The girls have done a great job this year providing for the Coop and its friends.They are now settling into the winter routine. this group is a bit less adventuresome than last years gang, and they seldom want to put their feet in that nasty white stuff. Even the compost pile cannot lure them out when the snow is blowing around. Only a few make it over to the bird feeders to forage. Most stay in the coop or huddle in one corner of the pen. A few have found the overturned garden cart, and have made a dust bath area there, so we have to really check when putting them away. One is having trouble understanding the idea of going inside when it gets dark. She will sit out in the pen in the dark and wait to be placed in the coop by hand. We also have at least one egg eater. It might be Twitchy, who can't seem to get with the program most days. In general though, this is a peaceful bunch, engaged in only minor pecking order fusses. They do get bored easily however, so we try to get them interested in stepping out in the pathways a bit. I am happy to report that there have been no losses to predators this year, and no unexplained deaths. Even Twitchy seems to be surviving, though she can't get up on the roosts and is often wandering around lost and confused. The others don't seem to pick on her.
The Coop as a whole has done well this year, in all aspects. We expanded beyond chickens to growing gardens together, sharing meals, and playing music. the work flow is fairly seamless and requires almost no real organizing. Everyone just does what needs to be done when they can do it and it seems to always fall into place around work and travel schedules. We have an increasing network of friends and neighbors who buy our eggs and appreciate them. We have begun to barter also, trading eggs for apples, squash, butchering services (and a Thanksgiving turkey which Jeanne & Peg will pay for with eggs and then pay the egg jar.)
I'm sure Matt will turn this information into lovely graphs, but for now here is some data from 2010:
Total egg production: 5,234 eggs, or 436.2 dozen
eggs used by coop members: 1884, or 157 dozen
eggs sold: 2988 or 249 dozen
eggs bartered: 13 dozen
If you look at the math on this, you will see that there are 206 eggs unaccounted for. 98 of those were either broken or had been eaten (by chickens, not by us). That leaves 108, or exactly 9 dozen, which is exactly the number of eggs we collected money for, but no one wrote it down, so we had extra money in the jar to account for. My guess is that more than one of us just threw money in and forgot to indicate where it came from. Better too much in there than not enough.
We began the year with $29.50 left over from 2009. Our income from egg sales was $715.26. Our expenses were $709.37, leaving us with $35.39 going into 2011. We actually only have $35.31, so I have misplaced 8 cents somewhere in this math, but do not feel a need to torture myself over it. The total accounting speaks well for our success. We are keeping income and expenses fairly even. If anyone wants to see the month by month figures, they are in the notebook kept here by your friendly accountant. We are experimenting with new food sources, since the feed store we used has gone out of business. We have two different kinds right now, and will see which the girls like best. It may be time to take the plunge financially and move to organic food. That's what they get out in the yard, but we haven't used the feed yet, as it costs twice as much. The coop will need to decide if we want to move to it now that we are holding our own financially and there are no immediate construction needs.
We had talked about adding some Buckeyes to our flock in the spring, as an endangered heritage breed that just happens to eat tent worms. But we have just learned that the supplier of these is also going out of business and moving out of state. They have given up their flock and are no longer breeding. So we are now without a source for chicks on two fronts and will need to work on finding new ones in the spring. Some of our old girls are nearing the end of their production. We are still getting one blue egg, usually every other day, but she pecks a small hole in each one, so we have to eat that one ourselves. We are also thinking the New Hampshires may not be a real strong breed, and we will want to try something else next time. 23 seems to be a good number to hold over the winter. We could probably hold 25 comfortably. Some of us are starting to think about maybe adding some meat birds to our operation at some point, since we are learning how to process them and it would make us more resilient as a community. Just a thought for now. It would be easy to do in the summer with the existing coops, particularly once we build the chicken tractor we have talked about.
Happy New Year to all our fans,
Peggy, amateur chicken accountant
