Are you ready to raise the right chicken on your homestead?
Over the past 19 years, we’ve raised many different breeds of chickens. We’ve made every mistake in the book and have had great success as well. We’ve bought day-old chicks from mail order companies and local farm stores. We’ve also purchased full grown chickens from the auction.
We’ve gotten carried away with how many chicks we’ve ordered due to pricing. No, 50 chickens aren’t the same as 100 – even if they were the same price. We’ve raised meat chickens, egg layers, and dual purpose.
We’ve accomplished our goal of adding delicious, clean, fresh meat and eggs to our diet.
We currently incubate the majority of our own chicks for meat, eggs, and in the pasture. We’ve created our own barnyard special that suits our needs. Any chicks we don’t incubate, we buy from places that grow chicks like we do, and do not vaccinate.
To me, this is food freedom. We have control over creating our own food and raising them as we deem fit.
The key to raising successful chickens for meat and eggs is purpose.
Why do you want chickens in the first place? What is your goal for chickens? Your why and goal will define how you’ll raise your chickens, the breed, and how many you should raise at a time. Remember, your why can and will change from season to season.
You will gain fresh meat and eggs from the right chicken. You’ll also get little creatures that clean up their living areas and fertilize the ground they run on. Chickens will eat bugs, frogs, mosquitoes, slugs, ticks, and so much more.
Define your purpose for raising chickens and how you want to raise them.
Before you buy or incubate your first chicks or next chicks think about the following:
Purpose: Are the chickens for meat, eggs, or cleaning up an area? Or all three.
When do you want the said purpose fulfilled? Remember, it can take 4 to 7 months for a heritage breed to begin laying eggs or be ready for harvesting. Think about timing when choosing when to start your chicks, so you get the result you want, when you want it.
You don’t want to be harvesting chickens when it is too hot or cold for the humans involved.
How much space do you have for your chickens? Will they be free ranged, have a chicken tractor, a run, etc?
What are you going to feed your chickens? Free ranged chickens during a growing season can get much of their nutrients from nature, but they still need some food.
Decide how you want your chickens fed. For instance, non-GMO (genetically modified), organic (which is always non-gmo), or conventional feed. You can also sprout and ferment seeds and grains for your chickens.
Read all the information on a chicken before you buy and ask questions.
When you start going through chicken catalogs be wary of the size of the bird. The size they list for the rooster or the hen is live weight, not dead weight. If the rooster is supposed to be 9 pounds, you’ll get about 4 to 5 pounds of meat, fat, and carcass. The less active and higher filler such as corn and soy, the fatter your bird could be. Look for chickens that fit your weather for raising. Some birds do better in cold or hot weather, but not both.
Look for breeds that tend to go broody. A brood hen gives you the ability to incubate chicks for you. Not all broody breeds will have a hen that will go broody. But having a broody breed means the natural instincts of the breed have not been bred out.
Ask about vaccinations. We did a quick email to the 5 top most well-known hatcheries on the web. What we found out is that they all were part of the NPIP (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/nvap/reference-guide/poultry/npip) through the federal government.
This is a volunteer program the government pushes as a good idea. NPIP hatcheries vaccinate their breeders and sometimes the day-old chicks. Anything that goes into the chicken goes into the egg and into your chicks. Then into you. You are what you eat.
On a side note, we did find a conservatory that didn’t vaccinate their breeders or their chicks. Many of the vaccinations for poultry are live vaccines. This means they are giving the bird the disease in the name of creating immunity. We believe this creates a fake immunity, which makes for a weaker flock. By not vaccinating your chickens you’re build a stronger flock through survival of the fittest.
Ask the hatchery if they are a NPIP Certified hatchery. Hatcheries do not have to list vaccinations on their website or tell you. If you’ve decided vaccination is a good idea, I ask you one question. Why? You are not a chicken meat or egg laying facility that has each chicken only have 3 square feet. Over crowding and dirty conditions create disease. Wide open space and natural chickens rearing does not.
Stay away from farm stores to uy your chicks. They do not know if the chicks you buy are vaccinated. Nor do they know anything about the hatcheries breeding program.
Meat Birds vs Roosters for Meat
If you’re raising your chickens primarily for meat beware of chickens that are considered meat birds. Know exactly what you are getting.
As a teenager, my husband worked on a farm. In those days the meat birds were the roosters that weren’t the main roosters for the laying flock. The older hens were used for soup and stews. There wasn’t a meat bird that grew to full size in 6 to 8 weeks and weighed 6 to 8 pounds. If you wanted poultry that was 6 to 8 pounds or more you raised turkeys.
I bring this up because of the popularity of the Cornish Cross chickens. We call them Franken Chickens. Why? Because this breed and breeds like them aren’t meant to reproduce. They are not sustainable. Why not? Because the chicken dies before it’s mature enough to lay eggs. They break legs and die. They have heart attacks and die. In my book they are not natural. What did man do to get such a bird that grows fast, dies if not harvested in time, and can not reproduce?
If a chicken can’t act like a chicken from hatching to reproducing, than man has really screwed with nature.
There are more and more breeds coming on the market with the ability to grow fast, but not reproduce so beware of the new names as well. Look for the fast grow time. Ask the hatchery if the bird you’re looking at can mature to 6 months and if the hens can lay eggs. If they say no, I’d stay away from them.
Other chickens on the market such as Freedom Rangers and the Bresse Chicken grow slower than the Franken Chicken. These will mature to lay eggs and do great on pasture. The Freedom Rangers are a mix of four different breeds, so there off springs don’t emulate their parents. In the past five to ten years the Bresse Chicken has become popular as a meat bird as well. To get the best Bresse Chicken results you need to feed them a special diet.
The Bresse chicken is more sustainable than the Freedom Ranger chicken as far as incubating your own eggs. The Bresse is not a hybrid of several birds. We’ve grown both Bresse and Freedom Rangers chickens in the past. They were fun to grow and eat, we no longer grow either one for a variety of reasons.
Dual Purpose Birds
If you want both meat and eggs, look for dual purpose heritage chickens. They take a little longer to lay eggs than an egg layer and grow slower than a meat chicken. You get the best of both worlds eggs and meat. They act like chickens and are very sustainable. Of course you can also cross any of your chickens, creating a barnyard special that fits your homestead.
One last piece of advice before you order your chicks. Don’t go by the price of the chickens, but the number of chicks you can raise safely for you and the bird. The more chicks you buy the cheaper each individual chick costs. Just because 100 birds is almost the same cost as 50 or 75 doesn’t mean you should do it.
Figure out what purpose a chicken has on your homestead. Then go for it. Chickens are an excellent addition to your food freedom. If you live in town check the codes. Many towns allow you to have a certain number of hens, no roosters, in your back yard.
There are tons of breeds to choose from, plus create some of your own.
Remember you are what you eat!
Grow Food – Eat Local – Gain Freedom