The economics of egg production so far

This morning, we collected 3 eggs, bringing our total to 14. So, we've finally broken a dozen (so to speak)! Six of these we gave to the neighbour as a thank-you for allowing us to take lumber from his wood pile.

But we've already been asked a few times: is keeping chickens worthwhile, economically?

Well, I noted down all the costs we incurred so far, and the grand total is $105.60. That makes our cost per egg $7.54 (or just $90.48 per dozen!). So, not exactly a path to riches.

But, over time, our production cost per egg has decreased, as the chickens have started laying more:

The data fit our trendline well, with an excellent r-squared value of .767.  As you can see, the trendline should pass through zero cost around January 19. So, we confidently expect that we will start making a profit on these eggs tomorrow. You can't argue with data. 

What's the cost breakdown? I wanted to extend the Excel awesomeness to making a pie chart, but I'm kind of sick of making graphs. So in numbers:

Feed        54%

Bedding   28%  

Heat          5%

Other       13%  (Oyster shell, buying a heat lamp)

We'll see whether these numbers change in a month or two! 

Note: Post and graphs created by Jan.  L eschews graphs made in Excel.