May monthly chicken financials

It is another month, so time for the monthly egg report for May 2010.  I will try and keep the same format so it is easier to read.  I always agonize when I should count the eggs I have sold.  I sold 9 dozen on June 1 because of the holiday weekend.  The chickens laid all the eggs in May, but I will count them in June.  I figure as long as I am consistent it all works out in the end.  Here goes for all those curious egg connoisseurs. 

 So May was a profitable month(two in a row).   I made a whopping $23.24 net profit on 30 hens laying (yep, lost three hens from last month, no trace of them.  Not really sure what happened) (for the year my net income is -$6.77/month.  I had $60 in expenses mostly food (remember, I had to lock up all the chickens for almost 10 days until I made Fort Knox for the babies to keep the cats from killing more chicks.  This drastically increased my feed expense for the month.  Also, my feed store sells feed at the daily market price for grain.  The feed cost jumped 17% in the middle of last month) (for the year my monthly expenses are $46.02).  We collected a total of 559 usable eggs averaging 21.1 eggs/day collected (for the year the average is 10.9).  The chickens ate 0.46#food/egg (for the year are averaging 0.77#/egg, remember I count my feed expense against the laying hens.  So when I am feeding babies the adults are responsible to make up the difference and the cats killed off 13 of my 24 babies last month).  In May it cost $0.09/egg (up slightly from last month, due to me locking them up until I could get the upgrades done to the coop) (my yearly average is $0.18/egg or $2.16/dozen.  I have been selling my eggs for $2.50 dozen since the beginning of the year.)  I am -$33.85 for the year.  Still haven't broken even yet and we are almost halfway through the year.  I will hopefully break even for the year this month.  Luckily, all the improvements to the coop last month were done in scraps so I did not have to pay for anything. 


At the beginning of May I was paying $8.55 for a 50# bag of layer feed.  Halfway through the month it jumped to $10.05.  I bought some today and paid $9.03.  Now for all those naysayers, this is a great price.  The local places sell it for $13-$15/bag.  So I am getting a much better deal, I just never know what the price will be when I go into the store.


I am not having any trouble selling my eggs, between Annmarie and I and our local customers we could easily sell about 2-3 times what we do know.  That is just a lot more chickens.  I do get to buy another dozen babies in about 6 weeks to make up for the ones the cats killed.  Now that we have the chicken Fort Knox they are safe from predators and have a space to spread out into.  It got too crowded in the coop, they needed an external run (insert wife comment here "I told you so" "last year").  


It keeps raining nonstop here.  I cannot spray any weeds and the grass is getting very tall.  The real problem is we have a lot of cheat grass and it is already forming heads.  Hopefully, I can get the ram pasture fence done in a couple of weeks (needs to stop raining when I am off work, not happening today) so the sheep can be turned loose in the pasture to eat it down.  


If anyone knows where we can get some Barbados Black belly sheep at a reasonable price let us know.  We love not having to shear them.  We would like to get up to about 15 ewes.