Good lord you're in for it. So it begins!
For starters, a bantam is never going to be big and fat and look good enough to eat. They're tiny and cute and pixie like. The eggs are also smallish, so unless you're feeding a really small family, or people who like smallish eggs.. I wouldn't necessarily recommend a bantam. Unless you get a lot of them.
I have a bantam, 2 actually and love them to death.. but I rely on my bigger girls for eggs.
Everyone on here will give you their 2 cents about incubators. I bought a LG forced air on
Ebay and do just great with it. I even use the crappy thermometer that came with it and do great with it.
So buy what your budget will allow is my advice. Though I will say, the extra 40 or so bucks for the automatic egg turner is the best investment I've made to date. Hands down.
I bought a few full grown laying hens, without knowing the breeds, just in shapes and colors I liked. Turns out, I have Silkies and Cuckoo Marans! Beautiful birds. A year or so later, I bought some day old chicks through McMurray Hatchery. Kinda weird getting chicks in the mail, but the entire experience was really rewarding and I now reguarly order chicks and raise them.
After that I bought my incubator and my first load of hatching eggs. Totally the most thrilling thing you'd ever imagine. I'm a 28 year old woman and I found myself enthralled with the whole miracle of life thing. As many times as you tell yourself that you understand that chickens come from eggs, you will still totally freak out the first time you candle an egg and see a heartbeat. You'll also find yourself glued, like a 5 year old in a candy store, to the incubator when it comes time for hatching.
Raising your own chicks is pretty awesome. Watching them develop from one thing into an entire different looking being, and nurturing their little personalities is pretty amazing too.
Then you'll start dealing with the medical issues and feeding them, the profound and infinite number of things chickens are willing to eat (This will never cease to amuse you, and much like a true addict you will find yourself preparing exceptionally diverse and complicated treat buffets for them), eventually whatever housing you have set up for them will need some sort of expansion or remodeling and before long..
Well, you'll see. This is not to be taken lightly. There is something very odd about those little birds and their ability to take over a large portion of our lives. And they're always so darn happy to see you too, which just makes it that much easier to fall into chicken servitude.
Just go ahead and get one of each breed. It's eventually going to end up that way anyway.
