What it costs to rear a pullet to point of lay
Ask three layer farms what a pullet costs them at point of lay and you will usually get three answers, and often all three are guesses. The chick price is remembered, because it arrived on one invoice. The feed is not, because it left the store over eighteen weeks in a hundred separate issues. The birds that died are not counted at all.
This page is about the method rather than the number. The number is yours. It moves with your feed price, your chick price, your mortality and your country, and a single figure quoted across Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa is an average of things that have very little to do with each other.
Why the figure matters more than it looks
A rearing cost is not book-keeping trivia. It is the opening carrying value of your laying flock.
Live birds are a biological asset, not stock. While a flock is brooding and growing, what you spend on it accumulates as rearing work in progress. Nothing is written down during that period, because nothing is being produced yet. At point of lay the accumulated cost transfers to the value of a mature laying bird, and from the first egg it begins to be charged off.
The standard method: take what the flock is still carrying, subtract what you expect one bird to be worth when she leaves the flock, and divide by the weeks between her age now and the age you plan to depopulate at. That is the week's charge, and it appears in the accounts as amortisation of biological assets, separate from building and machine depreciation.
Divide that weekly charge by the dozens the flock produced in the same week and you have the part of your cost per dozen that is nothing but the bird herself. So a rearing cost that is 20% too low makes every dozen look cheaper to produce than it is, for the whole laying cycle, which is precisely the period in which you are deciding what price to accept.
What goes into the build-up
| Component | Where the figure comes from | The usual trap |
|---|---|---|
| Day-old chicks | The hatchery invoice, for the birds you actually paid for | Pricing every bird placed, including any given free, cancels out the discount you negotiated |
| Feed to point of lay | Every kilo issued from placement to the first egg, valued at the price it was issued at, not at today's price | Feed issued but never recorded. This is the component most likely to be understated |
| Vaccination | Doses you bought and administered before the first laying day | Using the lifetime vaccination total, which includes doses given during lay. Doses the hatchery gave out of its own stock cost you nothing and do not belong here |
| Medication and treatment | What was actually administered during rearing | Budgeted programmes rather than what was given |
| Labour | Wages of the people who reared the flock over those weeks, apportioned to it | Left out entirely, because it never appears on a flock-shaped document |
| Housing and overhead | Brooding fuel or power, bedding, water, and a share of the house the birds occupied | Brooding heat in particular is large and short-lived, so it is easy to miss |
| Mortality | Not a cost line at all. A divisor | See below. This is the one most hand-built calculations get wrong |
The survivors carry the cost of the birds that died
Every cost above was incurred on the birds you placed. Only the birds that reach point of lay can ever repay it. So the denominator is the number housed at point of lay, not the number placed.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. Place 5,000 chicks and house 4,600 pullets and each survivor carries about 8.7% more than a naive "total spend divided by chicks placed" figure. Lose 12% instead of 8% and the survivors carry roughly 4.5% more again, before a single input price has changed.
Do not strip out the feed a bird ate before it died, either. That feed was bought and consumed. It stays in the numerator, and the smaller number of survivors absorbs it.
The same logic is why hen-housed egg production is the honest lifetime measure and hen-day production is the flattering one. Hen-day counts eggs per hen alive, so a flock that lost 15% of its birds can look excellent while quietly recording that you placed birds which never paid for themselves.
Where the variation actually comes from
- Feed price. Feed runs from day one to the first egg, so it is usually the largest part of the build-up and the part that moves most. A maize or soya price change during rearing changes the answer for that flock alone.
- Age at point of lay. A flock that comes into lay late eats grower feed for extra weeks with no eggs against it. Breeds publish their own expected week; where no standard is to hand, 18 weeks to lay and 100 weeks to cull is the common rule of thumb, and it is a rule of thumb rather than a standard.
- Rearing mortality, for the reason above.
- Country. Exchange rates, duty on premixes and vaccines, and the cost of power for brooding differ enough that a neighbouring country's figure is a starting point for a conversation, not a benchmark.
If you buy pullets instead of rearing them
Some farms buy ready to lay, at around 16 to 18 weeks. The rearing was then bought rather than done, and the cost is simply what you paid. Two things follow.
First, your own rearing cost, properly built, is the only sensible test of whether an asking price is reasonable. Without it you are negotiating blind.
Second, spread that purchase over the life the birds actually have left. Age them from their hatch date at the rearing farm, not from the day they were delivered. Treating a 17-week pullet as newly hatched spreads her cost over a life roughly 30% longer than she has, so every period is undercharged and value is left stranded on the books when the flock is culled.
Building the figure on your own farm
- Fix the flock and the window: from placement to the day the first egg was recorded.
- Total the chick invoice for the birds you paid for.
- Total every feed issue in that window at the cost it carried on the day it was issued.
- Add the vaccination and medication you bought and gave inside the window.
- Add whatever labour and overhead you can defensibly apportion, and say so when you quote the figure.
- Divide by the birds housed at point of lay.
Steps two to four are the reason this is rarely done by hand. They need daily records that were complete at the time, not reconstructed at the end of rearing from memory and a stack of delivery notes.
EggFactory keeps this figure as a running number per flock. It totals the chicks you paid for, the feed issued through brooding and growing at the price it carried when it was issued, and the vaccination doses bought and given before the first laying day, then divides by the birds housed at point of lay. Doses the hatchery gave out of its own stock are excluded, because you bought no dose.
What it does not do is apportion labour, brooding fuel or a share of the house to an individual flock. Those costs sit in the general accounts, so a full economic rearing cost means adding them yourself. That is why the figure on screen is labelled an estimate, and why it is best read as the directly attributable floor under your true cost rather than the whole of it.