Chickens for Eggs - Anyone Here With Experience?

My landlord is considering keeping chickens. Apparently his wife is bitching about the price of eggs (again), and they certainly have the land to acquire some small livestock (28 hectares). Well - anyone here with experience in keeping chickens?

I’m thinking Rhode Island Reds - apparently they’re good egg-layers, they’re hardy, and have some cold tolerance (sort of important around here).

He expressed some concern about waste disposal but I pointed out that chicken shit is GREAT for compost heaps and if he didn’t want it I’d take at least some of it. Which lead into a discussion of composting for his garden. I also mentioned that, since he’s planning to fence his vegetable garden this year, he could put the chickens in it periodically for bug control. Good for the chickens… good for the vegetables… (well, they might nibble a little but hey, you’re getting eggs out of it, right?)

He’s more than capable of building coops and fencing for keeping the chickens safe. A necessity between the raccoons, coyotes, foxes, and goodness knows what else we have running around the area.

Any thoughts/experiences/suggestions/warnings?

(Not certain this will go forward for sure, but this time of year is when we plan our agricultural projects for summer)

My friend has backyard chickens. He had 4 but raccoons got Ken.

I know he likes the website http://www.mypetchicken.com/ which has tons of info about backyard chicken keeping.

Isn’t this one of the things where you do it because you want some combination of a hobby, pets, or fresh eggs, not because it makes economic sense (both in terms of chickenfeed and your time)?

The feed is far, far cheaper than the value of the eggs. You do need to have a space for them, but they’re remarkably low-maintenance: Refill the feed bin every month or two, gather the eggs every day, and give them plenty of water every day, and then shovel out the manure once a season or so.

They’ll naturally stop laying in the winter, but this is governed by light, not by temperature. You can keep them laying year-round by putting a light on a timer in the coop, set to light up around twilight.

I don’t know how much they would eat vegetables out of the garden, but there are certainly some plants that they absolutely love. On the bright side, some of those things they love are weeds, such as chickweed. On the downside, some of the weeds they love, you might want to be eating yourself, such as purslane.

We have four Rhode Island Reds that we raised from 1 day old. All 4 hens lay an egg a day if you feed them well. Well worth it in my opinion. We keep them in a coop with a wire mesh bottom so all the poop falls to the ground where we can scoop it up and use for fertilizer. They make no noise unless they are laying in egg, in which case it is just loud clucking for a few minutes. We feed them mainly chicken feed and scraps from our meals. We also let them out periodically to let them eat the bugs out of the yard.

You do need to think about where they will be located. The smell from the poop is very strong and you need to be mindful of neighbors. Also, here on Kauai we have wild chickens everywhere. There are about a dozen of them that come to our house daily to eat the food our chickens drop and to try to eat our cats food. The wild chickens poop all over the sidewalk and will try to mate with our hens if we dont get them safely into their coop.

Did not know this and have not experienced this with ours. They have laid daily all winter. Maybe because we live in the tropics?

If you live in hawaii, the day and night are nearly equal and don’t change with the seasons. Since you never have a season of reduced light, you never experience a break in laying.

Used to tend the family chickens when I was a teenager.

There is nothing quite like the smell of chicken shit on a hot summer’s day. Melt the sinuses clear out of your head and have your brain quivering in fear in the back of your skull. As far as fertilizer goes, well, it’ll burn the fuck out of everything it is applied to. You’re going to want to mix it with mulch and let it weather for a year before you even consider using it somewhere you want to grow something.

And I wouldn’t let them wander the veggie patch. They’ll tear it up.

When I was about 5 my parents bought a house that came with a chicken coop. Nice fresh eggs, yum. I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Then one day my sister came inside and told Mom there was a funny kitty cat in with the chickens. It was a big ol’ rat. We had one of those chickens for dinner each Sunday thereafter until they were all gone, and bought eggs from a farmer after that.

