Should i get backyard chickens

I even created a spreadsheet and highlighted the chicken breeds that should be laying early between 17 to 26 weeks. I bought those breeds. One has yet to lay a single egg and is now at the ripe old age of I have started to plant the seeds of her becoming dinner but once again have been rebuffed by the family. Perhaps if I send them all away on a trip and enjoy her all for myself? But I digress. There seems to be no rhyme or reason when backyard chickens will decide to lay eggs.

They may lay every day for a month, then take a break for a few days, then lay every other day. Has your kid ever had a nagging set of symptoms that you simply could not diagnose?

Well, prepare to do the same with your chickens. You will spend hours reading, asking for and getting random advice from strangers on what to do with your chickens. You just might save the rest of your flock with this quick cure-all remedy.

I mean — they smell. They poop everywhere and it accumulates like all get out. Yes, you can throw down more straw and even some diatomaceous earth D. Oh, and then there are the flies that come to the party. My backyard now consists of two fly traps that smell like dead fish , square feet of straw about three or four inches deep, and twice a week sprinklings of D. This helps but the only true solution is cleaning and replacing your straw weekly.

Buying expensive products like Dookashi which may or may not help to solve the problem. To me, this is the number one reason to get backyard chickens. The eggs are supremely good. The yolks are bright yellow and they stand up nicely. Having a basket of fresh eggs on the counter to draw from is a lovely experience. The colors of the shells are beautiful and picking them up, warm from the brooder, is the most positive sign of freshness one can imagine.

Eating fresh eggs is a sublime culinary adventure. For this reason alone you should get your own chickens. I never thought I would say this but I like watching my chickens play together. They chase each other, push each other around, fly up in the air a few feet and drop down, roll in the dirt, scratch and peck, etc.

Sitting on the porch and looking at them makes me happy for some reason. Either way, I like it. Hens have around two good years of laying before their production declines and they become freeloaders.

When the cost of feed is greater than the money you save in eggs then you have a little mental cost-benefit analysis to complete. On a true farm, animals that are no longer useful are disposed of eaten. Since you are a gentleman farmer you can make a far more subjective decision that includes things like love for your birds and the value you place on them as pets. That said, they are pretty tasty little morsels and stewed chicken and dumplings is pretty damned good. Plus, you can experienced the whole process all over again by buying new chicks to replace that old hen!

She wants chickens. She wants them bad. She wants the experience of fluffy little chicks and she wants hens to weed for her and she wants her daughter to have that mini-backyard-petting-zoo experience. She has, up until now, not given into her chicken-keeping desires. For this I am so proud of her. I maintain a Pinterest board of chicken keeping and coop inspiration , by the way, if you are into that kind of thing. A continuous supply of plentiful eggs requires a continuous supply of hens at laying age.

For us non-commercial chicken-keepers, a good rule of thumb is that hens will lay pretty consistently with periods off for molting, reduced day length and broodiness from about 6 months old until about 3 years old. Although you will hear a lot of anecdotes about individual hens that keep pumping out eggs until they are 5 or 6 years old, the general consensus is that three years old is usually the beginning of the end for consistent egg laying.

A well-kept backyard hen, protected from hawks, raccoons and Fido, can easily live to be 8 or 10 years old, and ages of twice that are not unheard of. Bear with me here as I do some Urban Homesteader math. One layer hen eats about 1. Pastured birds will eat less purchased feed — yet another good reason to buy this book and study it before you design your coop and run.

If a chicken starts laying at 6 months old this is a bit later than average but it makes my numbers easy and has essentially stopped laying by 4 years old, and lives naturally to be 8, a backyard chicken keeper is looking at 3. Meanwhile, if you live in a city or suburb, you have an even bigger problem: your now non-laying hens are taking up your legal urban chicken quota which could be filled with younger, laying hens, and you are stuck.

If your hens are pure pets, this is all totally fine. There is another option, of course. You can make the decision to cull your birds when they are past prime lay. So basically those are your two choices: you continue to pay and care for chickens that barely give you eggs or you cowboy up and you deal with the slaughter of no longer profitable hens.

Can I give them to a chicken sanctuary when they get too old to lay? Some place that has a no kill policy? You know why? Personal responsibility. Your chickens, your adoption, your decision, your responsibility to see it through to the end. You own the chicken. Your home is a good home. This pisses me off, as you can probably tell. There is absolutely nothing ethically superior — and quite a bit that is ethically dubious, if you ask me — about enjoying the benefits of a young laying hen and then turning over the care or slaughter of that hen to someone else once it stops laying.

Normally I am a Rah-Rah Cheerleader for this quirky way of life, and I think any fair assessment would deem me particularly encouraging to beginners. I garden, keep chickens and ducks, homeschool my two kids and generally run around making messes on my one-third of an acre in suburban Seattle. Some councils also have restrictions or regulations relating to the construction of chicken housing.

You may require a permit. Roosters are usually not permitted due to their crowing. Contact your local council for the most accurate and up-to-date local bylaws and regulations. For further information please consult the Property PIC information for poultry owners page on the Agriculture Victoria website. When purchasing chickens, it is best to purchase vaccinated birds from a reliable commercial source.

A good starter flock usually consists of 4 to 5 birds aged 16 to 24 weeks. This many birds will usually produce enough eggs for a household. Ensure your chicken house and chicken run are fox-proof. Fully enclose the chicken run with wire mesh buried into the soil at a depth of 50cm to prevent foxes from digging under the fence. Cover the floor of the chicken house and the nesting box with sawdust or straw to a depth of 8cm so that it mixes with the poultry droppings to form a litter.

This litter can be removed and composted. Ensure the chicken house is adequately ventilated and positioned to protect against prevailing winds and rain.

Additional vegetation along the fencing can assist with wind protection. Composting is a wonderful way to reduce your ecological footprint, and a nitrogen-rich compost pile is a healthy compost pile. What better to provide the nitrogen than chicken poo? Eggshells are a great addition, too, especially in areas where there's lots of clay in the soil. At the end of the composting process you'll have "black gold" soil, so called because it's so rich and fertile.

Leaves, weeds and grass clippings are a treat for Gallus gallus domesticus. They'll happily dig through whatever you give them, eat what they can, and pulverize the rest. Give a small flock a heap of yard and garden debris and a week later it'll be gone without a trace. No need to bag it and pile it by the curb! If you're aware of conditions in factory farms, even in some of the so-called "free range" farms, we needn't say more.

If you're not, please research it. Factory farming is terrifyingly cruel. The good news is that by keeping a few pet chickens of your own, you're reducing the demand for store-bought eggs and sending a message to those factory farms that you don't want what they're selling.