Chickens for Eggs - Anyone Here With Experience?

[Broomstick]

My landlord is considering keeping chickens. Apparently his wife is bitching about the price of eggs (again), and they certainly have the land to acquire some small livestock (28 hectares). Well - anyone here with experience in keeping chickens?

I'm thinking Rhode Island Reds - apparently they're good egg-layers, they're hardy, and have some cold tolerance (sort of important around here).

He expressed some concern about waste disposal but I pointed out that chicken shit is GREAT for compost heaps and if he didn't want it I'd take at least some of it. Which lead into a discussion of composting for his garden. I also mentioned that, since he's planning to fence his vegetable garden this year, he could put the chickens in it periodically for bug control. Good for the chickens... good for the vegetables... (well, they might nibble a little but hey, you're getting eggs out of it, right?)

He's more than capable of building coops and fencing for keeping the chickens safe. A necessity between the raccoons, coyotes, foxes, and goodness knows what else we have running around the area.

Any thoughts/experiences/suggestions/warnings?

(Not certain this will go forward for sure, but this time of year is when we plan our agricultural projects for summer)

[Zaune]

Heh heh heh. Fence them in really thoroughly, or they will become very annoying, especially if the back door has a dog-flap.

On a more serious note, I don't know what a 25KG sack of layer's pellets costs in Illinois, but at least half their diet is basically free; vegetable peelings, stale leftovers and other kitchen scraps boiled up in a saucepan work great.

As for breed, I guess your best bet is to just go to the nearest working farm that has some for sale and see what they have the most of. It probably doesn't matter that much, to be honest; we've got ten generic reddish-brown ones and five weird-looking toy breeds (three bantams and two Silkies I think) and we were getting five or six eggs a day when the weather was good. We were giving them away because we couldn't eat all of them.

[Broomstick]

I've noticed a lot of Rhode Islands in the various background coops in the area, and my admitting brief research indicates they're suitable layers. Honestly, the fact a lot of folks in the area keep the RI Reds tends to make me favor them.

[Executor32]

I have no experience with them, personally, but my grandma still has some chickens on her farm. I think she has around fifteen to twenty or so of various breeds, mostly RI Reds and White Leghorns with a couple Silkies and Plymouth Rocks last I knew, and they give her enough eggs from spring through fall that she has plenty of surplus to sell. They stop laying during winter, though that might depend on the breed. It's possible that with a heated coop he might keep them laying, but I'm not sure; I don't know offhand whether it's temperature or day length that their laying is based on. If you or he have any questions, I can forward them to my grandma and see if she has an answer.

Oh, and it probably goes without saying, but he'll need to make sure to wash eggs he intends to eat or sell; since birds only have one hole for everything, eggs tend to have shit on them more often than not.

[Broomstick]

Day length is what affects breeding and laying in birds.

And yeah, just the one exit for birds - one reason he was asking me about this sort of thing is that we've had parrots as pets for about 20 years now. They're not the same as chickens, obviously, but since they're all birds they have quite a bit in common.

[Raw Shark]

He's more than capable of building coops and fencing for keeping the chickens safe. A necessity between the raccoons, coyotes, foxes, and goodness knows what else we have running around the area.

Any thoughts/experiences/suggestions/warnings?

The people I grew up across the street from kept about 15-20 RI Reds through my childhood, which provided a shitload of eggs. They seem to do fine in New England winter without any kind of artificial heat, as long as the coop isn't too drafty and they have sufficient nesting material. If you have a lot of wildlife of that sort, and enough building materials, you might want to consider putting a roof over the entire pen. My neighbors enclosed the whole thing with chicken wire on every side except the bottom, and never had raccoons get in that I know of.

[Tsyroc]

I had to look up the kind of chickens my cousin has in her backyard in Phoenix. She's had very good luck with Buff Orpingtons. I think she's up to 4 birds now. When I last was there she only had two but they put out plenty of eggs for her, her husband and their two young children.

The birds were friendly enough that they put up with the kids chasing them from time to time, and they didn't mind being held and petted. They also got along well with the family dogs.

From some of the stuff I've read looking up the names of these chickens it looks like your initial idea to go with Road Island Reds or one of the other Red varieties might be a good one because of the weather where you live. Plus it sounds like they should be readily available.

