Thinking about Chickens

[nes]

So I've been thinking about chickens for a couple years, and this year DH & I actually discussed it but I'm really not sure of what the best way is to go about the whole business.

My preference is for dual-purpose birds so we can have eggs but I'm thinking meat birds would be easier for our first birds?

We rent on the front of a cow farm so land isn't really an issue, and we can scrounge up some interesting materials from the farmer. He's super supportive of helping local city-idiots to learn more about farming

(although he does lay on a good dose of sarcastic humour for stupid questions!).

Because we rent I don't want to spend more then about $50 on a coop. I've been on the look out of a suitable shed for sale, etc. but haven't been able to find anything. I'd spend more money if it was going to be something we wanted to take with us, but we aren't sure where we are moving when we get our own place.

There is an old 3-sided barn about 20' from our house that is used to store bad or left-over hay, I know the farmer would let us use some of it for chickens if we asked, but because he needs to get in there with the tractor to get his hay I'm not sure how we'd make that work.

The other problem is that we are going to have to fence of a completely separate section of space, I've got a toddler & another one on the way so I don't want chicken poo everywhere. If I'm not going to be able to rotate runs how much land do we need for 20-30 meat birds? We just finished 3/4 of the lawn in 6' high no-scale goat fencing, would that be appropriate for chickens? There is lots more for us just waiting to take it down.

We have a great set-up for chicks, I've got a big fish tank & hubby's an electrician so a heat-lamp is NO problem. I can probably even get some feeders from the farmer when his son gives up on yet another attempt at turkeys (he took a break last year to try goats after all the turkeys were eaten, he's lost 1/3 of the turkeys already this year...).

Foxes and coyotes are a BIG issue in our area, what can we do to make sure they aren't going to get the chickens? Just hope they fill up on Turkey?

The other problem is in the spring I will have 2 kids. One will be just over 2 and the other will be 4-5 months by the time we're getting chickens (I'm due in January). I have a feeling I'll be putting chickens off for another year again. Not that it would be a problem to wait.

I've read TONS about chickens, I understand how to care for them, I just don't know how to make it work at our house!

Thanks.

 

[Imp]

Tackle one issue at a time and you'll have it figured out in no time. You'll get lots of advice here.

Imp

 

[nes]

Thanks Imp. My big issues are

(1) What to do about a coop
(2) Where to put/What to about a run

Everything else I think we can handle.

I forgot to add: I do see allot of people letting their chickens run loose with no fence (they don't get hit by cars?). We do have large "semi-field" on the one side of the backyard that isn't fenced. If the chickens aren't going to run out on the road it would be very easy just to stick a coop there. It's a 1/4 acre at least.

Although the farmer was "going to put hay there this year" it's really too small to get anything useful off & he's too busy! It's all wild-flowers again now. Plus their is another rental house on the other side of the "field" and even though our neighbours are reclusive & a little weird they have young kids & might be interested in getting some chickens too.

If we were going to put some sort of fencing up it would have to be temporary because it needs to be bush-hogged (no grass to speak of). I've never heard of a temporary fencing that would actually work with chickens.

They would get FAT off all the grasshoppers that are out there though!!

 

[wichix411]

First of all,

!!!

I think you'll find this place very helpful.
I can't really think of anything that would cost under 50 bucks for a coop. we built a 4x8 coop with a 10x12 run, but don't remember what everyything costed, prolly about200 total. That was for our pullets. We didn't even get our feet wet the first time we got chickens...we jumped right in

. We raised 50 meat birds and we have 8 pullets, and let me tell ya, meat birds are LOTS of work. and we just built a 10x10 pen out of 1x3 lumber that we moved twice a day to fresh grass. It worked pretty slick. and we too have coyotes and also weasels and coons and opposums, and nothing managed to get at any of the meaties in this pen. Google Salatin Pens, and you'll find the information interesting, and it might be best suited to you for now, since they aren't TOO expensive to build. If you wanna start with meaties, that would be the way to go. where you live would be the deciding factor of when to order the chicks, as they go out in the pen at about 3 weeks old, and it should definitely not be freezing at night. PM me if you have more questions about the daily-move pen. I got lots of experience with it!

and also with the tractor, you can decide where you do and don't want chicken poop (for the kiddos not to get in it)

 

[nes]

I'd be very happy with 2-3 egg layers but they'd need a much more complicated coop wouldn't they? I mean it would have to be insulated for the winter & have lots of nest boxes and such?

