The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Poultry & Waterfowl => Topic started by: Matt - Henbant on July 19, 2014, 10:15:43 pm
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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?
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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 :thumbsup:
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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.
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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 :thumbsup:
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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. :thumbsup:
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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yeah, none of my purebreds are vaccinated-or have ACS in their chick crumb. I dunno though, its also about that fact that none of these hybrids are bred for longevity-they are only selected for egg production over their first season and some of them for pretty colours only.
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Thing is if you want good egg production it comes at the cost of a short working life. Nobody who's seriously trying to make a commercial flock work can put up with three months without eggs while the birds moult. Hence the system of getting rid of the birds after their first full season of laying and replacing them. I've always kept pure bred birds like RIR, Sussex etc but at the end of the day they eat too much and they don't lay enough eggs.
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Eat too much and not lay enough being subjective terms of course. There is a price to pay for everything.
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Eat too much and not lay enough being subjective terms of course. There is a price to pay for everything.
I've found that hybrids, being generally smaller than LF pure bred birds, eat about half as much feed. Also I can buy POL hybrids for not much more than a fiver each and I couldn't rear my own bred RIR to POL for that. It's all subjective as we all want different things from our birds.
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I dunno, my hybrids were a comparable size to my Scots Greys and bigger of course, than my Marsh Daisies. Both of those breeds are much better at foraging than the hybrids and don't cost as much to feed. Neither of those will lay as much of course as good RIRs or LS, horses for courses. My 3 year olds in both are still laying well in laying season though-unlike the hybrid.
I recently bought a couple of Minorca hens-have always liked them, I like the Mediterranean poultry for their shape. Pretty impressed with them as far as laying and temperament is concerned and they aren't huge either. If I can't get Marsh Daisy stock again I may well get a Minorca cock and breed those instead.
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I've found the opposite to Stereo -hybrids, despite their size, eat more than Pedigree Large Fowl. In fact their feed to egg production conversion is about the same. The best for feed to egg conversion we have found, by a long way, is Leghorn Bantams. 80g feed per day for a 45-50g egg 6 days a week. Hybrids eat 150g feed for a 65-70g egg.
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its interesting about the comment about being able to forage.many of my purebred birds were incy raised and not big on the scratching and foraging even though they were free range but the ex-commercial free range hybrids we got were horrendous for destroying and digging up my veg patch. so im sure the ability to scratch etc is alot to do with copying others in the flock.
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really interesting thread. I'm fairly convinced that you need to be into the hundreds of birds before anything resembling a reliable profit becomes a reality. so much can go wrong and destroy finely worked out plans and projections its all about economies of scale. our local going rate is not much more than £1 for half a dozen and we would sell very few at any higher. our little flock just about cover the cost of their food over the course of a year, though for large chunks they certainly don't. My sister in law has started raising a few for meat and makes about a fiver a bird for 12 weeks work doing about 10 at a time/ I couldn't come close to that with the same number of layers
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what breeds were they Shygirl? nearly all of mine are incy raised and the scots greys are awesome foragers from the off-as soon as you get them outside. I dont have a veg patch but I don't find them to be diggers, although they do like the muck heap and the hay store. The Marsh Daisies I find the same. atm they are hardly eating pellets at all.
The araucana were diggers but blinking clueless when it came to eating the green stuff-they were incy raised (not by me) , the ones that were out earlier in life and out with my SGs were a better.
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If you look after your hybrids well as in housing, heat, ventilation, light, disease then hybrids will lay 2 eggs a day, we charge extra for our double yolks as well.
Your hybrid price at £6 seems a little high, also your bedding visit a commercial unit that may well educate you a little. Our bedding costs are 0 though we do collect a small amount of hay.
3p a box is good but to be fair we ask for boxes back I guess we use 1 in 6 new = less than 1p each
Your food bill seems low for layers, if your on pellets you may consider going to mash
If you let them out they will never do 2 a day in fact you probably wont do 300 a year maybe more hens and less feed costs ?
We have 95 ish though only get about 72 eggs a day this is because I now work and cannot devote the time/effort involved in lighting/heating etc, so they have adlib feeders, then out to play from 11 ish each day
we feed layers mash and sprouted wheat our feed bill is approx. 2-3p a day per bird
Either way buy the birds make a little extra and see how it goes
Declare every penny to the tax man saves having to look over your shoulder, plus all the tax helps keep our country so good.
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Lord Flynn. at that time we had white sussex and marsh daisies. i didnt realise how much ours didnt scratch until we holiday sat for a wyandotte who would kick her food almost out of her pen with enthusiasm.. our hybrids would see me in the veg patch and come running - the entire 30 - and destroy whatever i planted, especially my onion sets which they never actually ate, just dug up with a passion.
my SG are new so still in "quarantine", so that get to see how they get on,though there is alot of grass in their paddock so not a great deal of dust to kick about.
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Lord Flynn. at that time we had white sussex and marsh daisies. i didnt realise how much ours didnt scratch until we holiday sat for a wyandotte who would kick her food almost out of her pen with enthusiasm.. our hybrids would see me in the veg patch and come running - the entire 30 - and destroy whatever i planted, especially my onion sets which they never actually ate, just dug up with a passion.
my SG are new so still in "quarantine", so that get to see how they get on,though there is alot of grass in their paddock so not a great deal of dust to kick about.
Interesting :) I find the different breeds interesting. My lot have a paddock but I have a couple that come down to the house daily-they've not bothered my flower beds.yet!
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I have 22 hens, 17 of which are, or should be, laying. I live in a posh block of flats in town (not my choice :-\ ) and I have some land 4 miles away. I don't sell over the gate, but I do deliver to residents here and charge £2 for half a dozen. At low production times people order (leaving a note on my doorstep), and go the waiting list. So far, no one has had to wait more than 3 days.
As much as I love my hens, its a huge commitment getting to them 3 times a day, or finding cover so I can go away, so personally I would stop at 20ish hens, and use it as a breaking even hobby.
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Likley they were expsoed to it very young and have recovered but will always be carriers. Make sure they don't come into contact with young birds or the same will happen to you.
We sell excess eggs from our rare breeds hatching programme and they were helping to pay for feed until a couple of neighbours down the lane started to undercut us. Their old birds stop laying in Winter but we're not going to keep higher numbers all year round just for that selling period.