My wife and I have a small farm in the Wisconsin countryside where we have a giant garden and raise a few animals for our own consumption and to sell to others.
This year we are going to have chickens for the first time, and I am planning on just letting them roam the yard. Not that I really care what other people think of us, but for some reason I have this prejudice in my head that, whenever I see chickens in someone’s yard my brain automatically thinks “They must be poor”. I had ducks last year and they wandered around freely and I never had the same reaction as I do to chickens.
Does anyone else have this same weird perception/reaction??
If I saw chickens roaming around a farmish house in the countryside, I’d think two thoughts:
Watch out I don’t hit any chickens with my bike or car
Golly! Free-roaming, happy eco-chickens! I wonder if they sell the eggs or the meat.
I think the association with chickens = poor is one of those previous generation-associations. Elderly people may still think so, younger people will just like to see chickens roaming around in an romantic oldfashioned way.
My brother and his wife own just shy of five acres in my hometown, which is an obscenely large parcel of land for one family to have in a town as jam-packed as Brick, NJ is. One of the first things they got when they bought the place was a mess of chickens. The family gets bigger and bigger every year, and was recently expanded with the addition of Tina & Tank Turkey.
And no, they’re a hell of a lot further away from poor than I can reasonably expect to be in my lifetime.
Depends on what the rest of your house looks like, really. I lived in suburbia, and one house in particular just randomly looked like hicks-ville USA, complete with car parts and… a goat, actually. We always assumed they weren’t very well off.
Well, I don’t know about “downright vicious” but raising ducks is a lot more annoying than one might believe.
I found them to be extremely smelly, messy, demanding, and a general pain in the butt. But at the same time they were amusing and definitely had personality. When I had their number whittled down to three they were much easier to deal with. I might even get two or three again this year.
If I saw chickens wandering your yard I’d think you weren’t too swift, rather than poor.
Chickens can’t be trained to stay in the yard the way dogs do, and they go out into the road. People adjacent to my place of work had the same great idea, and people are contantly trying to avoid hitting the idiot birds that wander into our driveway. My childhood neighbors let theirs roam and had several of their chickens hit by cars too. Others were eaten by wild animals. Our penned chickens probably had less fun but they lived to ripe old age.
Have chickens. But be responsible and build them an enclosure!
IMHO, if you didn’t like ducks, you’ll hate chickens. Ducks are much gentler than most roosters (leghorns, excepted. they’re sweet) or hens raised with agressive roosters, and they’re considerably smarter than chickens as well.
My next door neighbours in the poor part of a fairly urban part of the city with three or four chickens: probably poor.
My neighbours across the street in my rural neighbourhood whose dad-blamed rooster starts crowing around 4 in the morning and doesn’t stop till past noon: possessed of annoying chickens, but not poor.
True **enigm4tic ** , I think that is part of it too. Maybe it’s because most of the other farms around us that have free-roaming chickens look like they aren’t very well maintained.
Our place is in good shape, I keep the bushes trimmed and the lawn mowed, and there are definitely no old rusty cars in the yard. The stable (now the coop) and the barn are freshly painted and in good repair.
Thanks for the other replies too, looks like I am a citified snob! (but I have pig manure on my boots so I’m getting over it)
Let’s see, they hatch, you feed them, they fly away.
August, you get my email a couple weeks ago? I sent one to your Yahoo account. Let me know what you think…
BTW, we did have chickens a couple years ago, but as they grew they got noisy (the rooster especially). The females stick together and are very quiet if you keep them fed. Have a box or three ready for the females to lay eggs in. A cardboard box on it’s side under a pine tree will work. Ours liked to lay in plain old paper bags (like gocery store ones) cut in half and placed in their cages. We had one or two to a cage and let them out during the day and closed them up at night to they wouldn’t get attacked by whatever roams around in the dark.
Once they got bigger and the novelty wore off we sent them to a farm so they could be raised properly.
My gf has a beautiful house on a quarter mile dead end country lane. She has a few chickens (3 to 5) and there is nothing like fresh eggs for Sunday breakfast. Every so often a fox will eat a bird. Last summer a neighbor’s dog tore one up. I did 2 hours worth of surgery, then kept the bird hospitalized to recuperate. A month later I did another 45 minutes of surgical work. The neighbor had offered to pay her vet bill. I gave my gf an itemized bill for $4,200.00 which she gave to the neighbor. My gf told the neighbor that she did not expect payment, but the neighbor has kept the dog on a short leash ever since.
Damn, now elfkin raises a different point! I’d rather be though of as poor than dumb!
I do have an enclosure that the chickens can use, I just liked the idea of them wandering the yard like the ducks did.
There was an SD staff report, I believe, about the economics of raising your own chickens for eggs rather than buying them. It wasn’t all that spectacular (especially given the cheapness of eggs).
I don’t know the economics about raising them for meat but personally, if I saved 50% on all my chicken, I’d probably save $50 a year. Not worth the trouble, in my opinion.
My sister keeps a couple dozen chickens on her little 10 acre family farm and they’re a pain in the butt, IMO. The have to be fed and watered and maintained. They’re let out of their enclosure to roam during the day but have to be gathered again at night. They lay eggs all over the place, not just in their little boxes so there’s a daily easter-egg hunt. The penalty for accidentally finding an old one is disgusting.
Ugh. Maybe I’m too much the city kid but I’ll just stick to the refrigerator case at my local supermarket.
The birds we are raising will be meat birds, not for eggs.
The economics of it don’t really matter to me. We raised 2 pigs last year and sold 1.25 of them for the grand profit of about $60. But we got 3/4 of a pig for ourselves, and it is the best pork I’ve ever had and I like knowing where my food comes from. Same thing with the turkeys we raised last year, they were so delicious I could never buy a frozen supermarket bird again.
Frozen chicken breasts from the grocery store are tasteless and full of water and bleach, I’d rather eat birds of my own.
Time to break out the top hat and walking stick!
