How many chickens would you need to keep to supply all the meat and eggs your family eats?

[aart]

I'm basing that on the farm I grew up on, how I saw my grandparents and some other relatives live, and how some of my neighbors lived in Appalachia, a poor region. There was so much diversity it's hard to generalize, even there.

You were born before 1850? JK....but really that is the era I was speaking of, way before your lifetime.

From literature I've read, many sold eggs for coins(egg money) to buy things that couldn't be 'grown'...and eating a bird that could lay 'coins' would not have been economically sound.

 

[Molpet]

1940 my 16 yr old future mom would come down here with a cousin and buy 3 dressed chickens for a dollar. It was a big deal for people from Chicago. My future Dad lived up the road from the chicken seller...and his mom had chicken every Sunday from their own flock.

I wouldn't be here except for 3 chickens for a dollar LOL

 

[Ridgerunner]

You were born before 1850? JK....but really that is the era I was speaking of, way before your lifetime.

Sometimes I wonder when I was born. Things have changed dramatically in my lifetime. When I was a kid there were some people back in the valleys and ridges of Appalachia that I don't think had changed that much from 1850. Pure subsistence living.

From literature I've read, many sold eggs for coins(egg money) to buy things that couldn't be 'grown'...and eating a bird that could lay 'coins' would not have been economically sound.

For some people that would be right. Some people would have kept a flock, maybe even an all-hen flock, for that purpose. The money they got for that was called egg money. Dad occasionally took eggs to the country grocery store to pay for groceries he could not grow. Not that often but a few times. Cash was hard to come by and he and mom liked coffee. But don't think that because a few people did that, either regularly or on a rare occasion, that most people did it that way. Remember diversity and don't paint with too broad a brush.

Besides, if you eat your cockerels or spent hens, how is that eating a bird that laid coins? It's just making room for other coin layers. Remember you have to feed them in the winter months, depending on climate.

 

[aart]

Remember diversity and don't paint with too broad a brush.

I used my wiggle words ...many(not all).....probably(not absolutely always).
Just my contributions to the 'hypotheticals' of this discussion.

 

[Shadrach]

I'm going to sort of disagree with this Aart, especially on the eggs part. The meat not so much but some. In 1850 a pretty large part of the population in the US and probably a fair part of the rest of the world lived in rural areas or very small towns or villages. Keeping a flock of chickens that pretty much fed themselves in season (winters were rougher for some, depending on climate) to provide eggs and occasionally meat was pretty common. There were exceptions, there always are, people living in cities for example. And many small town people did not keep chickens or did not keep a breeding flock. But for a lot of people eggs were a staple, not a luxury. I'm basing that on the farm I grew up on, how I saw my grandparents and some other relatives live, and how some of my neighbors lived in Appalachia, a poor region. There was so much diversity it's hard to generalize, even there.

In my experience eating chickens was not a luxury, we ate excess cockerels and older spent hens and raised our own replacements. We relied on broody hens. When a hen went broody Dad would decide if we should give her a dozen eggs to hatch and raise or whether to break her. That decision was part of his farm management. Those broody hens would probably hatch out maybe 40 chicks a year so that's what we ate. If Dad wanted to rely more on chickens we could have hatched out quite a few more. His flock was typically one rooster and 25 hens. Those hens often went broody. We used a rabbit hutch as a broody buster.

We raised hogs, which is where we got most of our meat. Those were fed on slops, kitchen wastes, and things that we grew, including some weeds we gathered. We raised cattle but that was a cash crop, calves to be sold instead of eaten. Maybe 10 times a year we'd go to the lake on Sunday afternoon and catch fish, partly for a fun family outing but partly for the meat. And we ate a lot of dried beans. A typical supper was dried beans, cornbread, milk and raw onions. I thought it was a good meal. Many of our meals were meatless, especially lunch and supper. Our staples for breakfast were eggs and pork.

