When you see our sign, we have eggs!
Welcome to our farm page! We love fresh eggs and love animals, so we decided to raise chickens for eggs! What started as 10 chickens in 2017 will be roughly 100 chickens in 2024! We pamper our chickens to keep them happy and healthy. If you are in the Camano Island area and you are welcome to come see the chickens and buy eggs if we have them!
Latest updates – the chicks are growing fast! They have started to get their brown feathers – it feels like almost overnight!
Last week I was worried about the thunderstorm we had impacting egg production – it did not! Friday, 2 days after, we had the highest egg production yet, with almost 70 eggs in one day!
Last week I was worried about the thunderstorm we had impacting egg production – it did not! Friday, 2 days after, we had the highest egg production yet, with almost 70 eggs in one day!
The 2025 chicks are all doing well! It is amazing how fast they grow. The two new videos are a few days apart, but you can see feather development and general size changes pretty easily! The rest of the flock won’t meet them for a while but appear to be enjoying the longer days! Egg production has been consistent and we have generally been able to handle requests for eggs.
Finally, the new additions to the flock have arrived! 26 chicks arrived at the post office early this morning, and happily, they were all noisy and moving around! They will be quarantined and in a brooder for at least the next 7 or 8 weeks, and won’t be laying for at least another 12 weeks after that. Coop 6 is mostly done, but will get used by the existing flock until the new girls are ready to join the flock. The new chicks are “Carmine Brown” and should lay dark brown eggs (https://jenkshatchery.com/products/cb-z0-gr?srsltid=AfmBOorEYzoUySQSpfxogMTNJEiLsT6lPcmzUOyh2mUMbctZlskeeX42)
It has been a while since posting! With the recent cold spell, the girls are doing well. We’ve had to make some adjustments to the automatic watering systems (adding heaters and changing out nipples) . They continue to lay, which is great. We did recently have 1 chicken die, due to a prolapse, which is the part about keeping chickens I do not enjoy (the death and dying part).
One topic that I’ve been waiting to talk about is egg pricing – many of you have asked about it. There have been lots of national and local news stories on TV and other streams about the price and availability of eggs as well as avian flu.
One thing missing from the coverage about the price of eggs, particularly when talking about “supply and demand” is greed. Economics says in a healthy market, when supply decreases and demand remains the same, prices can/should increase. This is assuming you are talking about a business where the goal of the business to maximize profit.
MJ’s Girls Camano is not a business. It is a hobby – the money we get for a dozen eggs almost covers the cost of feed, cartons, and labels. It doesn’t cover the cost of materials for building/maintaining a safe place for the flock. It does not cover the costs of the chickens, it does not cover our time in feeding and caring for the flock, nor for building and fixing their spaces.
You may be thinking all of this was leading to an increase in the price of our eggs, but that is not what this is about. The costs of feed and treats have not gone up for us, so why would I raise the price of eggs? We are not trying to (and don’t) make a profit now. We have a hobby that gives us the opportunity to meet our neighbors, keeps me from sitting in a chair all day, and gives us a supply of great fresh eggs for our own use. I feel that the super high prices of eggs are really due to greed – prices don’t have to go up so much.
Yes – there have been reductions in the commercial flocks due to the culling that happens when avian flu is detected. It takes 5 to 6 months for new chickens to get to egg laying maturity, and a few more months before the egg sizes meet M or L size.
My solution to the current market is to add some more chicks! This is known as “chicken math” (https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/official-definition-of-chicken-math.623182/) – my costs won’t change much if I add about 25 more chicks, but it will actually get me closer to breaking even with the feed I currently purchase. I am getting more “dark brown” egg layers and hope they will start laying towards the middle of fall. I won’t bore you with the math, but it actually almost works!
We will be super careful about disease prevention. We will not be allowing the handling/petting of chickens, nor having anyone step into the chicken areas. This will help ensure we don’t introduce avian flu to our flock.
Anyway – thanks for letting me vent – if you made it this far through my post!
One topic that I’ve been waiting to talk about is egg pricing – many of you have asked about it. There have been lots of national and local news stories on TV and other streams about the price and availability of eggs as well as avian flu.
One thing missing from the coverage about the price of eggs, particularly when talking about “supply and demand” is greed. Economics says in a healthy market, when supply decreases and demand remains the same, prices can/should increase. This is assuming you are talking about a business where the goal of the business to maximize profit.
MJ’s Girls Camano is not a business. It is a hobby – the money we get for a dozen eggs almost covers the cost of feed, cartons, and labels. It doesn’t cover the cost of materials for building/maintaining a safe place for the flock. It does not cover the costs of the chickens, it does not cover our time in feeding and caring for the flock, nor for building and fixing their spaces.
You may be thinking all of this was leading to an increase in the price of our eggs, but that is not what this is about. The costs of feed and treats have not gone up for us, so why would I raise the price of eggs? We are not trying to (and don’t) make a profit now. We have a hobby that gives us the opportunity to meet our neighbors, keeps me from sitting in a chair all day, and gives us a supply of great fresh eggs for our own use. I feel that the super high prices of eggs are really due to greed – prices don’t have to go up so much.
Yes – there have been reductions in the commercial flocks due to the culling that happens when avian flu is detected. It takes 5 to 6 months for new chickens to get to egg laying maturity, and a few more months before the egg sizes meet M or L size.
My solution to the current market is to add some more chicks! This is known as “chicken math” (https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/official-definition-of-chicken-math.623182/) – my costs won’t change much if I add about 25 more chicks, but it will actually get me closer to breaking even with the feed I currently purchase. I am getting more “dark brown” egg layers and hope they will start laying towards the middle of fall. I won’t bore you with the math, but it actually almost works!
We will be super careful about disease prevention. We will not be allowing the handling/petting of chickens, nor having anyone step into the chicken areas. This will help ensure we don’t introduce avian flu to our flock.
Anyway – thanks for letting me vent – if you made it this far through my post!
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