Larger scale chicken management

[KDailey]

Everything I seem to find on here seems to be geared more towards people with chickens in a backyard or that only have a few chickens. I'm interested in information from people who are a little more large scale. Right now I've got 22 chickens but it's inevitable I'll wind up with a lot more.

Some of the things I'm interested in are:

[*]Pen and coop set up that involve multiple coops and runs
[*]NPIP?
[*]Organization of any paperwork
[*]Tax write offs?
[*]Sales of chicks, eggs, hatching eggs, mature poultry, extra roos
[*]How did you choose what breeds to keep?
[*]Anything you think I need to know

 

[kuntrygirl]

How large of a scale are you talking about? 200 chickens and more?

 

[KDailey]

Hmmm... that would probably be the max.

I guess it depends on which chickens we're counting. If we're counting chickens I keep for breeding/eggs/etc then probably somewhere around 100-150 and then add whatever I've got that will be sold as chicks or even older chickens/roosters.

I guess that makes this more medium scale as opposed to large scale. I don't mean like hatchery-large. More like large farm setting.

 

[KDailey]

No tips from anybody?

 

[cupman]

I'm not sure myself but I saw this coop the other day in the construction sub forum that looks more attuned for a larger sized flock. (link at the end) I became instantly jealous. Her setup appears to be for breeding or maybe I'm just saying that because they are separated. I'm sure her setup could be used for eggs as well. You could probably send them a private message for more focused information. I hope you get some more helpful information because I'd be interested in knowing this too. I think it would be great to get a smaller end breeding operation going on, just something I could sell from craigslist or whatever. Good luck.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=539324

Also something to think about is learning to sex baby chicks, I was googling around looking for a class you could take or somewhere to learn first hand but I didn't have much luck, so you may want to look into that.

 

[kfacres]

Quote:
i bought a book.. sexing birds or something like that.. really paid off, great illustrations, etc... I doubt I could still do it without reading the book again, as it's been years since I've been directly involved with the birds. (until now)

To the original question.. Having 100 chickens is no different than 10.. other than you just need about 10x more stuff ( roosting space, feeder space, and feed mainly).

I don't see any of the benefits like tax rightoffs occuring though... To small operation.

When I was in 6th grade, I had b/w 2-300 birds, chickens mainly... had a pretty nifty egg selling business going, which made enough cash to buy tons of breeding stock.

One of the best investments, (and worst) was buying a bunch of retired white leghorns... 3 year old birds that layed eggs, dumb as a brick, but they finally wisened up after a while and found out how to be a chicken.. bought them for .25 cents each...

 

[KDailey]

I saw that set up! I was drooling out the wazoo!

Probably a little too expensive for me at the moment but I'm hoping to build up to that if we work on it a little at a time over the course of X amount of time.

When we went to get more hardware cloth from a little store nearby we were talking to the guy that was helping us and mentioned we were building a chicken coop and after we paid he printed us off an extra invoice and said we could use the chickens as a tax write off if we could prove that we sold at least 200 eggs a year.

I hadn't thought of the sexing chicks thing. That would definately be a good thing to learn.

 

[kfacres]

Quote:
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Then you'd better get to spending money on the chickens, cuz with a 15$ bag of feed every week, and selling that many eggs.. the chickens will be generating a profit-- wheras, that's defeating the purpose of writing them off. catch 22 if you ask me.