[Matt - Henbant]

Hi all, I am sure this has been discussed before, but how do people get on seeling eggs at the road side etc..

We have about 20 chickens and sell our excess eggs at the farm gate, the eggs are rarely there for more than a few hours and the locals always say we need more chickens.. so if we go to to 50 layers (the maximum I think we are allowed before we have to mess around with rules and regulations and dates and stamps etc)

Do people think my sums add up..

50x chickens over a year cost:

£6/pol chicken, 50kg of feed each per year@32p/kg, bedding £50/year, housing bits and bobs £500, egg boxes 3p each , medication £50/year. Total cost: 1775/year

if they all lay 300 eggs per year and we sell them for £3/doz then thats £3750

Leaving us with £1975/year in our jam jar.. can that be right? or am I about to make a mistake? 

[shygirl]

just remember the more you have, the more stress and disease can build up so extra attention to healthcare and rotation is required.
good luck 

[HesterF]

I guess there's a lot of ifs in there - could you ramp up more gently? I sell for £1.30/half dozen and that's higher than the farm gate norm around here - most seem to sell for £1 or £1.10/half dozen (and I'm in the 'rich' South East). None of mine are hybrids so not a hope of 300/bird per year but if you're going to turn over your stock every year I guess you can get that - what will you do with your older birds? BTW, I can't remember the details but I don't think you have to get into stamps at all if you're just selling from the farm gate. I've got over 50 birds so I'm a registered poultry keeper but as far as I can remember, you only have to register for egg production and be approved (with the stamps etc.) when you want to sell to retail outlets who will sell on your eggs or places like bakeries who will use them in their products. Then you have to have premium grade eggs or something.

[fiestyredhead331]

agree with Hester, once you get over 50 you need to register the flock for disease control purposes but unless you are retailing to shops you don't need to do the whole production number etc
we were in the same position, started with 6 then went to 12 then doubled each time as the eggs 'fly' out of the box at £1.50 per half dozen, which is standard price for up here. Up to 85 hybrid chooks now but the way I see it its like having children....bear with me....going from 1 to 2 feels like a bit of a jump but after that you don't really notice? you still have to feed them, shut them in etc regardless of how many you have so if you can shift the eggs then go for it 

[chrismahon]

It's a lot of hard work keeping 50 free range chickens in good laying condition and free from pests and predators Seabear. You may find problems selling all the eggs some times. You may have the problem of egg theft from the gate and give it all up, as my Sister did.


We used to make a small profit from 30 hens. About £200 a year plus all the eggs we could eat. But the major capital costs were excluded. So fencing, coops, shelters and runs. The reality was we were running at a loss.

[Matt - Henbant]

Thanks all,

I'm so impressed that I can ask a question one evening and get a range of decent answers so quickly, how nice to have other folk thinking about the same things..

It sounds like its worth a go and we are putting that bit more money in, which means that we will hopefully give predators and disease the respect they need.

I best get off to make a new chicken house!

[hughesy]

You won't very likely get 300 eggs a year. Possibly a lot less. You'll lose some of your birds especially if you free range them.  Hybrids are incredibly stupid when it comes to keeping themselves out of predators way. What will you do with the eggs whem you have too many? And make sure you keep accounts because the taxman won't believe you when you say they haven't laid any eggs for weeks.

[HesterF]

I don't think the tax man will be very interested in that level of income. The best reason to keep records is to be able to offset the business costs of set-up (i.e. include all new runs and houses) against any other income you have. No doubt the first year will make a loss overall and that's worth recording if you're paying tax somewhere else. Then continue to keep a careful record of costs & any investments including repairs, new birds as well as food, bedding, healthcare as well as laying and then be sure it is making you money.

[Dan]

As hughesy said, 300 eggs per year per bird is probably optimistic, it also reflects your absolute peak production. In 3 years you may be looking at 50% fewer eggs, so your profits will fall and you'll need factor in replacement costs.

Granted you have the capital costs out of the way for the housing, fencing etc, but you also have to consider what you're going to do with those 50 (or more likely 40-odd by that time) uneconomic layers in years 4+. Are you prepared to cull them as a batch and replace the lot? We don't, we 'retire' them to a mobile flock that scratches around our paddocks, and that requires additional housing.

