04/16/2026
What she said 🤣
What's the deal with HENS?
Year-round, I get messages daily asking if we have any hens (or pullets). This time of year I get dozens of these messages each day! People seem frustrated that there are not many laying (or almost-laying) hens available to buy. Someone recently said "If you raised a bunch of females over the winter, you'd make a fortune right now." Well....no....
The costs of raising chickens is high. A growing and fully grown bird eats about 25 cents worth of feed daily (and that number is going up as prices rise). Add in the cost of the value of that chick, water, vaccine, regular deworming, bedding, cocciostat and consider the overhead: brooders, coops, heat source, building, and the labor of the chicken breeder (I personally put in 3-5 hours a day feeding, cleaning, and caring for my birds). So $8/month to feed the bird (not including treats). not counting ANY OTHER expenses, I've got almost $50 in a 6 month old laying hen. If I want to just break even on that hen, I would need to charge at least $75 for her. Add into that the fact that 50% of the chicks I hatch out are male....and we're lucky to get $10 for most roosters....I'm spending over $150 for each hen that I raise to laying age. I would be an absolute fool to try to raise chickens just to produce laying age hens for people. Would YOU pay me $150 for a young laying hen? If I raised a batch of 50 chicks from hatching to laying age, I'd have about $3750 in that batch of 50 birds by the time they're 6 months old, not counting my labor. 25 of those would be roosters that I might get $10 each for...if I'm lucky. If I sold the 25 hens for $40 each, I'm making $250 (roosters) plus $1000 (hens). I'm losing $2500 on that batch I just spent 6 months raising.
This is why we don't sell many hens. We lose a lot less money by selling chicks as chicks, before we've got much invested in them.
If you are looking for hens to buy, keep this in mind. Make sure that anyone selling you hens isn't selling you retired (not laying any more) or diseased birds. Ask if they've been vaccinated for Marek's (it's a herpesvirus that's everywhere in the southeast), and ask if they've been dewormed regularly.
Golden Gaits Farm rarely sells sexed females. When we do offer them for sale, they usually sell within minutes of posting them for sale online. We don't take waiting lists and it would be absolutely impossible to let everyone know when we do have certain breeds of hens for sale. There would be hundreds of people on those lists! We run 5 different businesses and don't have time to keep track of waiting lists. We tell everyone to keep an eye on our page.
Some time this summer (we don't know when), we will be offering most of our breeding hens and roosters for sale as we are raising nice replacements for all of the breeds we want to raise next year. Until then, we've got some super nice unsexed chicks in many unusual breeds available!
