Is it profitable to have chickens in a country house

After we finally moved into a house built in the village, I decided to fulfill my long-standing wish and have laying hens.

My parents always kept different cattle, so I had an idea of ​​what kind of work it was and what kind of troubles it was. But the desire to hear the crowing of a rooster in the morning, to watch these cunning and inventive creatures, still won.

First we bought 6 chickens in May, and a couple of weeks later I received a rooster for my birthday. On the first evening, he escaped from the fenced chicken coop, flying over the fence. And no matter how much we chased him around the garden, this little tyrannosaurus did not go to the place, running away from us at a breakneck speed. In the end, I got angry and left him on the street to spend the night, although in early spring we saw a large fox in the vicinity. And the life of this stupid animal was in serious danger. But at 4 am we woke up from his loud crowing under the windows of the house. And then he just flew over the fence to the chickens and never again in these two years did not leave them a single step.

The first weeks the rooster did not give us rest, with its cries neither light nor dawn. But soon they got used to it, Petka became the background of life, now no one notices when he crows. But the guests, of course, immediately hear him and wake up early. Well, that's how it is, village life.

But I started talking about something else - is it profitable to keep laying hens? For me, the answer to this question is not at all difficult. If you buy feed at market price, then it is completely unprofitable. The costs will be very high, and it will be very difficult to cover them with eggs.

But I have other conditions that allow keeping chickens quite cost-effective.

1. There is a chicken coop, it only remained to fence off the walking on the street. There were boards, they bought only poles, but not for the chicken coop, but for the garden, so three poles were allocated for chickens.

2. All the equipment - troughs for feed, drinkers, feeders - remained from the parents when they were still keeping chickens.

3. For the winter, the chickens settled in an old dacha, where they heated the stove for them in the cold and cooked vegetables on the same stove. The cost of firewood was, of course, I had to tear firewood from the bathhouse.

4. My food is mainly vegetables. Potatoes, carrots, cabbage, beets, zucchini, apples - there is a lot of everything. Chickens were given without a standard. They bought only grain and shredded for mixing with vegetables.

5. But now the price of grain and crushed grain has risen so much that they eat up all the income from chickens. And again, we have special conditions - we found collective farmers in a neighboring village who took grain from the collective farm and then sold it. And it worked out for us, anyway, half the price of taking it from the base.

And two sacks were given to us by our acquaintances, who did not keep the pigs, but the grain remained.

6. Since I began to work remotely, I had time to take care of chickens, and it takes at least an hour or two a day. If you cook vegetables, then two to three hours, if you just feed, then half an hour. On average, two hours a day.

And now everyone can figure out for themselves - does he have these 6 conditions - a chicken coop, equipment, a winter coop, feed, grain and time in order to provide the chickens with everything they need? And only after that it will be possible to calculate the benefit from their presence.