Small Flock - Plymouth Rock

[Smudge789]

We intend on keeping Plymouth Rock chickens for meat and eggs. We wanted to keep a rooster and 3 hens for breeding. Are 3 hens enough or should I keep more hens on hand?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Finnie]

I would keep more. With only 3, the rooster will overmate them. I would say no less than 5. And even more would be better.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Technically yes.

If he's a very rough or active breeder though, he may tear their feathers up

 

[Brooks_]

I would suggest more. At 3:1 the hens will be over mated. 10:1 is often mentioned, but that is based on having good fertility rates. A few hens will likely be favorites and still over mated.

 

[Ridgerunner]

We intend on keeping Plymouth Rock chickens for meat and eggs. We wanted to keep a rooster and 3 hens for breeding. Are 3 hens enough or should I keep more hens on hand?

You can have the same bare-backed and over-mating issues with one rooster and 30 hens as you can with one rooster and 3 hens. Getting more hens is not a cure-all for that. Plenty of people have a very small number of hens with one rooster without issues. One big part of this is that chances of success go way up if you are talking about mature hens and roosters. Immature pullets and cockerels often lead to problems as they go through puberty. I personally don't see any difference in over-mating or bare-backed probabilities if you have 3, 5, or 8 hens as long as they are mature.

Let's talk about breeding. Are you planning on an incubator to hatch chicks? It is very possible you would never get a hen to go broody. The only way you have any control over when or even if you can hatch eggs is to get an incubator.

How many eggs do you want to hatch at a time? Every hen will not lay an egg every day, especially if you want them to. Somehow they seem to know. Every egg is not always a good quality to hatch. How many chicks do you want each year so how many hatches and how far spread out? Sometimes something happens to living animals and you may wind up with only two laying hens. To me one if the issues of having only 3 hens is the logistics of getting enough hatching eggs when you want them.

The flip side of that is that just adding one hen that lays well will increase the number of eggs you get. You can easily run into a surplus of eggs when you are not saving eggs for hatching. What would you do with that surplus? It's probably not enough to keep up a customer base if you want to sell them but you could maybe give them away. You can feed them back to your flock or to your dogs. Maybe freeze them for winter when the flock is not laying.

If you buy their feed another chicken makes that more expensive. I suspect you had figured that out.

My laying/breeding flock was usually one rooster with 6 to 8 hens. I had a lot of surplus eggs which I mostly gave away. I'd typically set 28 eggs at a time for my incubator hatch early in the year, usually February. I needed to hatch then so I would not run out of meat in the freezer by early summer. Other hatches came later, usually with broody hens though often I might need the incubator again. I bred my flock to go broody a lot, most flocks don't do that. Sometimes it was a struggle to get 28 eggs in a week in February to set.

My thoughts on how many hens you need have nothing to do with the possibility that you might, could, occasionally, sometimes, maybe have overbreeding or a bare-backed hen and more on the logistics of getting enough eggs when you need them. This does not mean that I don't think over-mating and bare backs can't happen, even with mature chickens. They can happen and need to be dealt with if they do. I do not consider more hens a preventative or a solution.

 

[AmeliaBedelia]

You could also get one or two hens of a different type that are more likely to go broody. But have them hatch your plymouth rock eggs for you, not their own.

 

[Mrs. K]

Abother point is how many people in your household? And your use of eggs? If you bake and eat a lot of eggs, I would think you would need more chickens. A rule of thumb is the number of people +1, if less than 4 people. +2 if more than 5 people. But that is mostly for just eating eggs. To have enough to hatch out for meat… I think you would need a few more.

They don’t lay every day, and in the winter they can stop all together. There really is no easy answer.