alt Hacker NewsBuild vs buy. You can be me and build an in-house flock, pay $100/mo in feed, $500 for a livestock guard dog, $100/mo for dog food, $500 for a solar electric fence, and then $500 for a few coops, etc. It'll pay off before I'm dead, I think! -- right?
Right?!
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What’s missing from all the calculations so far is the worth of the time you put in. Maintaining chickens isn’t free on a daily you spend around half an hour, sometimes more to tend to your chickens. Even by minimum wage standards, you’re spending quite a bit more just in labor than buying a dozen eggs for $2 more than what it was 2 years ago.
Did you factor in the cameras and 10g Ethernet you ran to the coop for ‘future proofing’? Hehe. It’s ok to have hobby, and if you get eggs out of it, even better.
500/month for a dog? 500 for solar?
Do you need a consultant?
Let's say you have 40 chickens that lay 1 egg per day. Egg prices are $5 a dozen. You tell me.
And you aren't even factoring in a keeper/guardian, that's a full-time wage.
You can do it a ton cheaper, depending on how pretty you want it to be. Like, you can scrounge up the materials for a coop damn near for free, and you shouldn’t need $100/m in feed if they’ve got an outdoor run with grass and you feed them kitchen scraps, unless you’ve got an absolute shitload of them.
Most folks do get upside-down on it, but it’s because they want a cute instagram-ready coop or substitute money for effort. And they aren’t willing to butcher and eat them after a couple years when they stop laying consistently.
Handle your chickens like country folk and you’ll do ok. Handle them like suburbanites, maybe not so much.
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As usual when the MBAs get involved the build price magically becomes 10x what the actual cost is.