Anyone raise chickens?

[bklem]

We are down to four and need to flip them. They are still laying but have slowed down. Anybody want four older hens for free!!!!

[Guardian Reaper]

They are a neat bird to own. We have 7 hens and a Craigslist rooster! (A giveaway. A couple raised 9 from eggs in an incubator and got 9 roosters) 5 of the hens are New Hampshire Reds and 2 Barred Rocks. The Reds are really good layers. The Barred Rocks are not bad themselves. The Reds will start laying about a month before other breeds. My suggestion is to build your own coop, as it will probably outlast prefab ones. We really enjoy ours and they are a lot of entertainment. You can probably buy eggs cheaper, but again, they just neat.

[Briar Friar]

Yes. We flux between 60-120 chickens. Meat birds and egg layers. Give'm space theyll flourish. Rat snakes are real egg suckers. Ive got a two deer feeders in my big coop...one disperses layer pellets 6 times a day...the other slings milo (sorghum) at alternating times. I got tired of slinging feed. Also I noticed after feeding scratch to my chickens that they really didnt eat the cracked corn but ate the wheat and milo well. Every slaughter...their crops are full of milo.

We incubate our own eggs because we run cocks. Fertilized eggs taste just the same as unfertilized.

The chickens get all of our organic food scraps. Mine go bonkers over banana peels. I feed them leftover fried chicken, hot dogs, balogna, moldy bread, weeds from the garden, whatever. They really are ominvorous little dinosaur descendents.

[Triple 000 Buck]

We used two trampoline frames welded one on top of the other, added a gate and left the mat on the top one, ran wire around it and connected to the cage, makes for a great chicken run. We don't let them free roam due to the droppings that they leave on our deck.

[Bayouboy]

We are down to four and need to flip them. They are still laying but have slowed down. Anybody want four older hens for free!!!!

Perect for gumbo or stew.

[cva34]

This has lots of info https://www.backyardchickens.com/forums

[Junkers88]

Chicken math is your enemy. Our initial plan was to have 5 hens and one rooster. By the time it was all said and done we had 60 hens, 5 roosters, 3 ducks, I'd dug a pond in the back yard for an aquaponics system totaling 2700 gallons and we had a Black Soldier Fly bin running that was 8x2x2 that produced a few pounds of feed grubs daily. I built 3 coops in the first two years. One was 5x10, the next was 10x10 and the last one was 10x25 with 18 nesting boxes on one side and 15 more on the other under the roost. Do yourself a favor and look up "poop board" and build them under your roosts. Makes cleaning a breeze and the poop can go right into a compost bin, BSF bin or into the garden.

It was a lot of work initially but I think that was due in part to my wife and I going "homestead nuts" and wanting more and more production off of the property.


Enjoy it!

[Shake N' Bake]

We had chickens in the past and recently got back into it. We are carb free as well and consume a ton of eggs.
We have 4 grown chickens that are laying, 4 chicks and 2 baby ducks. We will probably pick up a few more grown chickens soon.

I highly recommend Building your own coop. I was able to get a used wooded crate from my warehouse at work and I also scored some used lumber from a job site which really cut down on costs.

Here's a quick video I made of me and the family building our coop

https://youtu.be/FTvQurGLVHc

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[Les]

This time of year, ours LOVED June bugs.

[Strummer]

I have probably 30 chickens and 50 chicks now . Butcher about 30 or more a year . Most of mine free range .


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[SaltwaterSlick]

Yep, my bride wanted "a few" chickens for eggs... I went to that dang backyard chickens website that's been posted at least twice in this thread... Man, there's a whole other world out there... Some of those folks are.... well let's just say they're obsessed with chickens... I watched videos, read DIY posts, etc. Then I decided to build a coop rather than buy one. I figger'd I'd built a lot of deer stands in the past. A coop can't be much different! I ended up with a coop that has the automatic chicken door that opens just before sunrise and closes right after sunset, Got a big PVC self feeder, and a self watering system that I made using chicken nipples... Heck, I didn't even know chickens had nipples!! I bought 2 of those 10 X 10 chain link dog kennels and put them together for a pen to keep predators away from them. Made the coop pretty much predator proof and it is inside the pen. We lost some smaller birds to hawks and a hen or 2 to feral cats, so we put a 1" mesh chicken wire top on the pen and haven't lost a bird since. They can roam around during the day especially when my wife has her garden going, but let a hawk squeal out, and they're hotfotting it straight to the pen. We generally close 'em up at night, and if we're going to be gone for multiple days, we'll close 'em up in the pen. They're pretty self-sufficient in the pen for a good 2 weeks without any assistance... We haven't left them that long yet, but we could if we went on vacation. Other than losing those eggs, there's no harm/no fowl Right now wife has 12 hens and no rooster. That's WAY plenty for us! We end up giving eggs to family and friends pretty much year round... production dropped off this winter more than last, and they all seemed to go into a molt at about the same time... During love bug season, they're like ninja chickens snapping those suckers right out of the air... endless hours of entertainment for us!

[Strummer]

My kids butchering birds



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[Stan R]

I started with a 10x10 dog pen with a tractor supply coop. still have the 10x10 ... but build a 16x16 fully enclosed.... almost finished with the 22x15 fully enclosed addition. The coop is a 8x8 building with insulation, electric. and 4 small windows with screens. we have 9 chickens with 6 more in the brooder. Might get 6 more in a few weeks. We get several colors or eggs. We give some away and sell some but at $3 a dozen it will take forever to get my money back.

I love the automatic door.

I'll post pictures when I get home

[Quackerbox]

I love the automatic door.

I'll post pictures when I get home

Tell me more about the automatic door.

Im currently converting my old dog pen into a coop which will be very close to electricity. Ive already thought about adding a plug for a heat lamp when it gets cold.

[alec73065]

We have 6 hens and one rooster , we had a 10' x 10' playhouse on our property when we moved in that I turned into a coop. 10' x 30' dog kennel enclosure but I have a larger area fenced off they free range in . I only need about 10,000 eggs to break even on the money and time invested. We love sitting out and watching them and my wife's potbelly pig lives with them. It definitely is an addiction. We don't get a lot of eggs because ours are more fancy but we do have one layer that outlays the rest of them overall. We have lost one hen to a raccoon and 2 roosters to our mini donkeys , hence the larger free roam area. Having them run free in the donkey pasture was a recipe for killing by the donkeys. I am definitely in for pics of the auto door !!