Is Raising Chickens Worth It? Backyard Chicken Cost Breakdown!

With concerns over egg shortages throughout the nation, as well as skyrocketing egg prices, many are taking the leap into backyard chickens. But is raising chickens worth it? Rather than answer that question with a simple yes or no, in this backyard chicken cost breakdown I am going to go into detail about the costs of raising chickens and how much a dozen homegrown eggs costs our family.

Before I start, I want to stress that there are lots of variables to the cost of keeping chickens. You can buy a fancy prebuilt coop, get all new equipment, keep older chickens that aren’t earning their keep as pets, and spend thousands of dollars a year on your chickens. Or you can make do with what you already have, let your chickens forage for part of their diet, cull birds that are no longer laying, and sell extra eggs or chicks to get the costs down or even turn a profit with your backyard chicken flock.

To find out how much chickens will cost for you personally, you’ll have to do some research and plug in your own numbers when it comes to the type of coop, type of feed, etc.

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Some Benefits of Keeping Backyard Chickens

Is raising chickens worth it? Besides a bounty of wonderful farm fresh eggs, there are some other advantages to keeping chickens. We put our flock to work in other ways, so the benefit is not just in eggs and/or meat.

Here a few additional ways chickens can earn their keep:

Bug Control: chickens love to eat bugs, including caterpillars, grasshoppers and fly larvae. They can help to control the pests on your property, helping out your garden or other livestock.
Garden Prep: While you definitely want to keep chickens out of your planted garden, they are fantastic at clearing weeds, fertilizing the soil, and scratching up the surface. We frequently use chicken tractors (small, moveable chicken pens) to prep new or weedy garden areas.
Compost: Chickens produce lots of manure. And if you have a garden, chicken manure makes a great fertilizer source. Check out this article on how to make compost to get started turning chicken poop into plant food!

Startup Costs For Backyard Chickens

Most likely the biggest expense to get started with chickens is going to be your chicken coop. A fancy prebuilt chicken coop will cost anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. But you can get started cheaper by building your own or converting an existing outbuilding into a chicken house. We found a free old shed on a family member’s property and moved it with a tractor for our first chicken coop.

You’ll also need nesting boxes and some kind of feeder and waterer. If you plan to keep your chickens on lights in the winter you will need a timer and light set up.

Free range chickens will forage for much of their diet and will cost less to keep. However free range chickens are also more likely to be lost to predators, not to mention destroying your garden and landscaping. If you choose to fence your chickens in, you’ll also need to budget for fencing supplies.

If you are starting with chicks, you’ll need some type of brooder such as an empty water trough, along with a heat lamp or heat plates.

Finally, you’ll need to budget for the chickens themselves! For common breeds, most chicks sell for $3-$10 each. You can also start with adult birds, or with started pullets (young females). A 2 month old pullet won’t need a heat lamp or special care, but will typically cost $15-$30 per bird.

To find out more about what you will need to get started with chickens, be sure to check out our Backyard Chicken Checklist!

Backyard Chicken Cost Breakdown

And now to the nitty gritty backyard chicken cost breakdown.

This section does not include startup costs since they can vary so much. It does include feed and the cost of replacing hens every 3 years. If you would like to include startup costs, you can estimate the cost of the supplies and chickens you will start with, then divide them by the years that they should last. For example, if you are spending $1000 on a chicken coop that you expect to last 20 years, that would be a cost of $50 per year for the life of the coop.

Chicken Feed Costs

If you have read any of my previous articles about chicken feed, you may notice these numbers are different. Unfortunately the cost of chicken feed has increased drastically in the past few years. In 2020, we were paying $11 for a 50lb bag of local, non-GMO feed. Now we are paying $32 for the cheapest non-GMO feed we can find in our area.

To calculate feed costs for yourself, be sure to check around on feed prices in your area as they can vary a lot. Generally, you can expect to pay less than we do for generic conventional feed, and more for certified organic.

Note: if you are looking at feed prices from online retailers such as Amazon, you can expect to pay 2-3x the price because of shipping costs. You will most likely find the best prices from your local feed store or a nearby farmer. If you do need to buy feed online, I’d recommend using Azure Standard since they offer free delivery to most of the US. You just have to meet their truck at the designated drop point for your area.

How Much Does a Chicken Eat?