Personally, I think your parents were foolish to sacrifice the chickens because of a rat, if in fact that’s what they did. Or maybe they were just looking for an excuse to not bother with the chickens anymore.

Based on the reported feed requirements on various on-line sources and the cost of chicken feed locally, even if they were fed solely with bought feed there’s a good chance that my friend would come out ahead raising chickens rather than buying eggs. Even better if they utilize some kitchen scraps and allow a little foraging.

Locating the coop a sufficient distance from the house to avoid bad odors should be no problem. I mean, seriously, he has 70 acres.

And neither of us has any intention of putting raw guano on a garden. That’s what compost heaps are for, aging that sort of thing.

Look into designs for movable chicken coops, here is an example:

http://howtomakechickencoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/portable-chicken-coops-3.jpg

See it has wheels under one end and a handle on the other.

If you have a large yard or area you can leave the coop in one spot for awhile so the chickens fertilize a spot and eat the bugs there, then move it a bit to a fresh spot. They can be moved by hand or towed with a lawn tractor or riding lawn mower.

That way you do not end up with a big pile of crap under the coop that will smell and that you have to keep cleaning up. Move it to a sheltered spot in the winter, a sunny spot in summer, and spread the wealth, I mean poop around.

There are many different designs, look them up.

I’d be careful about bug control in the garden. I’ve found the Rhode Island Reds to be a bit too interested in the plants.

They’ll also eat kitchen scraps, although you can’t give them everything and it will decrease your compost volume.

Buy eggs at the store. Cheaper, cleaner, quieter and less hassle.

By the way, we have chickens for sale.

I have 5 chickens. Sexlink are good layers and mellow. We get an egg a day. In the winter, a light kept them laying. Go on craigslist or somewhere like that. Plenty of coops around. I change the food and water weekly, get the eggs daily, throw the scraps in daily. That’s about it. You do need to fence in a run because they will devour your garden and scratch the ever living shit out of everything else really quickly.

We have a coop with a raised chicken coop part, and an enclosed 3x6 area, with an attached run off of that.

A couple of extra chickens and you can give away eggs. It’s kinda cool.

My kids don’t have pets so they do all sorts of wacky stuff trying to teach stupid chicken tricks. Raised them from chicks, so that was fun too.

I think having half a dozen chickens is pretty cool. We can go away for over a week and not worry about them (leave the water and feed in the chicken feeders).

Commonly called a chicken tractor.

CMC

Since the OP is looking for shared opinions and advice, let’s move this to IMHO.

samclem, moderator

My first thoughts were that they would tear up the garden, but that’s just guessing on my part. What I know for sure is that my grandfather had a chicken farm for fifty years and put rotted chicken manure on his vegetable gardens. They were the most outrageous, incredible, gorgeous vegetable gardens I’ve ever seen. Factor the manure and the vegetables you’ll get out of it into the cost of keeping the chickens, for sure.

Broomstick, I will add an article about a chicken rescue service in MN. This speaks about some of the problems seen in raising chickens as a hobby.

Yeah, they will tear up the garden during the growing season. But if you put them in there during the off season they will till up the plot for you and eat any available grubs and bug eggs they find, and fertilize while they’re at it. We love keeping chickens, the eggs are so much better than store bought and you will be surprised how much personality they have. A chicken tractor is a good idea if you live in an area with a lot of predators. A good resource for questions and coop design is backyardchickens.com. They have a great forum.

Re: breeds, it’s fun to have a mix, so you can tell them apart. Consider getting an easter egger or two; they’re great layers of blue/green eggs. Red sex links are excellent layers, as are buff orpingtons, and Australorps (sp?). There are several others. Most standard chickens are fine in cold weather. We never lost one to cold when we were living in Maine, despite having an overly ventilated coop. (Don’t heat your coop, ever.) My dad, in Arkansas, has lost several to heat.

If you want a variety, check out local chicken swaps, it’s pretty late in the year to order day-old chicks by mail and get a good selection.