As the ‘nominated’ chicken farmer around here, I get to be in all the chicken groups. My niece has all her groups full up of fashion stuff and the like, so I get the honour of having my group chat filled up all day long with advertising of chickens mostly.
Lately, there’s been a lot about advertising and pricing of chickens and eggs. Lots of discussion, because people are starting to undercut on pricing. The market as it exists now is completely saturated. Pacific signed up the other day for a new chicken farm stall and then realised that she had nothing new to offer. She happens to like black chickens and grey ones, but that makes grey eggs, and grey eggs are so plentiful around second life, that people are crushing them.
We had our first scarce egg the other day, but it’s a dull grey colour, so not very saleable. And the New Waves are from the very first sion ones, so they give eggs in the common garden variety blue and green colourways, that you see all over the place.
Considering that all the chicken farmers are advertising their produce through to other chicken farmers to buy, is there no wonder the market appears saturated? Over the past couple of days several avatars have announced they are going out of business and selling off their eggs for a pittance, whilst others are bemoaning the fact of the market, and others again are trying to keep the prices higher with a bit of added peer pressure.
As a hobbyist, it looks like we have no shot of ever selling any of our common-garden variety eggs or chickens in such a market. And to get to the colours which might give us a chance, we will have to go out and buy them, just like all the other chicken farmers are doing. Hence the advertising to each other, I see now.
Today the advertising through the Farmers Group in-world and the Chicken Guardians group has taken a more imaginative turn. It is certainly interesting watching the changing forces in the markets. Now, there are quite a few advertisers targetting certain groups, whether it’s for very colourful eggs (which are more in demand), the perfects (chickens with all three vectors the same) or I’ve just seen one advertising black killer chickens in a new way. For many people wanting just a pet chicken or two, without having to worry about the prim requirements of having eggs hatch (each chicken takes up 9 prims) perhaps the sterile black chickens are the way to go. We happen to have a couple of these, one stuck at Version 10, the other at Version 11 – and they are really good pets. They never seem to get angry anymore, and with one other hen (a pretty one, or an ancient) they make a lovely pair. Just no eggs. So, for pets, they seem a very good idea.
Pacific went out and bought up a couple of reasonably cheap pretty next generation ancient eggs, she said mainly because she can’t afford a real ancient, and our small farm of ten chickens is never going to give us one, so she wanted to have some partially glowing pretty chicks around. She then bought another true ancient egg just because it was a pretty colour. But now she has to decide which of the blacks is to go to make way for it.
So, it looks like, to me, that all those chicken farmers are actually advertising to people like us – hobbyist chicken breeders who are basically doing it because, despite the small fortune in land prices, coops, and food all the time, basically because we love the chickens. And it took me a good couple of months to admit it. We are the target audience for all of those farmers who are making a living out of their huge chicken farms. And good luck to them, too.
If you’re after a pet chicken, take a look at the Chicken Guardian group in-world. They send out two or three daily advertising notecards containing some ads for places to go find an egg or live chicken. Other than those cards, the group is for chicken questions and support during the day.
If you’re mainly after lots and lots of advertisements through IM chat then you can join the Chicken Farmers group. Pricing is not allowed on there, so you’ll have to go to every SLurl given in the advertisements to check those out. This means a bit of teleporting around to find what you want, mind you, because many eggs are coming through with just a vector colour name. So you have to go see them to see the actual colours of the chickens-to-be.
Or, if you want to just walk through some very full chicken markets to see all the eggs and chickens, you can find some links to these on my Great sionChicken List, which I keep updated as we go.
And there’s a new internet community boards just started up, too. It’s called the ChickaholicFeed Boards, and you can talk about your chickens or advertise for free on there also. It’s just started yesterday, so needs new members.
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The latest/greatest in my mind is the Rebel Chick color calculator. You enter all of your chickens numbers and sex onto a config note in the unit and it stays there forever. When you’re ready to move your chickens around for different color combinations, you always have the color range for every pairing available. Enter it once, and it stays in the note until you remove it. Genius!
You won’t believe the coincidink of this one, Shannon. But I was at a couple of markets yesterday (trying to find a pretty coloured new wave rooster) and came across those exact things. I even took a photograph because today I was going to post about them.
You would think I work for Rebel Chick… I don’t even have normal face to face conversations any more… mine all start with “Have you seen the Rebel Chick thingy?!?!?!” Especially odd AND sad when speaking with the non-farming crowd.
The one thing to watch for is the decimal point- I had a few both in front and behind my first numbers- it makes half the egg black- and not in a good way- just a mistake kind of way.
I’ve learned that when you add new names, and once you have initialized the unit, don’t even bother picking a hen… just scroll through your list of roosters and check their colors one by one. If there are any errors, a quick change on the config card takes care of it.
After I’ve checked their colors, I’ll find one of my lighter color roosters and just choose him as a background color (think “wedding date”) while I run through the hens the same way. Now that I know what causes my random half black eggs, the problems in the config card are easy to spot.
If you haven’t bought one yet, I implore you- head to the market!