Good luck with it, at the very worst you'll make a wee bit of money and will have supplied excellent, high-welfare eggs to a lot of local people. 

[Stereo]

As pointed out the things to consider is replacements / what you do with the old hens. If you don't want to cull, you either need to retire them but they will still eat and need care and housing, or you need to sell them on while they are young enough to be worth anything. So you might buy your POL in spring and they will be in full lay by mid summer. You keep them until the next summer when they will be just about to moult and then sell them on for £2 each. In the meantime, your next batch are coming into full lay. But you need 2 houses for that period or a bigger single house and leg rings etc.

You should also figure that not many POL chickens are POL. You will usually get a few months of small eggs first and they will still eat during this time. Then at some point they are going to moult and some will probably drop dead, especially with hybrids. You'll get dirty eggs, broken eggs, thin shells and so on. All in, we reckon on 200 decent eggs from something like a Light Sussex laying strain for the first couple years.

At the end of the day the profit is never going to be huge, especially if you factored in labour but that said, you should make a few bob and it will pay for something.

[Womble]

We were in much your situation a couple of years ago - do we upsize or not?

In the end, we decided not to bother, and now just keep enough hens to give us eggs for ourselves all year round, plus some to give away or sell to colleagues when we have a glut.
 
If we'd had more time on our hands, more passing customers and a cheap source of feed that might have swung it the other way, but this way we still achieve our goals but with much less hassle and less at stake.
 
Good luck whatever you decide to do though!

[Stereo]

Yeah, we keep thinking about it as it's so nice to hear all our customers saying they are the best eggs ever. But I think that may be down to them having plenty of grass and scratch and also a high quality ration. Once you start scaling up, do you compromise those things? 300 hens are going to make more mess of a field than 50 and can you get them onto fresh grass with that much bigger house etc. etc.

In the end we have decided to have smaller flocks of pure breeds for hatching eggs and sell the surplus on the gate. We have initially chosen dark brown, pale and white egg breeds so our egg boxes look 'farm gate' as well. We've also got a few CLBs so the odd blue egg gets folks going. At the end of the day though, when you run the profits, it's a hell of a lot of work for not much. I would want £2.50 for 6 to really think about scaling up the layers.

[Stereo]

Oh and the other thing is that we have found production never matches demand. In the winter we have no demand from our box so a glut of eggs, even if they are not laying that well. In the spring we can't produce enough and people are moaning that there are never any eggs in the box.

[lord flynn]

Then at some point they are going to moult and some will probably drop dead, especially with hybrids. You'll get dirty eggs, broken eggs, thin shells and so on.

this-all bar one of my hybrids carked it or had to be culled before 2 ish, due to egg bind or egg peritonitis and prolapse-those huge eggs they lay later on in their lives can cause all sorts of problems. My older purebreds though are still laying quality eggs. The remaining hybrid will be gone before the winter-she rarely lays anything edible, much less sellable. A winter like last year was very difficult keeping eggs clean. I was selling eggs to a fair few folk but we moved and we don't have the traffic at our new place. Plus several bigger outfits started selling eggs at work-'free range' for £1.00 per half dozen-hardly worth the effort of keeping them IMO. Certainly not worth mine.

Hate to sound like such a downer-I expect it works for some people but it took alot of fun out of it for me.

I now keep them to breed, am being ruthless about culling out and sell only to friends and freeze the rest as my lot don't lay between moult and january.

[Stereo]

I know a local poultry dealer. He sources most birds from eastern europe and literally drives them back over, rears them to POL and then sells on to your local friendly poultry shop. These folk will tell you the benefits of them all being vaccinated etc. etc. but the truth is, in my experience, you'll get one year of decent eggs and then they will either die, start laying huge, soft shelled eggs or develop serious health issues. We rarely lose any of our own birds which are never vaccinated (some think that is a crime). I bought some Cream Legbars from a reputable dealer and they all show signs of IB in the eggs. The birds are fine and no other hens seem to have caught it so I'm thinking it's probably a low level caused by the vaccine itself.