We did some interesting maths the other night. How many chickens would we need to keep if we were to try living off the proceeds of selling eggs alone? The answer, it seems, is a rather a lot.

You see, eggs are cheap to produce and the profit margin is large, but the problem is that a young, healthy hen only produces about six eggs a week, and as they get older that number declines.

So how much does an egg cost? Well, by our reckoning it’s about 5p. We spend £7.05 every couple of months on Layers’ Pellets to feed our flock of three, which works out at £1.18 each per month. Bargain. Then you’ve got incidentals like poultry spice, garlic powder and so on, so let’s call it £1.25 a hen. That’s £15 a year.

Now each hen will lay about 300 eggs a year, which would bring in £75 if you sold them at £1.50 a box, which most people seem happy to spend.

A good healthy hen, without any discount, will cost about £10, and you can assume it will be in peak egg laying condition for perhaps two and a half years, so the average annual cost of buying it is £4. Take this off your annual income per hen, and perhaps another £15 to contribute towards hen housing and other incidental costs and you’re looking at a profit per year, per hen, of £56.

Following so far?

So let’s assume you want to make £25,000 a year after all of your costs, but excluding tax. At £56 a hen you’d need 447 of them (total profit £25,032). That would take up a fair amount of space – more than we have – but wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for someone with a smallholding out of town.

You’d be collecting about 134,100 eggs a year and shovelling untold tons of poo, which you could either give away or sell as manure.

So it’s not entirely practical right now.

But what if you were to do it on a more manageable, back yard scale? We’ve already had our first paid order for eggs (and other offers to buy more if we were ever to start selling properly) at the agreed £1.50 a box.

If we were going to sell all of our chickens’ produce at that price then over the course of a year we’d earn about £168 from them. Not a huge amount. And neither is our full potential. We have room for about 10 hens at the moment with the expanded chicken run, which would earn us about £560 a year.

Small beans, still, and not enough for a single mortgage payment, even in these times of close-to-zero interest rates, but enough to pay for your back yard hobby. And then some.

Related posts:

1. The cheapest eggs in town
2. Eggs for September
3. How to get yellow yolks