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Self Sufficiency Links: Fowl Top : Fowl | Home | Add a Resource | Modify a Resource | Latest Additions | Popular Resources | Random Link | Search |
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Self Sufficiency Links: Fowl Top : Fowl | Home | Add a Resource | Modify a Resource | Latest Additions | Popular Resources | Random Link | Search |
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A bit about chickens. I believe chickens to be about the best deal for people looking at starting to grow their own food. They are not big and scary like cows or even pigs, they won't eat your fruit trees like goats, and I think they taste better and are worth the effort more than rabbits. Most towns and cities will allow backyard chickens. They do not take up a lot of space and if you don't keep roosters they are fairly quiet. The manure produced can be put in your compost pile or piled somewhere till fall and put on the garden then. They make nice garbage disposals by eating most garden refuse too. Getting started with chickens is easy. By the time I had reached the age where I started paying attention to the farm and doing more chores than playing we had stopped raising them so even though I had some animal experience and knew what chickens were I was not as up on them as I was on cows. However any animal is basically the same, keep them in decent shelter, feed them properly, make sure they have water and you will probably succeed. I did a little research on the web to determine the best way to brood the chicks and looked at several designs for brooders. I ended up making something that looked like something I had seen and it worked well. When I do research and put it to use I rarely do anything exactly as I have read or seen. Since I prefer to look at several sources for my information most things I do are a combination of a bunch of things and I try to follow the basic concept but fit it to my operation. As I mention several times around here, flexibility is key. I started big with 130 birds, 100 CornishxRocks for meat and 30 heavy browns for eggs. If I could go back, I would cut those numbers in half. Our small shed was occupied by calves at the time so I built an 8'x8' cage in the garage. Inside that I had a 4'x4' brooder thing with 1 150W lightbulb. The first night I was furiously sawing more holes and adding 2 more 150W brooder lights as the temps had dropped to an unseasonable 40 degrees! I had to cut a hole in the wall to let them out when they started to feather and I fed them continuously every day. I lost a lot of birds that way. The last 2 years I have brooded out in our old 8x12 yard barn. I have at least 2 lamps on in there with 1 more in standby and a couple of extra bulbs on hand. The first 2 years I used it as a coop I lowered the ceiling to help keep the heat in but this year we converted it back to a calf house early and haven't had time to put the ceiling back down. I have a few more birds than recommended for that square footage and I hope that will help keep it a bit warmer. When we first get the chicks we use 1 quart waterers and the smaller metal chick feeders. We also use a few of the feeders that screw onto canning jars. This works OK for the first week or so then we can either move up to a couple of the gallon waterers or the big old 7 gallon waterer. We start switching to the big 4' long feeders after a couple of weeks. We start letting them out after 3 or 4 weeks. The end of the coop has an open lean-to built on it that I box in with 4x8 sheets of plywood. This gives them a small yard with a roof while they are still kind of small. I can move the boards a bit and give them access to a small part of the yard after that or the whole thing. We did try tractoring 6 of the heavy browns one year but since we had tried free ranging with them, they did not care for the tractor. It does seem to be a viable option though and I hope to try it again with a fresh batch sometime. We free ranged one year and are still finding eggs in the haystack and along fencelines. With a bit more management than we did it is also a viable alternative. I would suggest making sure that your neighbors dogs are well restrained and that the chickens are not able to get onto the roads. We have been able to get a small
market for our meat birds and sell about half of what we raise each year.
We charge a fairly decent price and our customers keep coming back.
Our egg sales can be spotty, it seems almost everybody has a relative that has a few layers
and will prictically give the eggs away. We will be trying selling eggs again this year though.
Chicken Links
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