The high cost of eggs and the arrival of Spring is generating outsized interest in do-it-yourself chicken farming. But eggs are just the tip of the iceberg when raising chickens.
There are plenty of really good reasons to keep a few chickens on your property; but before you make the leap into backyard farming there are things about chicken husbandry that you really ought to know. For the record, keeping chickens is truly one of the best things you can do for your family; the joys and benefits of raising backyard chickens are too many to mention, and I’ve yet to meet a person who regretted the experience to the point where they wished they hadn’t tried raising a few hens.
Chickens are truly fascinating creatures; they’re fun to have around, an absolute joy to watch as they scratch and search while eating bugs and ticks in your yard, and they lay eggs for your gastronomic pleasure. All good stuff. If you decide to keep chickens, it’s easy to access a plethora of helpful advice from books, how-to guides, the internet/social media, and even from neighborhood gatherings, if you’ve got those certain types of neighbors.
This author has more than a handful of decades’ worth of experience raising chickens, and over the years there are topics that arise over and over again from friends and neighbors seeking how-to poultry raising advice. What follows below, in no particular order, is a compilation of some of the most frequently encountered issues, most of which you are certain to experience if you keep chickens for more than a year or two. This is practical advice based upon years of actual experience that you might not otherwise be able to find in one concise place.
Consider the cost
If you are thinking the high cost of eggs is a good reason to raise some chickens, think again. Your effective cost per egg if you buy your own coop will be astronomical. Unless you’ve already got an existing chicken coop, or relatives willing to gift you one, the cost of securely housing your chickens alone will far surpass whatever amount you intend to spend on all your household egg needs for at least the next several years. If this isn’t a showstopper for you, carefully consider what type of coop you choose, taking into account your available yard space and desired number of chickens. Start with a thorough internet search for coops, such as Country Living’s Ten Best Store Bought Coops guide, and progress from there with your decision making process. Hint: it helps to have access to your eggs without having to enter your coop, especially if you have very young children.
Your yard will become a magnet for the animal kingdom
Choosing the right enclosure for your chickens is really important when it comes to keeping your chickens safe. It is said that chickens are the most important bird in the world for pretty obvious reasons; chickens are inordinately responsible for much of what the human race eats. But it’s not just humans that enjoy eating chickens and their eggs. Literally every animal that can fly, walk, crawl or slither into your yard will do so at some point to eat your chickens, their eggs, and their food. Your yard will become a veritable wild kingdom, filled with creatures both day and night that you probably did not even suspect lived in your State, let alone in your neighborhood.
Predators
Racoons are the worst, they can climb, dig, and operate simple locks. They’ll find any weakness in your enclosure to gain entrance into your coop at night, after which they will kill most or all of your chickens, but they’ll actually eat only one. It’s weird, but that’s what racoons do. At some point dogs, likely your neighbor’s otherwise friendly pooch, will get into your yard and either grab a lone free ranging chicken or, if Fido somehow gains access into your coop, it will do the same as racoons and kill all of your chickens, apparently just for fun. In daylight, especially at dawn and dusk, foxes, coyotes, and bobcats will pass rapidly through your yard and grab a foraging chicken so quickly that, even if you are in your yard at the time, there’s not much you can do and you’ll have one less bird, and perhaps a traumatized toddler too. Hawks are an ever present threat, and even though chickens have a pretty good awareness of danger from the skies, you are bound to lose one eventually, especially if you don’t have a rooster around to protect the hens.
Vermin and Pests
Other creatures will visit your chickens too. Weasels, skunks, possum, snakes (to eat eggs), and all sorts of other common creatures will become regular visitors to your yard, mostly at night. Regardless of where you live, rats are omnipresent around chicken coops; they love chicken feed. If you leave food for your chickens out overnight, you will eventually have rats in residence. You’ll rarely see rats, but they’re nasty and unwelcome. They’ll usually dig a difficult to detect hole near, or directly under, some part of your coop and they’ll happily gorge themselves at night on whatever food and scraps are in and around the coop. The very best way to keep rats away is to eliminate their food source, which means you have to be ultra disciplined about not having any food available after dark in any area of your enclosure.
Chickens are like miniature dinosaurs
Some theorize that chickens are related to dinosaurs, which would not be surprising. Think of chickens as tiny T-Rex dinosaurs with feathers. Chickens will eat anything; they are true omnivores. I’ve seen chickens attack, kill, and eat a mouse that tried to run across their coop; it was both amazing and disgusting. Whatever you put in the coop for them to eat, they will. Avoid meat products; just give them other kitchen and yard scraps and they’ll be happy and content.
