How to Raise Chickens for Eggs
How to raise chickens for eggs? These are birds that are light in body-weight and as a result often take off to roost in trees and tend towards flightiness in general. Therefore, if you want to keep egg-layers, they should really be kept in covered runs. Alternatively, if you want to let them free-range, you will have to clip one wing.How to Raise Chickens for Meat
How to raise chickens for meat? Table breeds are heavier and therefore less flighty than egg-layers. They are also more docile and placid in nature. There are also many dual-purpose birds which are both excellent table birds and good layers. These are discussed under Chicken Breeds . However, if you are going to raise table birds, never name your chickens unless you want recrimination and tears from the kids who refuse to eat "Rusty" or "Speckles" minus its feathers while gracing the plate!
However, if you end up with too many
roosters, don't despair, as you can caponize
chickens, making your roosters good as surrogate
mothers for hatching eggs, and also better meat birds.
How to Raise Chickens - How Many Chickens Do you Need?
How to raise chickens for your family's
needs? For those of you who are raising
organic chickens just for eggs, then 6 good layers will happily keep a
family of 4 in eggs, all year around. Beware however, that at certain
times of year there will be times when egg production will decrease.
This happens when the chickens loose their feathers during moulting in
late summer, early autumn, and in winter when there are reduced
daylight hours.
How to Raise Chickens and Buying your Chicks
Buying your chickens will basically
come down to 2 things; how much money do you have, and how much time
can you afford to wait before your chickens start to produce eggs or
will be slaughtered for their meat? How to raise chickens in the space
that you have?
The cheapest option is, without a
doubt, buying day-old chicks. However, although they are cheap, there
are some issues here that need to be discussed. First of all, buying
day-old chicks often comes with a high mortality rate. If you haven't
lost some on-route to delivery, you will often loose some more within
the next couple of days.
To prevent any further deaths you will
have to
invest in an artificial brooder, or find a foster mother for them to
keep them warm.
Secondly, very few chicken breeds can
be sexed
at that age. As a result, if you are after egg-layers, you really don't
want to end up with a lot of useless cock birds. And then what do you
do with them once you find that about 40 - 60% of your stock are male?
You will either have to cull them, or separate them off and sell them
at a later stage. However, you will have to off-set that against the
cost of their food, care and housing.
Lastly, when you buy day-old chicks,
you will have to feed, care and house them for at least 8 months or so,
before they start to lay.
For those of you who are raising
chickens for egg laying, it make more sense to buy pullets. A pullet is
a female that is at least 20 weeks of age and less than 1 year old.
Technically, she is capable of laying eggs within 4-6 weeks of
purchase, which is significantly less than time then the 8 months you
would need to wait if starting with day-old chicks.
The downside is of course in raising
pullets is the cost of
purchasing pullets. They are more expensive, but then they too have had
to be fed, vaccinated and cared for, for the last 8 months.
At the end of the day, you will have to
decide what is right for you, and your situation. However, the best
time to buy, whether it be day-old chicks or pullets is in the spring.
Your birds will be about a year old, and will be far happier coming to
a new home with good weather and access to new grass shoots and lots of
sunshine.
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