How I saved $450 on chicken feed last year (you can too!)

A few years back I wrote a post about my farm expenses for the year. In those expenses I had spent a whopping $1140 for chicken feed! That is a lot of money for chicken feed! Of course you can't have chickens without feeding them so it is a necessary expense. That is a lot of money to spend on chicken feed though, don't you agree?

I love to save money and I knew I could do better so I set out to save at least half of my feed bill. Unfortunately, I failed. I only managed to save about $450. However I did learn a lot in the last 2 years and by using these methods, I'm on track to save over half of my feed bill for this year!

Getting new chicks: should you hatch or buy?

If you're anything like me you get chick fever every year! It seems like every time I turn around, there are cute baby chicks right in front of me. I see them hopping around in tubs in feed stores, pictures on Facebook, chick sale emails coming directly to my phone...it's constant! 

Chick days, chick sales, chick events and chicken swaps. No matter how much I tell myself I'm not getting any more eventually I wear down and get a few. Is buying chicks really the way to go though? Or should I be hatching them?

Should you buy or hatch chicks?

There are several really good reasons why you should hatch your own chicks. There are also several really good reasons why you should buy chicks already hatched. If they're going to be your first chicks then I would buy them already hatched just to skip the incubation learning curve the first time around (wish somebody would have told me that years ago!) 

If you're adding to your flock it may be easier to get fertile eggs and let a broody hatch them for you. That way you can skip the brooder hassle. Let's look at the different reasons you might want to buy vs hatch your own chicks.

How much does it cost to raise chickens?

Have you ever wondered exactly how much it costs to raise chickens? Not just a few chickens either, I'm talking a LOT of chickens. Like, say....80! Raising chickens isn't cheap, and I often see people complaining about how much chickens cost. So how much does it cost to raise chickens?

Since I'm done doing my business taxes for the year I happen to have all these numbers handy. Some may surprise you, others may not. For example my bedding cost was much lower then I had thought it would be. Chicken feed was higher *sigh*. 

We didn't have any big expenses like new coops or incubators this year so this is a good example of a 'normal' year. I can't say for sure exactly how many chickens and guineas we had though, but the number always hovers somewhere near 80. 

So this is the summary of my poultry care expenses of 1 full year.

Cost of raising chickens

This picture shows the cost for feed and bedding. Now granted, I spent $137.91 of my feed costs on chick feed. I hatched around 600 chicks and not all of them left right away. I had to feed them while they were here, and that bill was much higher then I'd like it to be. 

This doesn't include the free bags of lettuce from a local restaurant, or countless loaves of stale bread and mushy fruit that neighbors gave us. It also leaves out kitchen scraps, what I gave them from the garden and the corn patch they decimated when they found a hole in the garden fence. Bad silkies!  

Buy it by the ton

I have to admit I'm always looking for the ways to do things cheaper. Especially in chicken keeping! Feeding all the critters we have here is probably the second highest expense we have (coop building would be #1, but thankfully I think we have enough space for the next year or so!) Lets face it, 80 feathered friends can eat a LOT of feed! 

I try my best to give them lots of extra produce, leftovers and other 'free' types of food, but their main diet is layer pellets. The way we used to do it was to buy a few bags whenever we ran out. It would come out to like, 3 bags every few weeks. 

One of the main problems with this method is that we live 1/2 hour from the feed stores. Hubby would pick it up on his way home from work sometimes, but mostly we would just run down to TSC to get feed. It often ended up with dinner out and grocery shopping, since we were down there, ya know? 

Add all these expenses and I realized that we needed a better method. I tried to anticipate their needs and buy when I was there but it never worked quite right. There had to be a better way.

Buying feed in bulk to save money

Then hubby saw a sign in TSC that said "Buy by the ton and save". He asks some questions and told me that they offer a 5% discount on orders over 20 bags. Well, I wasn't sure if 5% was going to be worth the storage space issue. I thought about it for a few days. 

I still wasn't convinced when I went to our mailbox one day and found a TSC flyer with a '10% off your complete purchase' coupon. NOW I started liking this idea. We headed out to TSC that night, coupon in hand. We asked and were told that yes we could use both discounts together....and that is how we ended up buying our first ton of food.

Now it's a twice yearly event for us. We wait for the coupon to arrive and buy a pallet of food. That's 40 bags. All I did was click 'create account' on their website. It asked me to enter my name, address and email address. I never did place an online order. Ever since then I get these flyers in the mail. 

We haul it home and store it till we need it. In the summer, feed lasts a bit longer then in the winter. I'm sure it's because of the free ranging and extra garden scraps. We try to save where ever we can, and an extra %15 off feed really goes a long way. 

The coupons come about 4 times a year, so you can choose which ones to use. You can get the volume discount on as few as 20 bags...so you don't need to get the full pallet like we do! It's just one small way to save money on these cute little feather balls we love so much!

Happy hauling!

~L

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