To Chicken or Not to Chicken, That is the Question

It has been four months since we picked up our box of tiny baby chicks at the post office.  We have tried a lot of new things since moving from the suburbs to a rural landscape.  Some of which were duds and some of which we would continue to do no matter where we lived.  Chickens fall into the latter category.  We love them.

We started with 26 chickens that were mail ordered from Dunlap Hatchery.  I found this company through a backyard chicken book and was really happy with their service and quality of chickens.  Every time we go to the post office, E asks if we are getting chickens.  We are definitely turning our kiddos into farm children.  15 of the chickens were straight run (mixed male/female) White Cornish Cross, used for broilers (chickens you eat, 5 of the chickens were pullet (females only) Barred Plymouth Rocks and 6 of the chickens were pullet Black Astralorps.  The Black Astralorps are especially beautiful with green feathers in their undercoats.  The pullets are all egg layers.

Barred Plymouth Rocks and Black Astralorps

9 weeks after we got the White Cornish Cross chickens, we took them to a nearby Amish farm to be butchered.  Andy was (of course) out of town on the day of the slaughter so I had to catch and cram 15 chickens into cages in the back of my mini van.  I don't think Honda had chicken transport in mind when it designed its' lay-flat seats.

For this unsavory task, I put on crappy clothes incase I got some... ahem, crap on my clothes as well as my Bog boots and work gloves.  I had originally planned to feed the chickens in the morning and quickly grab them as they unsuspectingly gobbled up their food.  Thankfully, my farming resource friend told me not to feed them 12 hours before butchering to help keep their insides cleaner.  So, though they were not distracted with food, the broilers are pretty dumb so I was able to grab up the first 5 very quickly.  The next 5 got a bit smarter and came after a bit of chase.  By now, the egg layers were smart enough to group up in a corner, prepared to attack as a group if necessary.  The last 5 broilers proved a bit tricky, especially because I was putting them in a cage with a tricky lid that I couldn't get closed (yes, at one point, I had a chicken escape and bounce around the car a bit).  The last chicken I had to grab was a larger rooster (the roosters were obvious compared to pullets as they were about a pound heavier) and proved to be my biggest fear when starting this task.  I finally got him in but for a bit wondered if I would have to break its' neck myself just to get the damn thing in the car.  Thankfully, on this occasion I was spared from committing murder.

The Amish family did a fantastic job and had my chickens slaughtered, cleaned and bagged by 4 pm that afternoon.  The total cost for 15 chickens was $29.10.  The very kind father of the family made me take my 90 cents change, though I proclaimed several times it was unnecessary.

We have eaten 2 of the chickens so far and they are delicious.  I am not super particular about buying "farm-raised", "free-range", etc because those terms can be very broad but let me say,  it is really nice eating food that you know how it lived and what it ate.

As far as cost breakdown of these chickens, here is a pretty good estimate of how much each cost by the end:

Price per chicken from Dunlap (plus vaccine)- $2.05
Price of shipping (divided by 26)-$0.61
Feed costs per chicken (this is the hardest thing to track so this is an estimate)-$2
Slaughter fee-$1.74

Total per chicken- $6.40

So, we really aren't saving any money raising them ourselves but it is also not really any more expensive then buying from the store- especially if you look at price of "free-range" chickens which is what they really are.  FYI-I did not put in the costs of equipment or bedding in the per chicken price since theses are start-up costs and will be minimal each year.  If you want to know what kind of equipment you need to start up, check back to our first chicken post.  Bottom Line:  We definitely plan to order more broilers in the spring.

Once the broilers cleared out of the chicken house, the egg layers were able to really stretch out.  They have such a personality compared to the broilers.  They are very active, jumping and "flying" around and are more skittish around people.  One of the biggest surprises after the broilers were slaughtered was how slowly we went through food all the sudden.  The 26 chickens would go though 2 troughs a day; 11 egg layers go through 1 every day or two.