[LadyTevar]

Actually, I think I have a better bird for you: The Ameraucana. They are a breed that bred in Chile, so they're suited for deep freezes, plus they have an interesting quirk -- Blue Eggs. Instead of white or brown, their eggshells are blue or green, so they've gotten the name "Easter Egg Hens". Not a thing wrong with the eggs themselves, just pastel shells that catch the eye should you need to sell any.

BTW: I have also heard from a farmer that as long as eggs are not washed, they have a protective coating that keeps the air out and thus the yolk/fetus 'in stasis'. This is how a chicken can lay eggs over a number of days, and still have them all hatch at the same time. Brooding the eggs wears the coating off, and air starts permeating the shell, and the fetus grows. So, eggs that have not been washed keep up to two weeks longer than washed eggs.

[LadyTevar]

Oh, and you'll need a rooster. Hens don't lay without a rooster. They also only lay for 3-5yrs per bird, so you'll have to replace layers ever few years. Birds that annoy you go in the crockpot.

[Korto]

Oh, and you'll need a rooster. Hens don't lay without a rooster.

Yeah. That's complete rubbish. Which is fortunate, since you wont be able to keep roosters anywhere you have close neighbours. They don't just crow at sunrise. Try 1am, 2am, 3am... Get the picture? What hens need to lay is to be unstressed (not too hot or cold, not continually scared e.g. by barking dogs), and well fed. They do NOT, in any way, need a rooster.
Given he's got ample land, he could probably have one anyway. A good rooster will apparently help the hens find food, and will attack any foxes or other predators to give his hens a chance to escape. A good rooster would probably also have a go at you, which I would find pretty cool, but YMMV.

Otherwise, they really don't take much. If he can move the coop around, he'll avoid cleaning up. They're a good way to "mow" an area you let get out of control, and they'll reduce a garden bed down to bare earth if confined to it.
Don't move them between multiple different coops - make one mobile coop. Chickens are territorial; they don't like everything changing and they may stop laying. If they're still in their 'home', with the same smell, they feel better about it.

Whether a wing needs to be clipped will depend. If a bird's causing trouble, I just clip one wing. It imbalances them when they try to fly, and they decide it's not worth the bother.

Chickens are NOT great for garden beds in current use. You'll be amazed how much damage the bastards can do with those claws of theirs. Ducks are better. Webbed feet.

You'll be overrun with eggs in summer (well, your landlord will be), and wonder where they all went in winter, but you've always impressed me as handy, so maybe if you offered to do various things with his excess, you could get a cut of the bounty. Try some different pickle recipes (I recommend Beetroot pickled eggs, no learning curve for the tongue and very pretty pink colour)

[Zaune]

Oh, yeah, one other thing. Don't start accepting money for eggs until you've gone over the relevant food safety regulations, otherwise you can get in all kinds of legal hot water.

[Raw Shark]

Oh, and you'll need a rooster. Hens don't lay without a rooster.

Yeah. That's complete rubbish. Which is fortunate, since you wont be able to keep roosters anywhere you have close neighbours. They don't just crow at sunrise. Try 1am, 2am, 3am... Get the picture? What hens need to lay is to be unstressed (not too hot or cold, not continually scared e.g. by barking dogs), and well fed. They do NOT, in any way, need a rooster.

Yeah, my memories of the chicken-keeping neighbors 200 yards from my parents' house would be a lot less rosy if they had a rooster more often than once every few years. You only need one of those when you want to make more chickens.

[Broomstick]

Lady Tevar, thanks for the tip about the Ameraucana breed. I'm told that you can mix different types of hens, so there's no reason he couldn't have a few of both. I think colored eggs would be neat, I'm not sure he cares.

Korto - roosters are nutty aggressive. One of my neighbors has chickens and a rooster. For several years their rooster regularly escaped and was challenging cars on 45th Street. My car's bumper has been spurred a couple times. Any rooster that will take on cars and SUV's will certainly challenge a human. I don't know if that particular rooster came to a a predictable end doing that, or died of old age, but we haven't seen him for awhile. They still have a rooster, though, I hear him occasionally. We're far enough away it's not too annoying. (They keep largely Rhode Island Reds)

My landlord and I have had combined agricultural effort for a number of years now, helping with our gardens, swapping our excess, he's the guy I did the hydroponics with... I'm expecting any oversupply of eggs will be offered to me as well as other family and friends.

Zaune - don't worry. Although we're more in mind of swapping eggs for other stuff, if we ever do get to selling we'll be sure to stay legal.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Oh, and you'll need a rooster. Hens don't lay without a rooster. They also only lay for 3-5yrs per bird, so you'll have to replace layers ever few years. Birds that annoy you go in the crockpot.

