Is 300 chickens enough?

[lazy gardener]

Chucks or chooks????

 

[Aerliss]

Chucks or chooks????

I don't understand the question.

 

[lazy gardener]

Chucks are wood chucks (in my part of the country).

Chooks are chickens.

I definitely try not to feed the chucks. A single one can wipe out a whole garden in a couple of days.

 

[Aerliss]

I wi have to Google what a wood chuck is... beaver??

Chucks, or chuckchucks, are just chickens.

 

[aart]

I wi have to Google what a wood chuck is... beaver??

Chucks, or chuckchucks, are just chickens.

No, not beaver.....is also known as a ground hog....not sure you have them in Scotland?

 

[Aerliss]

No, not beaver.....is also known as a ground hog....not sure you have them in Scotland?

Oh, I know groundhogs. Never heard them called woodchucks. Though I do know the woodchuck tongue twister. I always thought it was about lumberjacks XD

 

[Krazyquilts]

How much TOTAL land do you have available? I think it commendable that you want to homestead, and live off your land. If you have not yet done so, please put your general location in your profile. What works here will not work in the south, and vice-versa. Here are some considerations.

Raise a SMALL flock. Enjoy those eggs. Sell the extras. Do deep litter management in 2 or more runs, rotating birds and garden crops between these runs. Realize that when chickens work a section of land, best practice is to allow 90 days between application of fresh manure, and planting of any crops which would EVER be eaten without cooking completely. And DOUBLY ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE SELLING TO THE PUBLIC.

Do a market analysis. Find a niche where you and your customers have a symbiotic relationship.

First customer base: find a smallish restaurant which prides it'self on providing quality food. Supply them with organic salad greens, micro greens, and other seasonal organic veggies, as well as fresh eggs from happy chickens. Both partners in this arrangement will further benefit b/c you will keep their usable kitchen and left overs from customer's plates from going to the dumpster which attracts flies and rodents. You will also recycle all of their coffee grounds to further improve your soil.

If you are not in deep snow country, consider keeping a Black Soldier Fly Larvae bin to recycle a lot of the restaurant refuse that your chooks can't use. That will produce more free chicken feed, and more compost to feed #2 customer base.

Second customer base: Fill your empty feed bags with compost harvested from your deep litter chicken runs and coop. Sell those bags of compost at a competitive rate.

Third customer base: Sell laying hens before they are spent. These birds will be snapped up by folks who don't want to put the time and effort into raising chicks to POL.

Fourth customer base: Keep heritage birds. If you are allowed to keep a rooster, do so. Breed your replacement birds AND sell chicks and hatching eggs. You might consider keeping 2 breeds, and alternating your rooster breed every few years. For example: I HAD an EE roo. He produced lovely black sex linked babies which produced olive, green, aqua, blue and brown eggs. His babies had pea or walnut combs which do very well in my harsh winter climates. My new roo is a Buck Eye. He will produce black sex links, a few olive eggers, and more Buck Eyes, all of which will have pea or rose combs. All of these chicks, (or hens as they age out of the flock) should sell well in my area.

Finally, I agree with previous poster. RIR are nasty birds.

FANTASTIC advice! Very similar to what we are doing, though I hadn't thought about selling feed bags worth of composted deep litter bedding.

I very much agree with the advice on keeping heritage birds. They tend to start laying later but continuing laying longer so if the OP wants more pet-style chickens (pet as in not butchering/selling them as the chickens get old) that would be a more economical choice.

We are trying to get an egg business started, mostly eggs for eating but hatching eggs too, but we are getting way more people wanting to buy chicks, started hens, and meat roosters than we are people wanting hatching eggs or eggs for eating. So I second your advice regarding keeping a rooster. Plus, roosters are awesome! I love listening to mine crow and stand around majestically posing for the hens and keeping an eye out over them. I have strict behavioral requirements for my roosters too so all my boys are super well behaved and polite towards people and mostly towards each other too. A flock without a rooster just doesn't seem complete (assumimg one is allowed to have roosters of course).

And who wouldn't want to have this stud-ly hunk walking around! "Lemon" was only 4-5 months old in this pic and he's even more handsome now he's around a year old. Great with the ladies, too.

 

[Krazyquilts]

I believe that they don't do well if ground freezes. However, if you had a green house that maintains moderate temps without overheating or freezing, you could overwinter them.

https://ie.unc.edu/files/2016/03/bsfl_how-to_guide.pdf

Oooo! That's even more incentive for us to get a greenhouse up for next year!

 

[aart]

Oh, I know groundhogs. Never heard them called woodchucks. Though I do know the woodchuck tongue twister. I always thought it was about lumberjacks XD

Funny thing is, woodchucks do not actually chuck much wood...not like a beaver does.

