How many to start with?

it depends on if you are in town, or not...how many chickens does your town allow? If there isnt a limit (there isnt where we are....so far) then I say do like we did....JUMP IN we knew NOTHING and ordered 25 day old chicks...that was last March. Now we are hatching chicks, selling eggs, have 2 brooders, a home made Gopher-Bator, and we are building our second coop.
GO FOR IT! you are in the right place to learn all you can about being a chicken addict.

~Tiff~

 

I think also, it depends on what you would like the chickens to do for you. Do you want just eggs for your family? Do you want just lawn ornaments for a few pets? Are you wishing for a rooster so you can have fertile eggs for a broody to hatch or to go into an incubator? Hatcheries have minimum $ or minimum chick numbers to fill an order - but they will sex the chicks for you. Farm stores have chicks, but it's a toss up on the sex of the birds. So.... it's kind of a personal thing with how to do it. I was like Gopher... I jumped in with both feet. It's been a wonderful experience and I love all the feather balls that share my yard. But I did have to deal with excess roos and eventually develop a plan... excess eggs get sold and we eat the birds that aren't going to be kept. You learn as you go and one sick bird will make you an expert on the various maladies in the chicken world. They'll make you laugh and they'll break your heart. If it were me? I'd build the coop larger than you think you'll need..... chickens are addictive and you'll want more no matter how many you have Welcome to the wonderful world of poultry!

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Then multiply it by 2 to allow for loss and jeeze I should have gotten more and ........

 

Chicken lady is right. Start small. Your initial expense will be lower, your construction costs will be lower and your feeling of wasted time and money will be lower should you decide that keeping chickens isn't right for you. (It does happen, folks.)

As sussexgal said, you have to know what you expect from the birds and you have to provide a little more information about that for anyone to give advice about how many to start with.

But to start you off, if it's just for eggs for your family, I'd say estimate how many eggs you family will use in a year and divide by 200. (Around the number of eggs a laying hen might produce.) That will give you the approximate number of hens you need. Add some extra for the eggs you will need to bribe your neighbors with to feed the birds while you're away.

Wayne

[edited for spelling]

 

Ditto...All very good advice !!!......Antlers is speaking from experience....dont make the coop to small...because you'll be wanting more !!!

 

I agree, build bigger. We have a 60 sq. ft. coop for our roo and 14 hens. I've become so addicted I'm already planning a secondary coop and larger run for next year. I'll be ordering at least 8 new chicks in the spring.

Sonja

 

Unless you're restrained by local zoning, it is probably worth building a larger rather than smaller coop (finances and space permitting). You can always convert it to a garden or storage shed if you are some unique weirdo who ends up not liking chickens<g> and it will allow room for More CHicken Acquisition in the future. It is MUCH MUCH easier and cheaper to build a larger coop int he first place than to try to enlarge whatcha got.

You might consider not getting too awful many chickens to start with, though, maybe like 5 or 6. It will give you more of a chance to decide what you like, dislike, want, don't want, etcetera and then you will still have room for More Chicken Acquisition according to lessons learned

If you want to be really on the small end of "few", though, I'd sort of suggest starting with 3 rather than just 2, b/c if you should lose one of a pair then you have all sorts of problems whereas if you lose one of 3 then the survivors still have company and you are not *forced* to deal with the health and social problems inherent in introducing a new adult chicken.

Have fun ,

Pat