This is all VERY helpful. I am not planning to sell eggs, but when I start adding up who I want to GIVE eggs/meat in exchange for helping me tend the chickens when I'm gone or other services, or for barter (e.g., for milk), it just appeals to me to have a self-sustaining/producing flock (and I think BCM roosters are pretty!). The silencing would be for the breeding roosters that are sticking around, I was thinking. I think part of why I'm so exhausted with this is that I AM probably getting way ahead of myself and need to start simpler - I appreciate the encouragement to do just that. I DO want to breed Naked Necks and NNxNHRs, so I will probably at a minimum keep one or a couple good NN roosters from the batch of chicks this fall. JRNash, thanks for the input on housing roosters together and specific pairings. I'm also re-reading the Storey's Guide section on breeding as well. I think keeping roosters together separately and all the hens together in one coop will allow me to keep things simpler, housing-wise, and also be flexible enough for any future plans...
And yes, Angela, my girls LOVE fire ants!!! You should have seen the carnage when they found their first fire ant mound in their run/pen at about 10 weeks old (under a waterer that I moved). It was a massacre... Very satisfying to watch.
Here's another question, then. Seems simple, but... for those of you who don't just do total free range (but instead do a movable pasture/paddock type system), how do you move your chickens to where you want them to be for the day? While ideally I would have paddocks like wedges of a pie based from the coop, and rotate them in each in turn, I may wish to be able to put them elsewhere from time to time. For instance, at a minimum, I would like my chickens to turn over some of my garden beds at the end of the season - I can't imagine rounding them all up in little cages and carrying them back to where I want them one by one... Or is that what people do?!
- Ant Farm
Edit to add: @hellbender and @draye , if I had to pick only one breed, it would likely be the Naked Necks.
Honestly, I think you're getting too complicated and doing more with a dual purpose breed would be far easier than trying to have multiple breeds for meat only and eggs only and try to breed them well.
We have one breed, we keep backup breeders in case of loss, and we have far more eggs than we can ever use or even give away and we still have plenty for oiling and put into long term storage, and often wind up throwing away/composting eggs because we and the chickens can only eat so many eggs. We are slowly increasing our ability to be self sustaining with meat as well. It would go faster if we were not worried about other issues such as breeding to the SOP, but we could technically be self sufficient for meat as well with our dual purpose birds if we chose to hatch more per year. Having one breed to focus on and to breed well, with paying attention to both meat and egg production aspects (and in our case SOP aspects too), is much more workable than trying to figure out what to do with multiple breeds.
Only a few of our males are able to live together in peace once they are adults, without having the pen look like the TX Chainsaw Massacre every day. We do keep separate grow out pens for cockerels and pullets. Some hatches of cockerels don't fight much amongst each other, other hatches of cockerels that grow out together fight worse and seems like they try to kill each other all the time. It just depends on how the group dynamics turns out and it can be fine for a while and then the balance of power will shift and things get un-fine. It's a never ending process and you can't say you're going to do it one way only because sure as the world, you're gonna wind up in a situation where you have to change things up or literally risk having a good potential breeder being killed in a cock fight. Other than our grow out pens, we house both actively breeding males and backup breeding males either by themselves in smaller houses (but they can see each other and other birds), or they live with groups of females.
If you put your two breeders into a free range flock at the same time, you run the risk of them killing each other, and also of losing one or both of them during one predator attack. Personally, none of our best breeders are allowed to free range unsupervised - they stay penned and only roam the pasture when we are armed and in the pasture paying attention only to them. It can set back a breeding program substantially to lose a breeder, even when you have backups in case of loss.
We move our birds at night when they are on the roosts. Those in houses with doors, we can move while it is twilight. Those in the completely open air pens get moved after complete darkness, so they stay on their roosts while we move them to where we want them.
I would not put one of those anti-crow collars on a bird. The risk for getting caught on something or having another bird grab it twist it - in either case strangling the bird, is too great.