They'll lay just fine without a rooster. It's only if the prospective chicken owner wants his flock to be self-renewing, would there be a point in getting a rooster. And even then ... it's probably much cheaper to simply buy a new batch of chicks every few years, instead of spending all that feed on a bird that's not producing anything, that's too aggressive to really make a suitable pet, and that will cause your neighbors to slash your tires in the dead of night.

But, other than that ... yeah, you get a couple or three years of really good laying, a couple more after that of diminishing production. They'll still lay after that, but the quality and quantity only go down ... and the main reason for replacing them after three to five years is because at that age, they're still perfectly suitable for the crockpot (they're way too old for anything else at that point); whereas if you wait too long, they get too tough and stringy to be acceptable eating.

On a more serious note, I don't know what a 25KG sack of layer's pellets costs in Illinois, but at least half their diet is basically free; vegetable peelings, stale leftovers and other kitchen scraps boiled up in a saucepan work great.

Yeah, you can feed chickens vegetable scraps, and expect them to make up part of their diet in insects; but layer feed is essential for egg production. If one is not going to exclusively feed them on a layer's diet, then they should also have ground oyster shell on-hand to augment their calcium intake. Fortunately, layer pellets and oyster shell are both available from the local farm-and-ag store. For that matter, I've found layer pellets at the local Wal-Mart (your results may vary.)

Oh, and it probably goes without saying, but he'll need to make sure to wash eggs he intends to eat or sell; since birds only have one hole for everything, eggs tend to have shit on them more often than not.

There's a bit of finesse to washing them. They come out of the chicken with a natural sealant called "bloom." It keeps water inside the egg and bacteria outside. Usually, it's enough to brush off whatever happens to be stuck to the egg and not do anything with it otherwise until it's time to eat it.

If one must wash an egg, the trick is to use water that's much warmer than the egg, but not warm enough to accidentally cook it (i.e. hand-wash it with as hot a water as you can stand.) If one washes with cold water, it causes the inside of the egg to shrink, drawing bacteria through the now-exposed pores in the shell. Of course, after the egg is washed, its shelf life decreases by quite a bit.

[LadyTevar]

My apologies on the goof about the Rooster. At least I was right about the "Bloom" on the egg.

I have heard that "sexing" a chick isn't an exact science, so in any box of chicks you might get a rooster or two. Should you not want the rooster, after a few months he'd make a nice dinner.

[LadyTevar]

Oh, and this is another good idea for when it's winter and they've stopped laying:
How to Freeze Eggs

[Korto]

Check with your council about their regulations and preferences, but don't worry too much about some of them. I've ignored half of their stuff and the council doesn't care as long as no-one complains.

You may well accidentally get roosters you don't want, particularly depending upon where your young birds come from. If they're point-of-lay pullets you shouldn't (and take them back and complain if you do. That's just incompetent). If they're fertilized eggs then I'd guess it's a 50/50 shot, same as if you bred your own.
Assuming you decide to slaughter them for meat, the advice I've read is to wait till when they just starting to attempt to crow (but no later, as they toughen fast). My favourite method for slaughtering is:
1) Go into the coop in the middle of the night and calmly and gently get your bird, and put in in a cage. Go to bed.
2) In the morning, after setting everything up, feed the chook some bread soaked in overproof alcohol. Awww... chookie go sleepies now...
3) Lop its head off before it wakes up.
I came up with this method after taking a few millimetres of my wife's fingernail off when trying to chop the head off a struggling bird. Fuck that for a joke.

Laying birds need supplemental feed. They can't lay on pure forage and vegetable scraps. They need protein. I use scratch mix, at about .5kg / 3 birds / day, so you could work out how much your eggs cost from that (I feel 2 eggs / 3 birds / day is what you should expect. I'm not getting that right now. I think the old black's in for the chop).

Really, chooks are easy to look after. Just make sure they have food, water, and a bit of space.
If you get snow, you may have to investigate what people in your area do. It barely gets below 10C here in winter. At night. So I have no idea.

[Broomstick]

Check with your council about their regulations and preferences, but don't worry too much about some of them. I've ignored half of their stuff and the council doesn't care as long as no-one complains.

The possible chicken keeper is in a rural area in between honest-to-goodness commercial farms. His neighbors keep everything from rabbits to full size cattle. Chickens will not be a problem.

