Yep, that's why I am asking of how much they cost for a regular backyard chicken coop.

Also, places like Costco that sell $5 rotisserie chickens take a loss on them. They’re called loss leaders.

They get you in the door, and you end up spending more money on other things.

They're also extremely sweet creatures when hand raised. They'll come running and want to be picked up and everything. Eating them or having them die is awful.

It sounds like a hobby with big benefits. You get meat and eggs hhat you know where they come from.
Probably a way lot healthier than anything from even organic food.

You could save money with brewing your own beer, you would just need a good source of barley and malt it yourself. The malt is too expensive to save much if anything on making beer.

The mormans or latter day saints forget which are all about stockpiling, and they operate bulk stores to prepare for the end of times or whatever, and they sell 50 lb sacks for a decent price I hear, but there aren't any near me.

It is much cheaper to brew beer than buy it in Australia. A carton of 24 is about $50, a $18 kit will make 60 cans worth.

What is it now?

Fucking love that guy.

DOUBLE-U DOUBLE-U DOUBLE-U DOT

Looney Tunes theme song plays at full volume

It was more of a curious question. I have no energy to take on this amount of responsibility - but I might in the future. :)

Chicken math:

You have a couple of hens and a rooster. They're pretty chill and everything's cool. But you can't eat the birds you have, then you wouldn't get any eggs... Maybe you should get more birds? You wonder what it will cost you to hatch and rear some chickens. Before you're done guestimating, one of your hens is broody, so you let it do its business.

You starting building a secondary run for momma hen and her chicks. You forget the material price, but you do notice the text message half way through the month. It's from the bank, you're getting close to insufficient funds on your debit card. Anyway you move some funds around and head off to the feed store. Chickens need special feed and different feeders/water dispensers.

The chicks grow and you start to see something akin to personality. You want to optimize for size, so you wait with the harvesting. Suddenly some start presenting male characteristics. But the rest? They're too cute and you could do with a few more eggs.

While picking up considerably more feed, you notice the text message from the bank, you ignore it and start looking at that incubator that's on sale. It doea look neat. Next spring then hens start laying eggs again, you decide to not wait for a broody hen, and you start collecting an incubator's worth of eggs.

When the eggs are about to hatch, finally a hen has become broody, so when most egg have hatched momma gets her eggs switched with a load of chicks. You don't have any chicks to loom at indoors now, so maybe you should hatch a few more. You've heard about a different breed that you want to try out, so you find eggs on facebook marketplace and drive for 2hours each way to pay 50€ for the 24 eggs your incubator can hold. Of the 24 eggs 15 are fertilized and as you miss a single critical water refill only 10 hatch. You do note that that's 5€ per chick. But you think to your self "hey, it's an investment, now I have this breed and can hatch more down the road"

You keep this up, and second year you are worrying that the authorities will discover that you have more than the 30 chickens you can have without registering. You're also on a first name basis with the clerks in two feed stores and you ask about their kids ball games when you get your weekly 80kg of feed. You try to recoup some of the money by selling eggs. You have no idea what an egg costs to produce, but you can't get yourself to charge more than about 50 cents per egg. You don't piece it together, but your income doesn't match your feed budget. Your bank loves you, because even though you should be able to save money for a car and a holiday, you end up getting financing for all major purchases and going on holiday is overrated anyhow. You like to stay home, who would take care of your birds?

Anyway ⬆️that's chicken math...

They are just soo cute!
In my mind I would not have more than a dozen birds.
And I am really thinking about the old ways of keeping chickens, when every house had their dump (basically a compost pile) and the chickens did half of the work with it.
How did it actually work, what went into the trash - what did chickens get out of it (bugs, worms) - did they had to manually turn the dump, or did they just let it rot the used in the spring...
Haven't done any research on it - it is more of a thought experiment.

Thank you for your answer!
I haven't even thought of quail! growing up we always had whole eggs in the chicken soup - you just cracked them on the side of the soup plate and ate it with the soup.

Chickens take several months to reach full meat bird size. The feed is like $20/50lbs and 6 go through 1-2 bags per month.

That sounds like a lot? We have 5x the amount of birds you have and buy 2 bags of food and a bag of cracked corn every month & a half.

thank you for the recommendation!

Really hates canning though, or at least found it not worth it. I personally enjoy canning because I get to choose what is in them.

I have no knowledge about the economics of live poultry, but rotisseries are generally loss leaders at grocery stores. They're so commonly loss leaders that they're often cited as one of the primary examples to explain the concept of a loss leader.

https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-costco-rotisserie-chicken

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

My gosh. A factory that sorts the right eggs, batches them, kills the male ones, keep females alive and delivers a million of them ...

Yeah, that's why I wanted to know the real cost.
How much actual loss we are talking about?

My understanding is that Costco uses their rotisserie chickens as a loss leader. They make it as cheap as they feasibly can, and then they recycle the meat from the unsold ones into as many different prepared products as possible. Probably other stores are just matching their pricing structure.

Usually store bought raw chicken is way bigger

The rotisserie near my house buy their chickens for about 2 euros or less per chicken, but they're buying 200 chickens at a time, and probably directly from the nearest slaughterhouse.

Not surprising :(
Think positive! You can do ducks and turkeys too! Ducks and geese are really tasty!

But you can season the raw one however you want.

Alternatively, the chickens are pets, eggs are 100% profit 😅

Thank you for your answer!

Good to know, thank you!

They also sell meat birds in bulk. At least ours all do.

Correct answer right here. They are a hobby, and can be quite an elaborate one depending on your location, space, local ordinances, and budget.

Cheap eggs are cool and meat is cool too if you can stand to kill them. But if you're going into that for those reasons then you'll be sorely disappointed.

Thank you for the answer!

As to preserving the eggs, I think just vinegar works as well no? Like Moe's on the simpsons with the jar of pickled eggs.

Preserving in lime is just weird, like that ludafisk stuff. It is super caustic I wouldn't want to eat any.

That is clearly true. But again I had no idea of how much they actually cost to produce - that's why I was looking for people with actual experience growing them.
But now I have a way clearer answer, and learnt a lot of fascinating information on the way.