PLEASE HELP! How Many Birds Do I Want?

[Chicken Woman]

If your like me i would get as many as my DH would allow without leaving Me !!!!

 

[CityClucks]

I am not recommending any numbers to you, daabree - just sharing my experience, which might be helpful to your endeavor.

I come from a family of four who raised our own food when I was a kid. Chickens were a staple. We kept about 50 laying hens and sold most of the eggs. We butchered about 60-70 fryers a year. I think we usually kept about 50 birds for our freezer and had a few left over to trade or sell. Sometimes other families in the community would go in on the meat chicken deal - we'd take care of their birds and they'd help pay for feed and sometimes even help butcher.

I can't say for sure, but I think we ordered about 25 pullets and 75 fryers a year to account for loss. We turned our laying flock over every other year to keep production up. One spring a badger dug under the pen and got into the chicken house at night. It killed all but two chickens and tried to drag lots of them into its tunnel back to its lair. That year we got a late start because we had to re-order all our chicken stock.

We also had a few milk cows and raised pigs to eat and sell. Whenever one of our milk cows threw a bull calf we raised it to slaughter. We gardened vegetables, traded eggs and milk to some of the corn farmers for corn, and went to the grain elevators at harvest time to sweep up the spilled wheat to grind flour.

When us kids grew up and moved out, my folks mysteriously discovered that you could buy stuff like bread, milk and bacon at the grocery store! But they still keep chickens.

 

[slc]

I'd also like to add that your climate should factor in on your breed choice.

 

[patandchickens]

wait, I am confused, is this something you are actually planning to maybe *do* or is this a school project type of thing?

(I am guessing the latter...?)

You can pretty much make up anything sensible you want, because it just depends how non-vegetarian you want the family to be. Even if you don't want to be especially hard-core vegetarian, it is not really necessary to eat chicken MEAT at all (although if you are replacing the flock regularly you will find youself with old hens and young cockerels that you may as well eat), you just need enough eggs to supplement whatever vegetable-based protein the diet has. Again, "enough" is totally discretionary depending on how vegetarian, or not, you want to imagine being.

Figure a good sex-link hen at her peak will give you 5-6 eggs per week. Multiply by however many eggs you want. There you go.

Does that help (whether this is project or for real)?'

Pat

 

[chicken_dude]

Maybe you should consider black minorcas and dark cornish. The minorcas and cornish will forage for most of their food. The cornish are wonderful mothers that will replenish your chicken supply. Hawks will catch any free ranging white chicken.