I love the chicken tractors, but they all seem really expensive. I suppose if the goat fencing could be adapted (although the farmer probably has chicken wire we could have) it would make it allot less expensive.

Could I stick a chicken-tractor in a field with a bunch of cows or horses? (obviously the farmer would have to go for that idea first).

 

[StupidBird]

Welcome to BYC and best wishes!

Just Do It - you could even try just a few to work out the kinks in the housing/predator situation. We picked up five dual-purpose chicks this year as a trial run. Had talked about it for years, DH said sometime. Sometime turned out to be the week he got home from the hospital with his heart attack. I figured he needed something to keep his mind busy while home recovering.

Its been great; now of course I WANT MORE.

On the 3-sided hay shed: what if the chicken housing was built all up one corner, like some crazy bird apartment? My inlaws did their bunny hutches like that. I have also seen coops built from ag parts in arches, what're they called? Just cruise the BYC site's coop sections. Don't forget childproof latches or critters will be everywhere. Also some breeds are reported here to be much more self-sufficient in the free-range situations. Good luck, best wishes!

 

[Imp]

Quote:
Good Luck

Imp

 

[patandchickens]

Hi, welcome to BYC

Quote:
I would recommend starting with dual-purpose (i.e. non meat) birds -- meaties, if you mean the typical white CornishX broiler chicks you get from the feed store, are a whooole different world from 'real' chickens and could very easily put you off the whole enterprise. Once you are used to real chickens, then you can consider trying them if you want, but I wouldn't start out that way.

Because we rent I don't want to spend more then about $50 on a coop. I've been on the look out of a suitable shed for sale, etc. but haven't been able to find anything. I'd spend more money if it was going to be something we wanted to take with us, but we aren't sure where we are moving when we get our own place.

There is an old 3-sided barn about 20' from our house that is used to store bad or left-over hay, I know the farmer would let us use some of it for chickens if we asked, but because he needs to get in there with the tractor to get his hay I'm not sure how we'd make that work.

Can you just partition off a corner of it, where it won't get whomped by the tractor? Even just a 4x6 area would be enough for a few chickens to let you 'get your feet wet', see how you like it and where you want to go from there. You could probbably find lumber/plywood scraps lying around. Then you would just have to buy, or scrounge, decent run fencing.

If I'm not going to be able to rotate runs how much land do we need for 20-30 meat birds?

See above re: meat chickens... however, if you REALLY REALLY want to start that way, either build a broiler-type tractor (see Meat Birds Etc section of BYC for some design ideas), although that might be pricier than you want, or give them maybe 8x10' and expect it to get massively disgusting (you will need to add bedding, like straw or something, every day or few days so they are not marinating in poo). It will stink and breed lotsa flies.

We just finished 3/4 of the lawn in 6' high no-scale goat fencing, would that be appropriate for chickens?

Yes, they might well stay inside of a 6' fence unless they decide not to (for a smallish run, you could get some cheap trellis netting to put over the top to keep them from flying out and deter hawks). You would however want to get something smaller meshed, like definitely no more than 1x1" mesh and preferably smaller, to run along the bottom 2' or so to keep the chickens' heads in. Cheap plastic garden netting would be fine, it doesn't have to be super predator proof just chickenproof

Foxes and coyotes are a BIG issue in our area, what can we do to make sure they aren't going to get the chickens?

Foxes climb and dig (excellently). Coyotes dig, and some will climb a little. Climbing is very hard to prevent, short of running a strongly-charged and very reliable electric wire(s); digging can fairly easily be prevented by pinning heavy gauge wire mesh on the ground all around the outside of the coop/run and securing it to the bottom of the run fence or coop wall.

