My chicken buisness seems to be suffering from competition from big stores that can somehow afford to sell eggs at 3x lower price than I can.
Maybe if I had 5000 chickens, I too could afford to compete with such price.
This is because bigger buisnesses earn more per person in buisness, thus can afford to pay person same while lowering prices, where smaller buisnesses must have higher prices to pay person same as big buisnesses.
Another problem is that big stores buy eggs on mass scale, thus can afford lower price per individual egg.
Still, I seem to still have enough customers because apparently eggs from big stores arent considered healthy.
But I had much more customers when I had lower price per egg.
But you cant really do much when you start with 17 chickens and lose 4 due to predators or chickens getting lost.
You can protect chickens from predators by keeping them in cage, but chickens always want to go out and keep hitting fence until you release them.
I also lost one chicken because it ate too big snake and choked.
I lost another who returned after few days, so now I have 13 chickens.
Its not really good to lose 20% of chickens in first year, but I expect the ones who remained will likely be better at survival.
I do plan to buy more chickens, I already bought another coop for them. I am also seeking different ways to reduce feeding costs, so any suggestions would do good.
Right now 13 chickens get about 700 grams of corn per day in total, plus whatever they find when released. I was thinking maybe to reduce it even further, but I am already way below what internet recommends. Internet recommends at least 100 grams of feed, but I feed like 40 to 50 grams per chicken.