators out there now!
When I decided to get an incubator, I was on a super tight budget. Sooooo….I went with the cheapest incubator I could find, a cheap plastic model made in China. For my 48 egg incubator with an automatic egg turner, I paid a whopping $56!
As expected, the parts are cheaply made, but surprisingly it has held up and actually works perfectly well for what I do. It is still working and I’m about to incubate the first chicks of this year in it in just a few days!
If you are looking for a budget friendly incubator, you can find the model I have right here.
I would recommend this incubator for anyone who wants to get started hatching chicks on a tight budget.
Who is this incubator not for? Someone who wants to start a full time poultry operation, or is hatching extremely valuable eggs.
If you prefer higher quality equipment, you can shop for the best quality incubators on Amazon right here: Shop Top-Rated Incubators
#4: Selling Pullets
Young hens, also called pullets, are always in demand in my area. Pullets from popular breeds sell for $15-$20 each. Rare breeds can sell for much more. This makes it the most lucrative way of selling chickens. It also has higher costs than the other money makers listed here, though.
When selling chickens this way, you’ll want to carefully monitor your flock for parasites and other health issues. I always offer money back returns if someone accidentally gets a rooster!
You can either raise the chicks you hatch, or buy female chicks and raise them until they are 2-4 months old and no longer need a heat lamp.
If you are raising your own chicks to sell the pullets, keep in mind you’ll need to butcher or find homes for all the roosters!
We do this every year with our dual-purpose breeds. We raise the chicks that don’t sell until they are ready to go outside and we can tell the males from the females. After picking out a few favorite pullets to add to our own flock, selling the rest gives us a nice chunk of cash. The extra roosters are raised for bone broth and stew meat.
If you have plenty of space and an economical feed source, selling chickens this way is one of the best ways to get some income from your flock!
Keeping Records
Hopefully you found some helpful ideas here for selling chickens and making your chicken keeping more economical!
My final tip is to keep records of your income and expenses. This can really help you identify where the money is going and in what ways your chickens bring in the best income!
If what you are doing isn’t working, you can try something else next year, maybe selling chickens as pullets instead of chicks or experimenting with different breeds.
My goal as a chicken owner is for my chickens to earn their keep, but certainly you can take this even farther to make a real side income from your flock!
Happy chicken keeping!
-Kait
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