Chickens!
- stephanieandjosh
- Mar 23, 2017
- 2 min read
We picked up chickens last weekend. We had seen silkies at the Millarville Fair and a few other places and thought they would be a good breed to keep in a Canadian climate. Josh phoned around to a bunch of farms until he found someone who knew someone who had a friend who kept silkies and we arranged to pick up four.
We didn’t have time to patch up the barn and build a roost box for them so we bought a kit coop from the local Home Hardware and put it together in the morning before we drove down the two hours south to a farm in Colborne.
The instructions were to phone on arrival and the farmer would deliver the chickens to the gate. It was weird to hand cash over a fence for a box full of cuckling chickens and we were also nervous about our capacity to be good chicken-minders which made the exchange feel that much more clandestine. It’s probably good that we were unsure about the dog and about the chickens because it meant that we were already invested enough to be worried about them.
Although we assumed fluffy silkies would be a winter hardy breed, apparently, they are not and as soon as we got them home the temperature dropped and it started snowing so we ended up keeping them in the basement for the first few days to make sure they would be warm enough. Once the winter weather subsided, we put them back outside against the house with some wind breaks. They seem to be doing alright, but we will likely move them into the barn once we have time to upgrade their run and take out the makeshift dog kennel that is currently in the way.
While we hope to break even in the long term, we’ll need a goodly number of eggs over several years to may back the initial investment:
Chickens (4): $80
Gas: $85
Coop: $200
Feed: $40
Bedding: $10
Heated waterer: $40
Total: $455
This means that if we buy 12 eggs every two weeks at $5/dozen, it would take us a little over 3.5 years to make back the initial investment. Over the lifetime of the birds, we will also need to purchase additional feed and bedding every 4-6 months as well as maintain a steady stock of laying hens. If the flock increases significantly we will need to upgrade the barn, but we will likely wait until we have additional capital and the capacity to keep additional livestock that would further offset our costs.
Chickens seem like a good starting point especially considering the difficulty we would have had attempting to keep alpacas, pigs, or goats comfortable and safe in the basement, even for a few days!
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