Assuming you decide to slaughter them for meat, the advice I've read is to wait till when they just starting to attempt to crow (but no later, as they toughen fast).

One of my concerns is that I doubt very much that my friend will be able to slaughter and eat an animal he's kept and cared for for years. He's pretty sure he can't. At best, he'd be sending them off to someone else, whether selling or bartering them. It has been pointed out to him that hens can live about 2-3 times longer than they are productive layers. Does he want them as pets?

There is the fact that in a few years the last of the stay-at-home kids will be gone, so the diminished egg-laying of older hens might actually wind up scaling the supply to what two middle-aged people are interested in consuming. It's probably the biggest objection/concern his wife has, and unless she has buy-in I doubt this will happen.

If you get snow, you may have to investigate what people in your area do. It barely gets below 10C here in winter. At night. So I have no idea.

Oh, boy, do we get snow!

Chickens around here need a solidly-built coop for the winter. He's already asking locals about it. On the coldest days you need to keep the chickens inside and watch for frostbite, but get some of the cold-tolerant breeds and you should be OK. That's why we're looking at types like the Ameraucana, Rhode Island Red, and Wyandotte, all breeds developed in areas with serious winters.

[Ziggy Stardust]

As for predator avoidance, make sure they are well fenced in. Even when they are outside the coop in some sort of free range enclosure, they should have some sort of roofed lean-to structure to access; both for shade (which they like sometimes) and a place to hide from hawks (which will go after them). Ideally, you can give them a run covered with aviary netting or deer netting - this will give them a place to exercise/be outside while still be covered and protected.

Use hardware cloth instead of chicken wire. Raccoons and foxes (not to mention rats - rats will probably be your biggest problem, pest-wise, to be honest) will get through chicken wire like it's nothing. Hardware cloth is more expensive, but it provides better protection (the finer the mesh, the better). Further, the fences should be buried at least a foot down into the ground (or down to rock, depending on the local geography). Again, both foxes and raccoons will be able to burrow beneath anything shallower (the height of the fence is dependent on what kinds of chicken you have - some breeds will be kept in by one only 2 feet high, others will need something closer to 10. Predators can probably get over anything less than 4 or 5 feet). In addition, the coop itself should have a solid floor. Some people like to raise their coops off the ground so their cats can go underneath and hunt some of the mice/rats and such that will inevitably take interest, but on the other hand if it is flush with the ground you with a solid floor you will keep a lot of stuff away - both are good, but its an important consideration.

Also, chickens love to scratch things. Keep that in mind. They will scratch at every surface, constantly. The ground, the wire, the floor of the coop, etc. Between that and the activity of predators and mice, everything should be checked fairly regularly.

[Broomstick]

Friend has been getting more serious about this.

He has an unused concrete pad that could serve as the floor of the coop/run area. If the pad needs repair, or he wants to sink fencing bottoms into concrete that's not a problem. Locals are recommending a 3-layer fencing - screening material to restrict mosquitoes, hardware cloth, then an outer layer of chicken wire to help support the other two. He's a general contractor by trade and has extensive experience building houses for people, commercial buildings, etc. so constructing a sturdy coop should be no problem. For that matter, he probably has sufficient building materials left over from prior projects that he will have to purchase little materials to construct the coop and run. He's also planning to roof everything over with netting or fencing.

He's also located a local livestock butcher willing to take live, no longer productive hens and return them as neatly packaged disassembled eating poultry.

He's looking into what would be required to allow him to legally sell surplus eggs and/or poultry.

[Ziggy Stardust]

If you have a concrete floor, you'd want to put something down over it for the chickens to scratch on. They might injure themselves scratching at it.

[Broomstick]

I'll pass that along.

[Zaune]

This is a bit of a necro, but I had another important fact about chicken-keeping brought home to me earlier today.

The feed and any eggs they decide to lay somewhere ridiculous that you don't think to look in -and they will do this with annoying regularity- is going to attract rats and other pests. It's possible to buy chicken-proof receptacles for poisoned bait, or you can take the more naturalistic option and acquire a couple of cats, but this is something you'll need to address early on.

[The Grim Squeaker]

We have a medium sized coop at home. We feed them normal chicken feed that we buy by the sack from a nearby feed importer, and organic/food waste.
We get a ton of eggs, tasty eggs too. Comes out cheap. (Be careful with animals. We had a ferret/weasel/stoat? break in about a year ago, by digging under the coop fence. It killed 4, by ripping out their hearts in a neat hole, then draining all the blood.)