Business Ownership: The Ups & Downs

Paul's little chicken egg business has not been all feathered fun for the past nine months. Nor has it been all bulging piggy banks. Paul has experienced a few set backs in his business. My first impulse as a mother was to step in and fix it all for him, but then I realized there is value in learning through hardship. (I'm sure Matt was ten steps ahead of me on that one.)

We delayed ordering new chicks last spring as we didn't want to hassle with their more involved care when our family would be leaving for several days for the homeschool conference. This would have left us to find someone to care for the chicks while we were gone and we just didn't feel an inexperienced person would be up to the task, let alone the time commitment. So instead of ordering chicks through the mail, as we had done the year before, Matt decided to buy chicks at the local feed store after we returned from the conference.

At that point, most of Paul's chicken flock was two years old or older, so the hens' peak laying time was ending. He needed to replace at least half of the flock in order to replace the birds that weren't producing as much. We wanted Paul to continue to be able to supply his customers with eggs.

So he and Matt went to the feed store and came home with a total of twenty sexed pullet chicks. They paid the extra price to ensure that all (or nearly all--there's always a mistake or two) of the chicks would grow into nice laying hens. Bear in mind that it takes at least six months for a chick to grow into a chicken and begin laying. That's a lot of coddling and a lot of feed for no return on your time, effort or money. Not to mention the fact that chicks are only available for a few weeks every spring. After that, one has to wait until the following year to purchase any more.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. Paul and Matt purchased fourteen Neon Browns and six Rhode Island Reds. Two of the Reds died early on and ELEVEN of the fourteen Neon Browns turned out to be cockerels (roosters). The tell tale cock a doodle doos beginning at four o'clock each morning were a dead giveaway. Not to mention their more prominent combs and tails and their bullying behavior toward the other chickens.

What to do? Matt called the manager at the feed store and she just laughed and said, "That's the way it goes sometimes." She did offer to "make it right" this spring, so we'll have to see if that offer is still on the table come April. Our usual way of dealing with roosters is to enjoy a good meal of them after they've been cooked on the grill, but this situation was different simply because of its sheer magnitude.

Then Matt thought of asking the woman who farms down the road if she might be interested in our roosters. We had heard that she sold cockerels to customers for eating. Matt and Paul loaded up the roosters in the dog carrier, put the carrier in the back of the Subaru and headed over there. The woman checked over the birds, decided they were healthy and robust and then proposed a trade. She would trade Paul some of her pullets for his roosters and even pay him a small amount once the whole deal was settled. It seemed as if things were finally starting to look up and the year's plans for keeping up the egg production would be realized after all.Those new little adolescent pullets adjusted to their new digs quite well, but they didn't start laying until nearly two months after the woman said they would. So Paul suffered a set back in both time and money, but not nearly as badly as if he would have had to wait until this spring to replenish his flock.

Then another sort of setback occurred. Paul's chickens got mites. I've been told the reason why commercial growers don't allow their chickens on the ground is because of this very issue. Mites are in the ground and chickens like to muck around in the dirt. They like to scratch in it and they like to give themselves dust baths. So the chickens got mites and their egg production plummeted. It took us awhile to find the reason for the lack of egg production. We could never see any mites on the chickens, so we ruled that problem out at first. We wasted a few weeks fiddling with the food, water, bedding and lighting before we figured out what was really going on.

Matt and Paul sprayed all the birds and then two weeks later (per the package instructions) sprayed them again. They also cleaned out the chicken house, sprayed the inside of the house and put all new wood chips in the house and nesting boxes. We thought the problem was solved, but a few weeks later, we realized it wasn't. So Matt and Paul repeated the whole process all over again, this time dusting the soil outside the coop as well. Each spraying required that day's eggs to be thrown away (purely a precaution on our part). Our last option would have been to give them some sort of oral medication, but that would have required that the eggs not be consumed for two weeks. So far we haven't had to resort to that option and we hope we won't have to.

So all the weeks when the chickens were producing less eggs because of lack of maturity and the mites issue, I was buying eggs at the store for our own use so that Paul could continue to fill his egg orders.

The other setback to Paul's business has been the soaring price of feed. I was talking to a friend about this issue as she and her kids also have a little egg selling business. She told me someone said to her something along the lines of, "Oh you must make a tidy little profit on these eggs." (She sells her eggs for $3 a dozen, just like Paul does). I laughed when she told me that story. Paul is not making any profit on his eggs right now. (Matt is actually losing money, as he pays for Paul's chicken feed. Paul gives half of his earnings to Matt to offset the feed cost. Obviously, if Paul isn't selling very many eggs, Matt's even more in the red.)

Now that the egg production has come back up (we're getting almost 2 dozen eggs/day), Paul is having a tough time selling all of them. He made phone calls to his one of egg business buddies yesterday and asked if he might want to buy some eggs from him. (This is not an unusual practice. Paul's buddies sometimes buy eggs from him in order to fill their egg orders if they are running short on eggs for some reason.)
So if it's not one thing, it's another in the chicken business. Right now our refrigerators are burgeoning with lovely free range, expensive eggs. Even with all of our baking and egg casserole making we can't seem to make a dent in them. Matt plans to run another ad at work on Monday to see if he can rustle up a few more customers. In the meantime, I have eggs planned at least once for dinner and once for lunch this week, as well as the usual eggs that some family members eat for breakfast each morning. I guess it'll be another eggstravaganza week at the Macduff household.