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Raising chickens might seem like a daunting thing to undertake. It’s how most people level up from just gardening to hobby farming, and one of the best ways to produce your own food. But it doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking. Chickens can be very low maintenance, or you can pamper them to no end.
In this article, we’ll talk about what it takes to set up a successful chicken coop, and more importantly, what it costs. Let’s get into it!
Buying Chicks (or Eggs)
The first cost you’ll encounter in setting up your home coop are the chickens themselves. You have two main options here. You can either buy live chicks, or fertilized eggs, and raise your birds from the moment they hatch.
If you’re the type of person that wants to do everything themselves, you’ll probably want to raise your chickens from eggs. But as we’ve learned, this can be a very stressful (but exciting!) process, not to mention costly (more on this in a minute).
The cheaper, less involved option is to buy chicks directly. We even sell chicks at bargain prices, starting from $75 for 15 female egg layers. If you want to avoid shipping them, you can also buy chicks at your local farm supply store.
Brooding Chickens From Eggs
Now if you buy fertilized eggs, you need to invest in another piece of gear: an incubator. The incubator is what keeps your eggs warm and turns them until they hatch. These cost between $40 and $140. Having one is essential, or your eggs won’t survive to hatching.
Baby chicks eat medicated crumbles, which are full of nutrients and keep them from getting sick. Chicks will go through a few tablespoons of crumbles per day, increasing with age. A single bag of crumbles ($10-20) will last you a few weeks easily.
Raising Them to Adulthood
Regardless of whether you bought eggs or chicks, you also need a brooder. A brooder is a combination of a small enclosed run with a heat lamp or heat source that keeps your chicks warm as they develop and grow.
They’ll spend the first six to eight weeks of life in this brooder, until they’ve got feathers and can control their own temperature. Brooders go for $25 to $100 or so.
Building a Chicken Run and Coop
Now comes the biggest expense of all: a chicken coop. This is where your chickens will live and thrive as they get old enough to start laying home-grown eggs for you. Now bear in mind that we’re not mentioning the biggest cost of all, which is having enough space to support a chicken run.
Be sure to check with your local zoning office about whether you can keep chickens, and where in your yard they need to be, before building anything.
We’ve already done a full article on building a chicken coop, so be sure to check that out. In summary, a chicken coop has three parts: the coop itself, the run, which is a fenced area around the coop, and laying boxes, which are enclosed spaces inside the coop where your hens will lay (and where you’ll collect your eggs).
Materials
Any coop needs these three things. Chickens aren’t too picky (as long as they feel safe), so as long as they’re free from predators, you can make your coop as budget-friendly or fancy as you like.
We’ve seen chicken runs made from old trampoline frames surrounded by chicken wire, and we’ve also seen people drop thousands of dollars on lumber and shingles to custom make chicken coops.
For a nice middle ground, you could easily make a suitable coop from plywood and a few 2x4s. You can construct your run out of chain link, or high gauge chicken wire, whatever keeps the predators away. Depending on how you source your materials, this project might cost you nothing but labor hours. Or it could cost thousands. Your pick.
Keeping Your Chickens Safe from Predators
To keep your chickens safe and stress-free, you need to make sure their run and coop is predator-proof. You should plan to build a chicken wire covering over the run, which will prevent owls and hawks from getting to them. Having a latching gate is also usually a good idea.
Depending on where you live, you might want to bury the fence around the run to prevent burrowing. You can take this a step further by adding a skirt of heavy-duty canvas roughly 2 feet wide around the base of the fence underground.
Care and Feeding
Chickens don’t take much to be happy. They need clean water and food, which can be just about anything because they’re omnivores. You can feed them your kitchen scraps, or if you’re into black soldier fly composting, you can give your black soldier fly larvae to your chickens.
Chicken Feed Options
Other options for chicken feed include freeze-dried mealworms, or pellets. The average chicken will go through about ¼ pound, or about a cup of feed per day. Multiply this by the number of birds in your flock. That’s roughly one sixteen-pound bag of feed per week for ten hens.
Additions to Your Run
There are a few other quality of life additions you can make to your run to simplify things. If you decide to add an automatic feeder, that’s another $50-75. Automatic watering setups go for $30-70. You can also add a dust bath, which will help your chickens stay clean and give them some enrichment. This usually includes a plastic kiddie pool and some sand or diatomaceous earth. In total it should run you about $20.
Totaling It All Up
As we said, you can make your chickens’ coop as simple or convoluted as you want. If you just want it simple, you’re looking at roughly $450 all in, with ongoing costs for food (unless you produce your own feeder insects). On the high end, you could easily spend thousands on a fancy-shmancy coop. It’s all up to you.