Today we talk about if laying hens are profitable – How much profit can you make with egg farming
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Let’s talk about laying hens and if they are profitable. Yes they are profitable but there are some things that you need to consider so we need to make a few assumptions about this model before we get started.
Everyone’s contacts is different this is what’s going on in my area so please keep that in mind and some tweaks might be needed in your area.
We are selling pasture-raised egss and not everyone’s model and setup will be the same. We are marketing and selling our own eggs.
The key things to our system here is having them out on pasture and free range. Not only does that give us the highest quality eggs possible but it’s also a marketing term that we can use to sell eggs.
If you don’t have a situation like this you’re gonna get a different prices
depending on your market
I want to share with you some information and why we actually do eggs. There’s another benefit besides the profit that we make off the eggs, actually a few benefits. One is we’re rebuilding our soil by rotation-ally grazing the chickens.
There is an initial investment. If you’re going to be getting into a laying hen operation you need some sort of coop. Breakdown on starting a chicken layer business.
- Cost of Coop
- Watering System
- Chicken Feeders
- Cost of Day old Chicks
- Cost of Bedding
- Cost of Feed
I found is that you know you can either buy chicks and you can raise them up yourself and there’s a significant time and money cost there because you have to pay for the feed to raise them and generally you only get your money back for the hen when she starts laying eggs.
The second option is to buy point of lay hens. They are expensive but you can start to generate a healthy income within a month.
Make sure when you’re talking about breeds that you choose the right breed that does well in your area and lay the most eggs with the least
amount of feed. In general the hybrid and lohman- browns are good to start with.
If you have a target number of how many hens you want, you don’t have to start with all the hens right away and you should in fact start with less. Build up your customer base and then add on more chickens as your
business grow. That way you’ll be having income to buy more chickens so that’s another good way you can get started.
Let’s say you have 50 hens and these hens will lay about 300 eggs a year plus or minus depending on their environment their feed and if you give supplemental feed or not.
So let’s say they lay 300 eggs a year at 50 chickens that comes out to about 24 dozen a week that you can sell.
Consider the method you use (buying day old chicks or point of lay hens) the feed and water bill, you should roughly make around 50% to 55% profit with egg farming.
You can use the online feeding calculator on this website – click here
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