The other problem is in the spring I will have 2 kids. One will be just over 2 and the other will be 4-5 months by the time we're getting chickens (I'm due in January). I have a feeling I'll be putting chickens off for another year again. Not that it would be a problem to wait.

Well, chickens are really pretty easy to care for... I got my first chickens when kid#1 was a little over 1 1/2 and I was 8 months pregnant with kid#2 (I kept them in a converted dog run - the chickens, I mean, not the children - til kid#2 was about a month old, at which point I knocked together a chicken tractor for them).

(e.t.a. - I see you're near Ottawa - I'm probably too far away, about an hour north of Toronto, but if you ahve a truck and wanted to come out here I could set you up with my tractor which I'm no longer using, it would probably be adequately winterizeable for 3 chickens or so, especially if you parked it in a barn for the winter...)

And even at only 1 1/2, the older one LOVED the chickens right from the start

So, you do not necessarily need to wait

My suggestion would be to knock something together for 3-4 layers (sexlinks, barred rocks, whatever you can get easily this time of year in your area and appeals to you) and then give yourself til next spring or the year after to decide what if anything you want to do on a larger scale. I know my plans changed MASSIVELY (!) after getting my first chickens, and I am glad I did not commit to a more major course of action that early.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat​

 

[3KillerBs]

Here's some thoughts for a fellow wannabe chickenkeeper (I discovered that my town doesn't permit chickens). I don't know if you could call it advice, but its the train of reasoning that I followed to get to a certainty about what I wanted and what would work on my property.

I started with the thought that there are so many breeds and varieties that there was no reason on earth to raise chickens that I didn't find visually appealing. I have a strong aversion to the color brown so I eliminated those breeds and still had a tremendous variety to choose from.

I wanted a good supply of eggs with enough meat on the hens to be worth making stew when they retired. So the old-fashioned, dual purpose breeds seemed best -- especially since I didn't want to have to replace them every year but rather wanted to get a reliable second year out of them. That made the commercial leghorns and commercial sex links iffy.

I live right in town, so I wanted something that would look nice in a tractor on the lawn. I thought that if my hens were beautiful to look at there would be less likelihood of neighbors complaining -- an old-pickup truck on blocks gets complaints while a new sportscar parked in the same spot gets admiring stares.

I wanted brown eggs because they're part of my mental picture of what a farm egg should be. And raising heritage breeds goes along with the heirloom plants in my garden.

I needed the ability to cope with high heat and high humidity. I don't need much in the way of winter-hardiness, but I can't be having them die of heatstroke because the thermometer hit 95 -- because that's just about every day all summer. That made the Silver-Laced Wyandottes, the front-runner in many categories, iffy. I might have tried them, but I'd have bought them from a southern breeder to be sure they were selected for the ability to tolerate heat.

It boiled down to Australorps and Delawares. Since the former is selected more as a layer and the latter is more a meat bird I decided on Australorps, with some optional SLWs if I could get local stock.

Since I have a large family (4 kids, with my Mom moving nearby soon), but no ready market for spare eggs I worked the math based on 4-6 eggs per bird per week and decided that half a dozen hens was the right number -- since its better to be a little over than a little under in case of sexing errors, predation, or other issues.

Your case may be different in every detail -- aesthetic preference, climate, number of eggs needed, market for extra eggs, etc. But following the same steps is likely to lead you into the right decision for your circumstances.

IMO, the main thing is to start on a manageable scale. Its easier to expand something if its more successful than expected than to get out when you're over your head.

 

[PunkinPeep]

Welcome to BYC!

I liked the idea about putting a tractor out with the horses and whatnot. If the farmer is agreeable, i have read others here say that this also helps keep away some of the normal predators because the larger animals scare them off.

I know you've read all about it, but my two cents on getting started (i'm barely started myself) is to start with egg-layers. If you only want two or three, you raise layers in a tractor too, and it's a really good experience to watch them grow and mature and get used to their ways.

Either way, I hope you dive in!