7 articles on starting out for Philippine backyard keepers, every peso figure sourced and dated.
The first flock: what it costs to place, how long the money is out of your hands, and which decisions are expensive to reverse later. Written for a backyard, not a commercial house.
Every page answering this question was written somewhere a barangay clearance does not exist. Here the ceiling is set by an ordinance nobody has collected into a national list, the DA's old registration floor was rescinded in 2023, and the state has no category for a flock smaller than 250 birds.
The layer pillar on this site says the pullet premium is a figure you cannot look up, set against ₱270 from 2018 and a rearing cost you have not run yet. This is that rearing cost, run: feed from the Hy-Line rearing table, brooder electricity at the August 2026 Meralco rate, and mortality taken off the top, turned into the pullet quote at which buying and rearing cost the same.
The premium is real, sourced and per kilo. The profit is still not computable: the whole published record of what a Philippine native chicken eats is one 20-bird UPLB trial that ends six weeks before market age. Here is the half that has numbers.
One batch, day 1 to harvest, with a Philippine figure attached wherever one exists and an honest blank where none does. There are more blanks than you would expect.
Hy-Line and Lohmann were measured separately and land on the same feed-per-egg figure. Put it against the June 2026 farmgate and the margin on an egg is thinner than anybody tells you.
Every beginner's guide opens on how many chickens to get. That question is fifth, and it is derived: three of the four decisions above it are fixed on day 1 and cannot be managed down later, while the head count is only ever the smallest of what your floor holds, what your buyer absorbs, and what your own three quotes will fund.
The day-old chick figure is published, wholesale, and not what a dealer will quote you for 20 sisiw. Feed, coop, vaccine and equipment have no Philippine price at all. What is computable is the shape: cost per bird falls hard from 20 to 50 and barely at all from 50 to 100.