Something to consider:
1. How many people in your family are you trying to feed? If over 4, consider getting meat birds some of the time - perhaps keeping some and cross-breeding into your existing flocks - which makes for larger flockmates, but not likely as large as parents. Some have done this well, some have not. I can take a 5# CX to church and easily feed 12-15people for lunch with it. But our dual purpose Black Java's cannot feed more than 5 fully. (Java's have less breast meat and therefore feeds less folks).
2. How many times a week do you eat chicken? That's your base number of birds you need to have on-hand at any given time. We have a freezer just for meats (beef, vension, chicken, fish, lamb). I know that 25 birds take 2 full shelves in my freezer - that's cut up! I'm not sure how much room they'd take if they were whole. Do you have a freezer? Or will you 'thin as needed', meaning planning meals ahead knowing that Thursday you'll eat chicken, so the deed must be done on Sunday so the bird has time to rest in the fridge to let rigor pass. We eat chicken 2x/wk. With 25 birds parted up in the freezer, that's 20wks or so of meat - or nearly 5months. So, twice a year I'm raising 25 birds to put away for our family. That's completely possible to handle. There's the additional cockeral from the layer flock in there as well, so it's more like 60 birds a year total.
3. How long can you stand the juvenille cockeral behavior - at about 7-11wks, they start crowing; at about 14wks start trying to mount hens; at about 20-26wks are a good sized table bird - but now, your hens are terrorized from all the bad rooster behavior! Unless you provide a 'cockeral only' pen which is out of view from the hens at all times. Even then, you'll still deal with some bad behavior - fighting and posturing and such.
4. How are you going to feed these 'extra' birds? Feed is pricey - no doubt about that - but there are ways to cut down on feed costs. Fermenting the feed is one we use extensively and successfully; providing forage is another - but in the dead of winter, there's not much to forage upon here!; growing your own 'extra' chicken garden provides greens for the girls at relatively low cost - putting a raised bed that's got 1/2" hardware cloth over it and planting fast growing salad greens or grass provides some forage if they eat it all - but that's seasonal. What about dead of winter?
5. What will your neighbors deal with? Ours found a hole in the fence and were finishing up after the neighbor's horses! Gads....Another neighbor (who isn't chicken friendly) is someone we have to constantly coddle with fresh eggs to keep nicey-nice. Often, people are harder to deal with than the chicken 'issues'!
6. How will you deal with the 'extras'. Meaning, you're raising a set # of chicks - then most of the flock goes broody on you - now you have few, if any, eggs and LOTS of additional chicks to feed! It happens.
7. Lastly, consider how self-sufficient farms worked in the past. A farmer would let the hens hatch as much as they desired - and forage for their feed with minimal chick feed - then come fall, would cull the flock down to the few they wished to keep through the winter and feed. Know what that number is based on your coop size and worst winter conditions imaginable. Ours is no more than 10 in the coop for the winter, based on blizzard conditions which kept the chickens indoors for almost 2 weeks. More than that, and hens get injured and health issues become apparent (ever try to scoop out fresh frozen pine shavings to muck out the coop in January?! It's hard!) It's a critical number to know!
I hope this helps you in your decision making. We're working hard on self-sufficiency also - but do order a few CX and/or a batch of FR to add to our freezer supply is easy and makes it possible to enjoy our layer flock for what they are too.
