The real cost of a dozen backyard eggs

Start with feed, because feed is the number that decides everything else.

A laying hen eats roughly a quarter pound of layer feed a day. Call it a pound and a half a week. A fifty-pound bag, then, runs one hen about thirty weeks, or six hens about five weeks. Six hens in full lay give you somewhere near two dozen eggs a week, so that bag of feed covers about ten dozen eggs.

Take today's price on a bag at your feed store. Divide it by ten. That's your feed cost per dozen, at peak, with everything going right.

Now cut your production estimate roughly in half over the course of a year, because hens molt in the fall and stop cold, because laying drops off hard when daylight falls under about fourteen hours, and because a hen's second year is noticeably weaker than her first. Divide the bag price by five instead. That's a more honest per-dozen feed cost across a real calendar year.

For most people, in most years, that number lands somewhere in the same neighborhood as good eggs at the store. Sometimes under. Sometimes over. What it almost never does is make you rich.

The one-time costs people underestimate

The coop is where budgets die. Not because coops are expensive, but because people build cathedrals.

You need three to four square feet of interior floor per bird, eight to ten square feet of run, eight to twelve inches of roost bar per hen, and one nest box for every three or four birds. That's it. Hens don't care about cedar shingles. They care about being dry, out of the wind, off the ground at night, and unreachable.

What you should spend money on is hardware cloth, not chicken wire. Chicken wire keeps chickens in. It doesn't keep raccoons out, and a raccoon can reach through it and do damage you'll remember. Half-inch hardware cloth on every opening, stapled properly, with an apron laid flat on the ground twelve inches out from the perimeter and pinned down. Digging predators follow the wall, hit the apron, and give up.

Then there's the brooder setup if you're starting with chicks: a heat source, a tote or stock tank, shavings, a chick feeder and waterer. Most of it you use for a few weeks and store for years. Borrow it if you can.

Add a proper feeder, a waterer that holds several days, and a way to keep water liquid in January. In a cold climate that last one is a heated base and an extension cord, or it's you walking out twice a day with a kettle all winter. Pick one now, not in December.

The recurring costs

Feed dominates. Everything else is rounding error, but the rounding error adds up.

• Bedding. Pine shavings or straw, refreshed regularly. Deep litter stretches it considerably if you're willing to manage it.
• Oyster shell and grit. Cheap, and not optional. Shell-free hens lay thin-shelled eggs and eventually break down.
• Replacement birds. This is the cost people forget entirely. Production falls off after the second laying year. If you want steady eggs, you add a few pullets every year or two, and you feed them for five or six months before they give you anything.
• Medications and the occasional loss. Sometimes a bird gets sick. Sometimes a bird just dies, on a Tuesday, for no visible reason. Chickens are fragile in ways that surprise new keepers.

Call your feed store and get current prices on chicks, started pullets, and a bag of layer feed before you commit to anything. Those three numbers, plus your coop budget, are your whole business plan.

Time is the cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet

Ten minutes a day, most days. Open up, check water, check feed, collect eggs, close up at dusk. An automatic coop door buys back the dusk trip, and if you travel or work late it's the single best money you'll spend after the hardware cloth.

Then there's a real cleanout a few times a year, and a heavier one in spring. And there's the day a hawk takes a bird in the afternoon and you spend an hour rethinking your run cover.

And you can't leave for a long weekend without arranging something. A big feeder and a big waterer get you four or five days in mild weather. Winter cuts that down, because water freezes and nobody's there to break the ice.

Where the money actually goes wrong

Too many birds. Six hens produce more eggs than most families of four can eat in the peak season. People buy twelve because chicks are cheap and cute in March, then feed twelve all winter for eggs they're giving away.

Scratch grain as a main feed. Scratch is candy. It's lower in protein than layer feed and it dilutes the ration. Handful-a-day treat, not a meal.

Keeping hens past their working life out of guilt. This is the one that separates a small livestock operation from a hobby, and it's a legitimate choice either way. Just know which one you're making. A four-year-old hen eats the same quarter pound a day as a pullet and gives you a fraction of the eggs. If you're keeping her anyway, that's fine. It's a pet, and pets cost money. Budget for it honestly instead of pretending the flock pays for itself.

Pretty breeds. The fluffy, feather-footed, blue-egg-laying birds are a pleasure to own and they lay considerably less than a plain sex-link or leghorn. Nothing wrong with that trade, but it's a trade.

What you actually get for the money

Not cheap eggs, most years. What you get is eggs you can account for completely, from a bird you can see, fed something you chose. Yolks that stand up. Shells that take real pressure to crack.

You also get a very efficient machine for turning kitchen scraps, garden waste, and bugs into food and fertilizer. Hens will clean up a spent vegetable bed better than a tiller and leave it fed. Composted coop litter is genuinely valuable if you garden at any scale.

And if you've got kids, you get a chore that can't be negotiated away. The birds need water whether or not anybody feels like it, and they need it on Christmas morning too. That lesson has a value, though it won't show up on your feed receipts.

Run the arithmetic with your own local numbers before you buy lumber. If it comes out roughly even and you still want to do it, do it — you'll have gone in with your eyes open, which is more than most people manage.

Then build the run bigger than you think you need. That's the one thing nobody regrets.