Chickens on $15.00 a month.

We recently decided to figure out how much our Hens cost to raise and keep. We keep them in a chicken tractor so we are able to move them to fresh grass daily. We feed them all our food scraps we know they'd like. Mostly vegetables such as beet and carrot greens, swiss chard, tomatoes,  carrot and beet peelings, lettuces, cucumbers, zucchinis, fruits like strawberries, pears and apples and even things like feta cheese, organic yogurt and sour cream. If anything is going to waste in the garden or fridge we can feed it to the chickens. When herbs like cilantro, arugula or parsley go to seed or start to die we feed them to the chickens. Whatever the chickens don't want we compost. We supplement the chickens with grain but if there is any fresh food or grass around the feed goes untouched for days. We've been going through about one bag of feed for them a month. It costs, give or take a few bucks, around $15.00. The Hens were purchased for less than a dollar each as chicks. They started laying eggs at around sixteen weeks of age. We now receive on average 8 eggs a day from 8 Hens. They are extremely easy to care for requiring only the odd mucking out of their homestead, water needs to be refilled daily , eggs need to be collected  and we have to move them everyday to avoid too much lawn destruction. They seem to actually benefit the lawn. Where we've had them stationed the grass grows quickly back and lusher than before. We collect their manure to age and use on our garden in future years. We get a lot from our Hens and at $15.00 a month I think we're getting a good deal.

Here they are taking care of the jack o lantern remnants.