Housing meat and egg birds together

[SandraMort]

As it stands now, the plan is to get meat chicks (color rangers) late August. They will be moved to tractors and then late September my layers (buckeyes) will arrive. Those go to the barn and will free range while the kids are in school.

I was thikning, it's possible it might just be less work to put all of the birds together in the barn and skip the whole tractor step, since the property is large enough for all of the birds. But they'll be different sizes. Is that even possible or is it an exercise in futility? If so, is there a better way to do this?

 

[SandraMort]

I have a barn with three large stalls. I coould leave the broilers in the center stall in the mornings, let the girls out to roam for a few hours, then put them in the stall and let the broilers roam for a few hours, but I don't know if they'll have enough space that way. And it may just be too complicated to swap midday.

 

[roger95]

I was thinking of doing the same. Some people down the street from me house theirs together. But i was hoping to get more info here on this.

 

[The Chicken Lady]

Quote:
If you want to chase chickens back into the coop every day, I suppose that would work.

I would be worried about how the meat birds were treated by the others if members of a combined flock. I'm pretty sure, due to their size and smaller combs (depending on the breed), that they would be on the bottom rung of the pecking order... Meat birds are also notoriously less bright than other kinds of chickens.

Also, after you slaughtered the meat birds, you would throw the social structure of the main flock off, and there might be additional pecking, bumps in egg production, etc., from any stress caused by the removal of a large number of birds.