 

[Krazyquilts]

Unfortunately I have to agree with all the other points here. Some of them you've already well understood, like 300 chickens is an overwhelming number, a factory number.

But more relevantly; Chickens in my mind seem to have two kinds of keepers; Pets or livestock.

As pets, you can reasonably expect to keep maybe up to 10 hens but 6 is probably more practical. You can probably DIY some vet care and keep them safe and happy without compromising your "veggie" ideals. They will be like most pets, enjoyable but ultimately a money sink. You will never profit off of birds you keep into old age. Every dollar you earn or save from their laying days will be spent into their aging life and then some, even if you deprive them of any vet care you can't DIY. Even as pets, however, most chicken keepers find trouble providing good quality of life to aging birds, especially since most vets don't see chickens. DIY care is the norm, and even that frequently includes at-home euthanasia as birds fall very ill and age dramatically.

As livestock chicken must be managed. It is a must. If you even expect to break even you must give serious consideration to things like when to cull birds. Forget old birds for now and their obvious problems... What about also sick birds that are young and robust? What about when a young hen comes down with symptoms that sound an awful lot like a contagion and could kill the whole flock? As a pet, vet care is an option. Babying a chicken in a house for a month might be possible. As livestock, you CANNOT risk your flock, you WILL make mistakes, you WILL cross contaminate. Those birds are literally your bread and butter. Sometimes sacrifices must be made. And to truly make ANY money off of chickens, even to just break even, culling as chickens fall ill or age is an inherent part of livestock management and frequently a kindness. Additionally, with some diseases the govt will come in and kill them for you before letting you threaten every other chicken keeper within 10 miles (and possibly our national food supply). Even with the best biosecurity someday there will be hard choices to be made.

And that doesn't even cover the problems of roosters which are a whole 'nother can of worms. For every hen hatched to supply your farm, a rooster goes into the nebulous of somewhere (likely a stewpot or a wood chipper tbh).

Which is not to say you can't give livestock good quality of life but farmers are already wildly underpaid in the US and you must compete with factory farmed eggs gathered by workers paid less than is legal. Your budget must give somewhere and for most people it's when the chickens age. Not only are they no longer a food source from eggs, but they also can become an additional food source for humans or even obligate carnivore pets. Most homesteaders/farmers don't see this as a waste, but as a respectful end. A body continuing to give life to other living things. The continuation of a complete cycle of our world.

It sounds rather like you dream of caring for chickens like pets and making a profit like a farmer. Which is a nice idea, but to support that properly people would have to be willing to pay $10/dozen for eggs. And perhaps even a dozen eggs SHOULD be worth that much! But a month ago at my supermarket they were $0.80 a dozen from a factory farm. There's no way to compete.

Time was that people spent a large percentage of their income on food, allowing farmers to potentially care for their animals better and still compete. But historically the % of our income spent on food each year has dropped constantly since the 1800s to all-time lows.

Maybe as our farming system continues to evolve and things like free range organics become more like the norm and less like the outlier there will be room for a farm that raises chickens the way you describe that can break even or make profits. And I hope there is some day! But right now it's a sad reality that it's just a money sink to keep chickens the way you have described even if you had the space to do it.

Basically what I'm trying to say is you have two conflicting goals. You can't keep chickens like you would pets AND keep chickens like you keep livestock. Our economy doesn't support it. You have to decide which route and how far you're willing to go with each. Sometimes you can fudge it a little. Sometimes it would kill every one of your birds. So think about it for a long time before you make a choice.

If you could never, ever kill a chicken, nor send one to someone who would, consider only keeping a few as pets. They make fun pets, and they do still make you breakfast. You can give them your ideal quality of life and caring for them as they age isn't a huge burden. You might even be able to get replacement hens every 4 years or so to keep getting eggs forever.
If you want to raise chickens (or any animal!) as livestock, you will have some hard choices to make. More often than you will be comfortable with. So think about it.

Great advice, well said. It is a constant struggle to balance how I'd LIKE to treat my chickens vs how I can I AFFORD to keep my chickens. Example: if one of my Yorkshire Terriers starts limping, off to the vet we go immediately. But one of our favorite Orpington boys has been limping for a while and it doesn't appear to be bumblefoot, a break, a sprain, or anything else we can figure out. But I can't afford a $300 vet bill for a chicken, even one we love. (I know it would be about $300 because that's how much it was to take one our ducks to the vet last summer. Never again, especially since the vet didn't really do anything!)

So, since our rooster's limp doesn't seem to be affecting his quality of life - he still eats, crows, keeps up with the flock while free ranging, breeds his hens, knocks off his second-in-command rooster and the new young whippersnapper cockerel when they try to breed "his" hens, etc - there's really nothing we can do.