Henpecking is a real thing
Unfortunately, there is a pecking order in the coop, and the low chicken on the Totem Pole will sometimes become so henpecked that it will lose feathers and perhaps bleed a bit. Chickens become like sharks in the water when they see blood; they’ll peck relentlessly at any injury on another chicken until that bird dies – and then they’ll eat the carcass. You have to be hyper-aware of this situation and act quickly by separating the injured bird and allowing it to recuperate. It helps to apply salve to the injured area; products like Rooster Booster’s Pick-No-More are helpful in these scenarios.
You will have an unending supply of manure
One of the main things to consider when raising chickens is how to handle the manure in your coop. Large coops, or portable coops that can be easily moved from place to place, require less frequent maintenance than smaller and/or stationary coops. If you keep a compost pile, life is easy, just add the manure as you collect it to your compost pile and your job is done. If you don’t have the room for compost, you’ll have to dispose of the manure somehow, usually in leaf bags with the recycling or, as a last resort, in your garbage, if that’s allowed in your municipality. The frequency with which you have to clean your coop is entirely dependent upon the density of your flock. If you keep a lot of chickens in a small area, you’ll need to clean the coop more often than if you have fewer chickens in a larger area. It’s obvious when the coop needs a cleaning. Do it the moment you think it needs doing; any delay will result in more work down the road and perhaps unhealthy chickens too.
Sickness, wild birds, dampness and mites
Chickens are living creatures susceptible to all kinds of health issues. They actually sneeze a lot, but that does not necessarily mean they are sick, they simply have to sneeze. A clean coop with fresh water, adequate food, and a bit of room to roam is pretty much all you need to keep the flock healthy. That said, the henpecking issue mentioned above is hard to avoid, and will inevitably happen. Other issues usually occur during prolonged periods of dampness; it’s during these times that chickens are most susceptible to disease, mostly because they can’t take a dirt bath, which is essential to any bird’s well-being. Wild birds will always come to visit your chickens, and they can bring with them disease and insects, most frequently mites. Mites are really bothersome for any coop resident or owner; they’ll infest your birds and get on you when you enter the coop. Fortunately, mites are not like lice; you can rid yourself of mites with a shower and a good washing of your clothes, but ridding the chickens and their coop of mites is another issue entirely. The chickens will have to be removed and individually treated with dusting powder and the coop will have to be cleaned out and fumigated. All you have to do to avoid these unpleasantries is make sure your chickens always have the ability to take a dust-bath in a patch of dry soil or a box filled with a mixture of loose, rock free dirt/sand mixed with some food grade diatomaceous earth. In fact, diatomaceous earth is invaluable when raising poultry; it has a multitude of uses in the chicken coop, all of which keep chickens healthy and make life easy for the farmer.
Food is easy; water is really important.
Feeding chickens is easy and lots of fun. As previously mentioned, chickens will eat anything and, if allowed to roam, they’ll literally feed themselves. Store-bought chicken feed does provide nutritional balance, and you will occasionally have to add calcium to the rations if eggshells start to get soft, but there are no other special requirements for a hen’s diet. Give chickens all of the garden weeds and grass clippings you can gather; it will all disappear and the chickens will be well fed and entertained. Kitchen and garden vegetable scraps are especially appreciated by hens – their eggs will have darker colored yolks and taste better too. Water is key to egg production; hens need a steady supply of clean water and if they run out of water for more than a few of hours they are likely to stop laying eggs for a couple of days. No water, no eggs, no kidding.
Chicks, pullets and eggs
When acquiring your hens, you can order day-old chicks that will come in the mail and provide some of the happiest days of you and your children’s lives. The level of excitement that the arrival of a box of chirping baby chicks creates within a family is simply astounding and hard to match. If you don’t have young children, buying pullets (hens not yet mature enough to lay eggs) is an easy option as well. Hens will begin to lay eggs at around 20 weeks of age, give or take a few weeks. The first few eggs will be tiny, but after a week or so you’ll have full-sized fresh eggs every day. Expect 5-6 eggs per week per hen until about two years of age, then plan on about 1 less egg per week with each half-year of age thereafter. Be aware that it’s perfectly normal for egg production to decline in periods of extreme heat or cold.
Chickens are a joy to raise, and if you have done your research, and are still so inclined, take the leap! As unlikely as it might sound, all of the above experiences are sure to provide you with fond memories of life’s lessons learned, childhood memories formed, family lore created, and just plain crazy good stories about the time you decided to raise chickens in your backyard. You’ll have no regrets.