Aart, one of your sayings is where romance meets reality. Shadrach is putting up a purely hypothetical situation with his assumptions. If you use his assumptions and definitions he is right. If you control the assumptions and definitions you control the outcome. In my experience I find his assumptions to be more based on romance than reality. I think a lot of arguments wouldn't even start if we could agree on definitions. People that really rely on what they raise to eat would not do it that way. I was raised with people that relied on what they raised. It wasn't easy ans they did not go out of their way to make it harder.

I agree on the delusion of many people on this forum and in the world in general. For some, romance never meets reality.

I must admit, I do enjoy your tales of the old South.
As you write, if you use my assumptions the model is correct.
I didn't at any point write that the model I proposed was a viable way of keeping chickens. Part of the object of the post was to make the romantic aware of just how little their backyard flock contributes to their overall protein requirements. In your case I believe it calculated to 4 grams a day.
Many of my posts here hopefully point out some of the realities of chicken keeping and to some extent the realities of trying to run a smallholding. If for example one can't manage a two foot high rooster having a bad day without killing him, the chances of managing a sow with piglets, or a ram in a flock of sheep are pretty remote imo.
I do this for a living. I try to manage two small holdings now for people who have had the money to buy a piece of land and then decided they would have a go at being smallholders. I build the enclosures, erect the fencing, stock the animals, arrange the feed, make sure the fields get plowed and the right crops get sown etc etc.
I must admit, I have become a dewy eyed over the chickens but in the long run if I can help correct the nonsense written by people about rooster aggression, mating dances and egg songs, broody behaviour etc, my little bit of romance there will have been worthwhile.

 

[Shadrach]

You were born before 1850? JK....but really that is the era I was speaking of, way before your lifetime.

From literature I've read, many sold eggs for coins(egg money) to buy things that couldn't be 'grown'...and eating a bird that could lay 'coins' would not have been economically sound.

It was mainly hams from pigs here that generated cash from the animals. Various locally prepared hams are a big deal here and have been for many years.
Charcoal was another. The Holme Oak that grows here is great for it.
It's grains that most of the smallholdings here used to come unstuck on in the past. It's not good land for grain production.

 

[CindyinSD]

I raised enough chickens for one per week for the year... maybe if they hadn’t been huge we’d have wanted more. Next year I’m going to use heritage breeds for at least half of them. We buy beef from my cousin. I plan to start quail next spring and possibly rabbits. I have cattle but that’s a bit of a long term project. I would like to do feeder pigs but because of DH’s aversion to the nearby pig factories of his youth, I will buy instead, from one of several nearby farmers. I have three chest freezers plus three refrigerator freezers... probably not enough, though.

No one wants to live on chicken alone, but I would maintain that anyone with the desire, a suburban back yard, who can afford the feed, can humanely raise a reasonable contribution of chicken to their family’s meat needs for the year if regulations permit. Nothing’s perfect, but perfect is an unattainable goal. Good is better than nothing.

 

[chrissynemetz]

@aart wiggle words... I love that!!

And I don't know about the rest of y'all, but reading this thread has made me want to go butcher a chicken and pull out the crock pot...

 

[aart]

@aart wiggle words... I love that!!

And I don't know about the rest of y'all, but reading this thread has made me want to go butcher a chicken and pull out the crock pot...

I think it was @Ridgerunner who introduced me to the term 'wiggle words'...
...I call them clarifiers and use them often because not much is absolute, espcially when talking about 'live animals'(another one I 'stole' from RR).

I cooked up a cockerel on Monday...part of 3-4 meals already and still some stock and meat left.

 

[centrarchid]

Growing up we produced enough game chickens to keep everyone in fried chicken every Sunday from about July into roughly November. No feed was required specifically for chickens. They were raised free range on roughly half a dozen barnyards. Older birds were harvest in larger numbers when we did not want to carry low potential birds through spring.

Having livestock helped provide food. Graining livestock was even better. This involved close 100 hundred hens were many males not eaten were sold or used for other things. We still raised more beef and pork for table. If cut off from imported feed and utilities, that approach is what I would fall back on.