This is for the well-to-do guy who can afford to do all this shit like a hobby. By and large, raising all types of animals at the hobbyist level is a tremendous money sink compared to buying stuff yourself. Chickens can be cheap if you have land for them to feed off of, and plenty of scraps….but chicken feed is still pretty pricy too.
Seems to be true w/ all crops, gardens, etc. You’d better be able to afford the extra mouths or a SAHM in order to mind all this stuff while you’re out earning the bills. Otherwise you’re ONE big breakdown away from despair
people need to understand:
NOBODY WILL BUY YOUR EGGS
NOBODY WILL BUY YOUR CHICKENS
(at a price you’ll make money on. You can get a bottom dollar reserve price at feed stores often, but you had better know how much feed/rx you wasted on that bird before hi fiving each other over eight bucks)
YOU WILL SPEND FAR MORE ENERGY MARKETING AND HAGGLING THAN IT IS WORTH
Everyone wants free eggs, nobody wants to buy. Our farmer’s market never returned after 2020, the only people in the small holding economy are brownoids - funny enough, mexicans buying in bulk are the best customers we have around here. All other customers are insane, fringe weirdos who WILL stalk your place for things to steal, and keep coming back to fleece you when they see you’re a nice, gullible white.
But people REALLY have a rosy understanding of this whole thing. It’s been flooded with new people, and “well you can just sell them!” never works out how you want. Last time I checked
@WashedOutGundamPilot @siinclaiir @sjw @BowsacNoodle I do know someone in my family who is raising his own chickens. But he does it more as something he likes to do, as he most certainly does not make money on his eggs when he is giving many of them away. If you go into such a plan with the idea of making money, you are not going to do that unless you have a massive scale of operation. Which in that case, you have become a full time chicken farmer.
Reminds me of the OTHER irritation of “hey you guys want eggs?”
Nobody EVER gives you the carton back to refill, no matter how many times you tell them to swap it out with you. It seems like it’s not a big deal but you feel like a rube when you’re buying this for the 5th time this year all so people can just keep throwing them away because they’re too lazy to care about the free, valuable thing you’re nice enough to provide to them
Lord help you if you grow something w/ cool eggs. If you have laying turkeys you find out REAL quick who the jews are
Look man, I’ve got a bunch of cartons I’ll trade 3:1 for a carton of eggs, we can work this out
💢 :jahy_rage: Angry Kyūkyoku Wraith 
:AngryGlitch: 
Kinda neat honestly. My grandparents lost a farm years ago to a bad sibling of mine. Kind of neat.
How many chickens? If you keep a dozen then they’re simple and easy (provided you can feed them cheaply, I got a hookup on feed and even still it’s about $100 a week for what we have, even w/ hay and free ranging)
Once you scale up past 25/50/100/200/300 things get very problematic. Everyone faceplants because they get their first bunch and let them hatch, then start getting ideas about actually being able to make something out of it as an enterprise. One line of ours started with 1 breeding pair. A couple years later and that turned into at least 70, probably 100+ chicks. You realize selling them is more pain than it’s worth, dealing with brownoids, hagglers, and poors. Maybe guys in rich areas can do it. But most of the places west of the miss will already be saturated w/ egg sellers & chicken haulers.
And it all starts when your woman sees well-dressed upper middle class suburbanite-turned-2021-homesteaders i showing off a tidy pen of 50 ‘meat birds’ acting like they’re able to afford $500 Ulta makeup bills every month by selling birds to the feed store for five dollars a head. As the dad you gotta be a little heartless and put your foot down on flock size before it all spirals out of control
We have somewhere from 80 to 110 right now, last time she counted she’d raised something like 800 birds since she moved in with me.
CatSoc 
If you freerange in coyote territory it’s easier just to keep a rooster, then you can replenish losses. Even be grateful for them.
Peacocks seem instinctively driven to roost on top of the fanciest, cleanest car in a 3-mile radius
They all belong in a dog’s stomach
Herace Siinclaiir >We have somewhere from 80 to 110 right now
share some pictures of your cock sir.my bbc irl
Well there's your problem. Rooster dies first. Cock-a-doodle-don't even think of doing that outside my house. A family raising chickens can usually do fine with 1 bird per person ± extras for baking or how much you like eggs. But how the heck are you paying that much for food!? I barely fed mine besides table scraps. Maybe it's because I have kids so food is "wasted" more, but they don't need much feed. They'd pick the compost pile clean and eat the bugs that crawled on the food I tossed in there.
Which is why I hate all this tiktok farm nonsense, it’s filling their heads with this unrealistic nonsense about having it all and making it work. All these people making big videos about their fancy, well-furnished coop are backstopped with their hubby’s money, and it’s telling gullible, well-intentioned normies that you can TOTALLY be a trad farmer by going into tiny semi-hobby sized agriculture.
Maybe it’s just a pilot thing, since they got money and idle wives, but I’m seeing a LOT of guys leaving the cities to go move into the sticks, raise chickens for a year and buy a share of an alfalfa plot and pretend they got the farmer life all figured out.
Some of you guys here will see in time. Your daughters will doe-eye you with promises of “daddy people pay good money for them” and you shrug thinking it’d be good to be self-sufficient….and then you’re trapped
I'm not reading the rest of the conversation, but so much this.
It's sooo difficult to start up as a homesteader. You're going to need at least $20k going from not-homesteader to homesteader.
And then, the profit margins are so small, you'll be lucky to break even. I've been at this for a year, and haven't broke even yet.
They make it difficult on purpose. Big food processors are in league with the FDA and USDA. They don't want people to grow their own food. They don't want it to be easy for you.
last year i tried pumpkins but the squash bugs genocided them
i am calling for total rabbit death (except pippa)
You should try growing some shit thats hard to kill / fuckup like mint, basil, and malabar spinach (at least here in Texas). These plants keep popping up everywhere in my garden.image.png
Everyone who has animals as a hobby will tell you “oh I don’t wanna think about how much I have in ‘em”
As long as you get that, you’re fine. It’s just a hobby. But right wing anons have this very silly idea we can all just move to the outskirts of town and survive on $300 a month and growing everything on 5 acres of shit land…..without realizing all the instagram/tiktok/youtube faggots “doing it” are working as remote sysadmins for Oracle in their downtime.