If you are going for productivity, I would go for a production breed such as Sexlinks, Stars or a similar hybrid layer, leghorns or Rhode Island Reds. These breeds can lay over 300 eggs per year and are more efficient in feed consumption.

I keep a variety of breeds that all have a lay rate of over 250 eggs a year. By lay rate, please note that I refer to the number you will find on a hatchery’s website, which is the peak that breed can reach with winter lighting and perfect feed and care. Realistically, your backyard flock will probably not quite reach that number.

The high production breeds I mentioned will need about 1/4lb of feed per bird, per day. A “heavy” breed, on the other hand, can eat 1/2lb. a day!

My mixed breed flock eats about 1/4lb. of feed per bird per day, in addition to kitchen and garden scraps and some bugs and worms.

At the 1/4lb. per day number, each hen will eat about 90lbs. of feed per year. And at $32 per bag, plus a little extra for calcium in the form of oyster shell, that comes to $70 per year per bird for feed.

Adding in $5 per year to replace your hens every three years, that number goes up to $75 per year per hen.

How Many Eggs Will Your Chickens Lay?

With feed costs so high, is raising chickens worth it? Although many breeds have the potential to lay more, a good number to expect for a mixed breed backyard flock is 240 eggs per year, or 20 dozen per hen.

At $75/year, those eggs will cost you about $3.75 per dozen.

This is for non-GMO feed. Conventional may be cheaper, while organic will be more.

For comparison, I would be paying $6 per dozen for non-GMO eggs from my local grocery store, so even though $3.75 seems expensive, I am saving $2.25 per dozen. And multiplying that by just ten hens laying 20 dozen per year, you would save $450 per year compared to buying eggs in the store.

And it does get better than that; in the next sections I will be sharing some ways that I get that cost down, so my backyard eggs actually cost a lot less than that.

How to Reduce Chicken Feed Costs

Yes, chicken feed is expensive! Sometimes I wonder, is raising chickens worth it? But there are many ways to reduce chicken feed costs. Here are just a few ideas:

Feed your chickens non-toxic weeds
Grow extra in your garden for your chickens, including winter storage crops such as winter squash, carrots and mangel beets
Grow high protein seeds such as sunflower seeds and flax
Grow a patch of field corn or other grain
Grow a patch of high protein field peas
Free range your chickens so they can find more of their own food
Keep your chickens in movable tractors so they can still access bugs and grass while being safely confined
Grow alfalfa for your chickens
Soak your chickens’ feed to make it more digestible
Feed your chickens butchering scraps or road kill (feeding chickens meat used to be very common)
Feed your chickens extra milk or whey from your dairy animals, which has some protein and lots of calcium
Raise worms or insects to feed to your poultry
Raise your chickens on compost, turning some over each day to help them find worms

When growing your own chicken feed, the most important thing to remember is that they need 15-17% protein. Their diet can be made up of many different foods as long as this protein requirement is met.

Selling Chicken Products to Cover Feed Costs

By selling some of your chicken products, you can significantly improve your backyard chicken cost breakdown! We usually cut our yearly feed costs in half by selling some hatching eggs, chicks and pullets each summer.

Here are a few products you might consider selling from a laying flock:

Extra Eggs
Fertile Hatching Eggs
Chicks
Pullets
Young Adult Starter Flocks

One example of how this can play out is with a flock of 12 chickens (11 hens, 1 rooster) giving 220 dozen eggs per year, with a feed/replacement cost of $900 per year. By hatching 4 batches of 25 chicks in a small incubator over the spring/summer, sold at $5 each, you would make $500. That brings your costs down to $400 per year. The remaining 210 dozen eggs would cost $1.90 per dozen, compared to $4.09 without selling chicks.

Check out this page to learn more about making money from your chickens!

Is Raising Chickens Worth It?

So in summary, is raising chickens worth it?

It really depends on what your goals are. If you are buying conventional eggs in the store, it might cost you more to produce them yourself. But if you are not looking at it purely from an economic standpoint, chickens can really increase your family’s self-sufficiency by providing eggs, compost and meat in the form of extra roosters or older stew hens.

For us, we go to some extra trouble to grow part of our chicken’s feed and to sell extra chicken products, so we are able to get non-GMO eggs for well under half of what we would pay in the store. It’s also important to us not to be dependent on the grocery store, and keeping chickens really helps with that!