Update on the Summer's Happenings

It has been a while since my last update. Some of the happenings in the last couple of months:

The last of our New Hampshire Reds are no longer with us. The second to last disappeared without a trace. Something must have snagged her in the woods, because I didn't even see the telltale scattered feathers that usually accompanies an attack. The last one didn't lay an egg for three days. She was kinda moping around. Then she laid the biggest, fatest egg I have ever seen. After that, her laying-end did not look good and she died in the coop three days later. So, now we are not getting any more brown eggs.

This summer, the colored eggs have been popular. We have seen an increase in egg sales during the tourist season and have sold out of the araucana (blue) eggs a couple of times. We have not yet sold out of white eggs, but our backlog is only a few dozen.

Our sales have been pretty sporatic - we sometimes don't sell any eggs for 3-4 days, and then we sell eight dozen in one day. Weird.

I will be redoing my cost model soon - the reduced feed consumption during the summer (due to free-range foraging) has led to a significant deviation from my original model. During these summer months, we are showing an operating profit. However, we still probably are showing an overall loss due the the fact that I fed 75 chicks for several weeks just to have the majority of them wiped out by a weasel.

We are talking seriously about building a new coop. We want to address a couple of important deficiencies of the current coop that we inherited from the previous owner:

1. It sucks in so many ways. It leaks (the roof doesn't extend all the way to the exterior walls). It is not predator-proof. The door is too narrow to walk through while carrying a fifty pound bag of feed. The door opens in and extends low enough that every time you close it, you pull a bunch of chicken poop out the door. Very nasty "mud" when it rains.

2. It is at the top of a hill far from the house and barn. This is not bad in the summer, but in the winter it is too steep to snow-blow a path. And the path gets icy anyway. And it is a long way to carry water on a steep, icy path.

3. We want a dual-coop. We want to be able to run two flocks in the coop at once. Typically, the second half will have broilers (but will also have layers occasionally when we want to "reboot" our laying flock). The idea would be to have a wall across the middle of the coop with a door in it. The "wall" will probably just be chicken wire.

We will probably build a new coop right behind the barn. It will share a wall with the new sheep shed that I need to build. Supposedly, sheep and chickens are quite compatible. The sheep will be in this shed and adjoining pen during the winter months when there is no pasture for them to eat. I have a vague hope that with the sheep stomping down the snow in the pen, the chickens might be able to have an outdoor area where they can be free-range even in the winter. And maybe they can forage for some of their own food among the bugs attracted to the sheep, the sheep poo and the hay/bedding for the sheep.

Foraging for Profit

The weather has been great for the last few weeks, and the flock has been out foraging all day. They have been primarily feeding themselves (for free!) outside in the yard and woods.

During the winter, a 50 pound bag of layer pellets was lasting about eight days. Lately, a bag has been lasting about 20 days. That is a huge cost savings, especially since the cost of feed has gone up so much. There has been no decrease in egg production or quality. However, the number of double-yolk eggs has decreased - I am not sure if this is due to the change in diet/exercise, or just a function of the hens getting older.

We have been selling eggs at $2.50 a dozen at the street and to friends. Business has been steady, and we expect demand to pick up some once tourist season hits.

Price Elasticity

We have been selling eggs at the street for a week now, and things are looking good. At $2.50 per dozen, we have been selling eggs faster than we are producing (we had a little bit of inventory built up). I want to watch sales for at least a couple more weeks before drawing any firm conclusions.

Path to Profitability?

I have been carefully analyzing our chicken expenses. And things don't look too good. Our current calculation shows a cost of $2.04/dozen (including the carton) if we amortize the cost of raising the chicks to laying age over a 20 month production lifetime.

Many of the local flocks are selling eggs for $2.00/dozen. Of course, some of them don't have very good eggs. To quote my lovely farm wife Catherine, "They have icky whites." At least she has not become an egg snob...

Based on my decades of experience in business I am thinking we need to reduce expenses and/or increase our sales price. Smart, huh?

We stopped by Clark's Grain Store and I chatted with The Guy about volume discounts, etc. It turns out that we want to stick with Blue Seal Layer feed, because it gives the best and most consistent nutrition. It turns out that volume discounts start at about three tons of loose (not bagged) feed. With our current flock, it would take us about two years to use that up. And I have no place to store it. For bagged feed, we can get about 10% discount if we buy at least one ton. That would take about 40 weeks to consume. I bought five bags and saved about 1%. Yay.

So we have raised the price for our eggs to $2.50/dozen. Our eggs are great quality (because we are feeding the good stuff), and they are distinctive because of the Araucana "rainbow" eggs. Time to do some marketing.