If anyone is interested, I have worked through this exercise myself and my findings are:

 

Additional Costs	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Total Costs from Above	208.33	233.33	308.33
Number of Eggs Produced by TWO chickens	624	624	624
Additional Average Cost per Egg	£0.3339	£0.3739	£0.4941
Food Costs s per Egg per the BBC	£0.0350	£0.0350	£0.0350
Total Average Cost per Egg	£0.3689	£0.4089	£0.5291

 

SWITCH to HTML format to read the table properly.

 

So, I demonstrate that it costs more to keep your own chickens than it does to buy from the supermarket. I also mention some of the opportunity costs.

 

I reveal that I can buy fresh large eggs for 10 pence each in Oxford!

 

Finally, I discuss the qualitative factors of keeping the chickens

 

Not such a silly question as you might have thought! There’s definitely a very useful half lesson here for accountants, business students and economists.

 

 

 

Alright, here you are: forget the AQA, OCR and Edexcel case study analyses for a few minutes and get to grips with a couple of chickens.

 

If you would like to incorporate management accounting with a touch of The Good Life, the environment, GreanPeace, Friends of the Earth and the rest take a look at this page and then answer the question that follows:

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3714733.stm

 

Stroll down to the Chickenomics graphic that is followed by a short series of numbers and calculations.

 

Required: the answer provided by the BBC is wrong: suggest the correct answer. (10 marks … or for AQA, 150 marks)

 

Time to fly the coop and begin to sort out the web site: regular visitors be prepared for www.duncanwil.co.uk to suffer a possible short loss as I migrate from one ISP to another.

 

 

Duncan Williamson

 

PS forgive the dig at AQA but I couldn’t resist: I was going to develop it even further but resisted the temptation!