Feed per egg: what it really costs you to make one egg
Turn the bags you issue into a cost per egg you can compare month to month, and find out where feed money leaks before it shows in your profit.
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Why feed per egg is the number to watch
Feed is usually the biggest cost on a layer farm. Knowing what you spent on feed in a month tells you very little on its own: a bigger bill can be good news if the hens laid more. What you want to know is how much feed, and how much money, went into each egg.
Two figures answer that:
- Feed per egg: grams of feed used for every egg collected.
- Feed cost per egg: shillings of feed behind every egg.
How to work it out
The formulas
Feed per egg = feed issued (g) ÷ eggs collected
Feed cost per egg = cost of the feed issued ÷ eggs collected
Use the same period for both sides: a day, a week or a month. A month is the most useful for comparing, because it smooths out the day-to-day swings.
Here is a worked example with round numbers:
| One month | |
|---|---|
| Feed issued | 165 bags of 50 kg = 8,250 kg |
| Eggs collected | 64,500 |
| Feed per egg | 8,250,000 g ÷ 64,500 = 128 g |
| Price paid | KES 3,000 a bag = KES 495,000 |
| Feed cost per egg | 495,000 ÷ 64,500 = KES 7.67 |
Your own numbers will differ with breed, age, feed and season. What matters is how your figure moves from one month to the next.
Count what the hens got, not what you bought
The most common mistake is to divide the feed you bought by the eggs you collected. Purchases arrive in lumps: one big delivery makes a month look terrible and the next month look cheap. Record the bags issued to each house every day instead. That is the feed the birds actually had in front of them.
At the end of the month, check that bags bought, minus bags issued, matches the bags left in the store. If it doesn't, feed is going somewhere it shouldn't.
What pushes the number up
When feed per egg climbs for more than a week or two, look for:
- Waste: feeders filled too high, spilled feed in the litter, or rats and wild birds in the store.
- Fewer eggs, same feed: a drop in laying rate shows up here first in money terms. See how to read your laying rate.
- Heat or cold: hens eat more to keep warm in cold weather, and lay less in hot spells.
- An older flock: as hens age they lay fewer eggs, so each egg carries more feed.
- A price rise: the grams stay the same but the cost per egg jumps. Keep the two figures separate so you can tell which one moved.
Make it a monthly habit
- Record bags issued to each flock every day.
- Record every egg collection, cracked eggs included.
- At month end, work out feed per egg and feed cost per egg for each flock.
- Put the figure next to last month's. A steady rise deserves a walk round the feeders and the store.
In OrnisNest, feed is recorded in bags as it is issued, and the Finance overview shows the feed cost behind each egg, worked out from the prices you entered for your feed.