Egg production: economic update

Let's revisit chicken economics! Since the last economics post, the hens have made a lot more eggs. Sadly, we've also spent a lot more money:

The chickens have laid 115 eggs. Our spending on chicken-related paraphernalia has gone up to $192.27. The chickens don't seem to be eating as furiously as before, and our neighbour gave us a bale of hay. But, we also put down more money building infrastructure for the chickens: a chicken tractor and a chicken hoop house (which we'll talk more about in a future post).

Fortunately, we made $30 by selling some eggs to Jan's colleagues. The "fortunate" part is partly because we made some money, but mostly because we didn't have to eat 115 eggs. (The egg revenues are not included in the graph above).

Our costs per egg have gone down, but not quite as much as we predicted before. In fact, they seem rather to have stabilized:

Our cost per egg is now $1.65. Not great, especially given that the chickens, along with some of the equipment and feed, came for free. But, our egg economics model (i.e., the linear fit we put on the curve with an awesome R-squared of .7361) predicts that we will become profitable tomorrow!

If you take out the "infrastructure" costs, the marginal cost per egg goes down to $1.06.

The costs breakdown to date:

Percent of total costs	Percent of operating costs		Category
37%	58%		Feed
16%	25%		Bedding
7%	10%		Electric
36%			Infrastructure
4%	7%		Consumable

NOTE: This post was written by Adam Delved. Eva Spun spurns Excel graphs.

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.