The chicken or the egg

[Not That Guy]

Which is better to cook up? And if the chicken is better is it better to hack its head off as soon as i pokes its head through the shell or after a couple months?

[Lomax]

You don't get nearly enough meat from a chick corpse so it's better to wait until they've grown to adulthood before you slaughter them. That being said, if you have a lot of chickens they will multiply insanely fast so plant a lot of feed for them and when you think you have enough, plant some more cause they're like the friggin' apocalypse.

[dwobwinkle]

The eggs are way more efficient. The only reason to raise chickens for food is if you have a warg, and even then there are better options. The chickens will eat more food growing to mature size than you get from them, and you also get fertilized eggs at a slower rate than unfertilized.

[WhyBorne]

An egg (fertilized or unfertilized) is the equivalent of 5 meat when used in a meal.

Based on my experience, there is no difference in the amount of time for a chicken to lay a fertilized egg vs. an unfertilized egg.

A baby chick is worth 14 meat [corrected].
A juvenile chick yields 19 meat (after 1 season of life).
An adult chicken yields 27 meat (after 2 seasons of life).

So, you can see that the longer you wait, the more meat you will get; however, there are additional things to consider:

1. Eggs can be stacked 75 to a tile and that is the equivalent of (5x75) 375 meat. 375 meat would take up 5 tiles of freezer storage. So eggs save a lot of space over meat, which means you are also saving resources and electricity.

2. To get from egg to baby chick, you need to wait for the egg to hatch. This means you risk some potential disaster destroying the egg (explosion, fire, animal, etc). You also need to dedicate some space to store the fertilized eggs. Also, you then need to take the time to continually review the "Animals" tab, click butcher on each new chick, and have a colonist spend the time killing, butchering, and hauling.

3. To get from baby chick to juvenile or adult, you've got to keep the chicken alive and fed for 1 to 2 seasons. So if you have plenty of grass fields around your base you may be fine. If you have to feed the chickens your colonists food, then you are losing overall food (or maybe swapping veg for meat). Then you still have to go through the butchering process.

If you are willing to deal with all the down sides of waiting until that egg is an adult, then waiting provides more meat (up to 5.4 times more meat).

Personally, I go with just using the unferilized eggs.