Seriosly thinking about chickens

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Joy Downs

Joy Downs

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5 Years
Joined
Apr 11, 2014
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Location
East Texas
Hi my name is Joy and I am interested in raising chickens for eggs and meat. Can you please give me some advise on what kind of chickens are best. I am thinking of buying some baby chicks from Tractor Supply. This is gonna be my first time ever raising anything for food consumption. Any and all advise is welcomed. Thank you
 
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Welcome to BYC!

So glad you could join our community! You will want to get dual purpose birds for meat and eggs..Orpingtons, RIR's, Dominiques, New Hampshire, Barred Rocks... Lots of great breeds out there. You will want to check out these two breeds charts to see which breeds are dual purpose and may suit your needs...

http://www.sagehenfarmlodi.com/chooks/chooks.html

http://www.albc-usa.org/documents/chickenbreedcomparison.pdf

You can also check out our Meat Birds section here on BYC for lots of tips on raising and processing meat birds...

https://www.backyardchickens.com/f/21/meat-birds-etc

Good luck with all your projects and welcome to our flock!
 
:welcome ISome good duel purpose, tame, kind chickens to start out with are Easter Eggers, Buff Orpingtons, Barred Rocks, and Gold laced Wyandottes! I know fr om experiance! I hope you find my comments helpful and by all means welcome
 
Hello :frow and Welcome To BYC! TwoCrows gave you some great links to get you started! Good luck with your chicken keeping projects. TSC usually carries some sort of Red Sex Link as egg layers, you can't hardly beat them for producing eggs, and Cornish Cross which are really popular for straight meat birds... TWoCrows mentioned some great duel purpose breeds if you want to stick with one breed to do both.
 
Thank you all for the response's. My only other question would be is will the TwoCrows and the Cornish Cross be ok in the same pen? Or would I need to separate them
 
The would be better separated - Cornish cross meat birds are bred to mature very fast, and they can literally eat themselves to death, achieving that goal. If they are in with regular chickens, they will eat up their food as well.
 
If you get Cornish cross, limit their feedings to twice daily for 15 minutes rather than giving them constant access to food as you normally would with average chicks. There are threads about fermenting feed if you want to do some research on that and go that route. You will want to move them from the brooder to an outdoor tractor or coup after about 2 weeks rather than the average 6-8 weeks with other chicks as they tend to be extremely messy.. I have raised cornish cross ONE time and I would personally lean towards an average growth multipurpose bird as listed above for beginners. We will be using multipurpose birds here on out.. Cornish are great for the quick result but high maintenance in my opinion.
 

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