Are backyard chickens worth it?

If you are looking to save money on your food bill then it will take a very long time before you make your money back on the setup costs, but there are more advantages to keeping chickens than just eggs. On a small scale, such as a dozen chickens or less in a backyard setup, they provide no economic benefits and in the best-case scenario can cover their food costs with the money you’ll make from selling eggs.

They have to be fenced in

Chickens can’t fly in terms of being able to sustain themselves in the air, but they do a great job of boosting themselves over a short distance or a low fence. The flight feathers can be trimmed to stop them from reaching as high, but they should always be behind something they can’t flap themselves over. This also goes for protecting against predators, especially in areas where foxes or hawks might be present.

So are backyard chickens worth keeping or not?

Yes, they are, depending on how much you enjoy gardening and the feeling of accomplishment from producing something yourself. Chickens are a funny type of bird and their behavior is often comical, if you’ve ever had to dig a hole inside a chicken pen then you’ll know what I mean, there are only so many times you can ping them off the shovel before it gets annoying.

The eggs you’ll be collecting each morning will be fresher and taste better than anything you could find in a standard supermarket, who often buy from cheap battery farms. Chickens kept in these conditions are never as healthy as free-range or backyard chickens, and don’t share the same varied diet that a caring owner would provide. The other advantage is you know exactly what the birds have been eating and what’s gone into the eggs, something that can’t be said about battery farms that use growth hormones and various other nasty additives to make them grow faster.

Fertilizer is another advantage for anyone who also grows vegetables or has a compost bin, and will be produced whether you want it to or not. Scraping up all the waste you can once a week will give you a good amount of quality fertilizer to spread around any plants and make a noticeable difference to them.

Do backyard chickens produce much?

The amount of eggs laid will depend on the type of chicken and the time of year. There are hundreds of species of chicken but only several are commonly raised due to their output. Take the leghorn for example, this type of chicken is one of the most productive layers there are, with an average of 280 eggs laid per year. Ten of these things should give you 7 or 8 eggs a day on average, but they are much more productive in the spring and summer than the colder months. For something to be considered a “good laying bird” it would have to be able to produce 200 or more eggs in a year, but this amount can easily be reached with many species of chicken.

In terms of meat, it would always cost you more in what you fed the chicken than to just go and buy a whole chicken from the shop. The only way around this is if you have a substantial vegetable garden to feed them and raised your own chickens from eggs hatched in your coup, but this is a much more advanced setup and strays away from the space limitations of what could be considered the average backyard chicken.

One of the ways to make your chickens more meat productive is to focus on a breed raised solely for meat, like the Cornish Cross which is widely recognized as being the best meat-producing chicken species on earth. They take 6 to 8 weeks from birth before they can be killed, which gives the owner the option of raising them in batches over a short period, instead of looking after egg-laying breeds that can live for years. raising something like the cornish cross would only be worth it if you had a cheap way to feed them, such as a well-established garden or access to cheap grain.

How many chickens can I fit in my garden?

Each chicken should have an indoor space of 30cm² for a nesting box or perch and 1 square meter of outside space, but there are exceptions to this. Chickens like to live together and you should never keep less than 3 chickens or they will develop psychological problems, yes chickens can get depressed and this affects their egg-laying abilities.

As an example, if you’re looking to keep 10 chickens then their coup will have to be 5 feet long, with five boxes on either side and a center space of about 2 feet. Outside you will need 10 square meters of ground to keep them happy, and with the average garden size for a terraced house in the UK being 4 meters wide by 15 meters long, this shouldn’t be a problem. A pen at the bottom of the garden spanning the whole width and 3 meters long would be plenty of room to keep 10 chickens in happy conditions.

The above example has many exceptions, with the main one being the type of chicken you want to keep. Some are significantly smaller than others and you could fit 50% more into the same space, as long as their needs were still met. The breed known as the silkie is one type that requires much less space and still produces an average of 160 eggs per year for each laying bird. They aren’t worth raising for meat due to their size and longer time to maturity when compared to something like the Cornish Cross but are a good choice for anyone with less space to dedicate to raising chickens.

How much will keeping backyard chickens cost?

This depends on a great many things, but the single biggest cost will be the coup itself and the fencing to go around it. If possible it would be better to build the coup yourself or try to find a cheap shed you could convert because buying a proper coup from a supplier can be very expensive. The coup below costs £299 and is only big enough for 3 or 4 chickens, though if you take this amount and buy the wood yourself, it’s going to work out much less, or at the very least a bigger coup for the same price.

The equipment they need would be the next thing, but are also the cheapest things to buy they will need. Water holders and grain feeders are just simple plastic pots and don’t cost much, and you only have to buy them once. Feeding them will be the biggest maintenance cost but can be greatly reduced if you have access to certain things. Chickens will happily eat various types of leftovers and tops from certain vegetables and can feed themselves to an extent if they have access to plenty of ground.

The more grazing ground you can provide for your chickens, then the lower your food costs for them will be. They spend most of the day scratching around at the earth looking for bugs and worms to eat, but they also need variation in their diets so grain will be an unavoidable purchase. An adult chicken of a standard breed will need about 100 grams of grain each day, which is one kilogram a day for ten chickens. The average price for a 20kg sack of chicken feed is between £15 and £20 depending on the type and brand, so if you have to buy all their food yourself, then you’ll need about 15 bags a year, costing between £225 and £300.

Buying the chickens themselves would cost between £10 and £20 for most breeds, which have a lifespan of 3 to 7 years. The uncommon and rare breeds can go for considerably more, but whichever type you get will most likely save you the money in eggs over its life. Chicken auctions are good places to find cheap chickens or people who know where you can find them, with the other option involving hatching your own eggs. Fertilized eggs are very cheap and you’ll probably be able to get them for around £1 each, or maybe less, but then you have to buy your own hatching light and raise them from birth, plus there’s no guarantee that all the eggs will hatch.