Grow your own eggs, but it will cost you

With the price of eggs at Albertsons ranging up to $8 a dozen, it may have occurred to you to buy chickens to produce eggs for your family. Well, it’s definitely possible, but there are costs involved, as I found out at 2 stores here in Tucson.

The first store I went to was OK Feed and Supply at the corner of Dodge and Ft. Lowell. “What’s this?” I said to myself a couple of years ago when I first saw the building with its big sign, a replica horse on the roof, and murals on the side. “A feed store at the northern edge of mid-town?” I promised myself to visit this urban feed store one day, but never got around to it until a few days ago. It turned out OK Feed (founded in 1938 when it was way way out of town) was one of the two main sources of baby chicks in Tucson.

It starts with a $5.99 chick

At OK Feed the cost for each tiny chicken is $5.99. The staff there told me they are selling like hotcakes to people, many of whom want to produce their own eggs. A shipment of 300 chicks went within days. Twice since, they have re-ordered the three varieties of tiny, skittering bundles of cute-ness. But cute chicks take a while to grow up to be egg-layers. A young couple were buying 3 chicks while I was there. I wonder if they know it will be 18 to 22 weeks before egg production begins — under good conditions and if the chickens are not eaten by coyotes before then.

But is it legal?

It suddenly occurred to me as I drove off to the northwest to the second store that said it had baby chicks, that I had never heard a rooster call in Tucson. And I had heard roosters and chickens in a lot of Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Maybe it wasn’t legal to keep chickens in mid-town Tucson? Were there space requirements? And what about the neighbors or the HOA?

The answers are: it’s legal to keep backyard chickens with no specific backyard size requirement, but watch out for your HOA. And as for the rooster calls — it’s illegal to keep roosters within the Tucson city limits. Crack-of-dawn crowing is banned to silence the rooster in residence at Arizona Feeds Country Store — North.

Or you can buy a chick for $6.99

At Arizona Feeds Country Store you can buy a chick for $6.99. And they, too, are bundles of adorable cuteness. After I took a few photos I spent some time wandering around the store and came across a Beginners Poultry Kit for $34.99. Okay, I thought, that’s the beginning of the costs of 18 to 22 weeks of feeding and caring for the chickens before they begin to pay their way by producing eggs for your family. (BTW, as a girl I raised chickens and they poop like crazy and the poop is very stinky! Cleaning up after them is part of the “caring” for growing chickens.)

So as nice an idea it is to “grow-your-own-eggs”, maybe 20 weeks from now the price of a dozen eggs will drop down again. After all, the price of red peppers at Albertson’s has now returned to 99 cents, dropping 30% from it’s inflationary high.

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