Andy built a perch for sleeping and nesting boxes.  You don't need a nesting box for every bird or they will just sit in them all the time so 1 per every 3 or 4 is enough.  Andy cut the lids of 5 gallon buckets and attached them to a stand for quick, easy and free nesting boxes.

After building the perches, Andy picked up each bird and set them on the perch.

It took a few nights, but finally all of them found a perch.

Andy also built a platform for the waterer to keep the bedding out of the water.  It is scrap wood with chicken wire stretched over top and keeps the water a couple of inches off the ground.  Another option is hanging the waterer from the ceiling.

The chickens love getting out of their house to so some pecking around the property.  At first, only a few birds would come out at a time and we had some issues with Murphy, our dog trying to herd them.  Back to back nights ended up with one chicken short after a nightly head count.  After not finding the missing bird on night one, we called it our first loss, assuming it had wandered off or would be meet death by raccoon over night.  On the second day, head count was down to 9 and I was DETERMINED to find this chicken!  What do you yell when looking for chickens?  Ridiculous things like, "here chicken", "come here lady", "Come, blackie" (we have, at the point had yet to name them and the missing two were the Black Astralorps).  E came to the rescue, looking in some nearby day lilies finding BOTH missing chickens huddled in a corner on top of each other.

Now the chickens are much bolder, sometimes traveling all the way up to the house, other times venturing to the horse pasture or into the barn.

You know when an eagle is flying around because all the sudden you will notice the chickens run/fly back into their house very quickly.

E and F love the chickens and help with feeding them and filling their water tank and take turns terrorizing them trying to pick them up.

E has adopted the runt of the litter and named her "Jello".  One day, E brought Jello all the way to the garden beds where I was working to tell me Murphy was bothering her.  Poor Jello looked helpless, yet resigned in E's arms.

Now Andy and I frequently realize we are calling this silly chicken Jello.

No eggs as of yet but we expect them anytime.  One question I have been asked is why we have all females and if we need a rooster to get eggs.  The only purpose of a rooster is to fertilize eggs; female chickens will lay eggs no matter what (just like human females) but the eggs will only turn into chicks if they are fertilized by a male.  We don't want to deal with hatching our own chicks because we would need more equipment and then you have to worry about vaccinating them yourself (chicks are vaccinated for Marek's disease with is a highly contagious viral disease in chickens).

Even without getting the benefits of the eggs yet, we love having the chickens.  It is so satisfying to see them around the yard and they are very low maintenance.  As far as cost per bird, this is harder to figure out since they don't have a set "end of life" date.  Before calculating feed costs, they would be $3.30 each.  I would estimate another $3 per bird of feeding costs so far so about $6.30 each.  Seems like a lot since they haven't started producing yet, but if you think ahead, during summer months we should get 11 eggs a day and probably 4-5 a day during winter months.  So, similarly to the broilers were probably are just breaking even with our cost verses just buying from the store but I have been told that there is nothing better than fresh farm eggs so I think it will be worth it.

So, back to my original question.  TO CHICKEN!  One day, Andy and I will have moved to a city somewhere and have chickens roaming our rooftop- that's how much we enjoy this little hobby!

**You can get salmonella from handling live chickens so make sure you wash your hands after holding them!

How We Ended up with 26 Teenagers

We are three weeks into being chicken farmers and it is actually going really well!  I can’t say that we have learned a lot so far but we haven’t killed any yet, so that is something.  

Our 25 chickens arrived by mail three weeks ago.  In my 30 years, I don’t think I’ve ever had such a surreal experience as I did when I was handed a box of chirping wild things from the amused postal worker.  The kids were delighted on sight while I was immediately second guessing our decision.  Well, you can’t really return chicks so we took them home with fingers crossed.

We had ordered 15 Cornish Cross chickens which are yellow and meant for butchering and 10 egg layers; a mix of Black Astralorp and Barred Rock.  We got one extra black one so we ended up with 26 chickens.  I imagine they throw an extra one in in case one perishes during transport.  

One important tip I got before we got the chicks was to take each bird out of the box individually and place their beaks into the water bowl then set the chick down by the water.  They are too stupid to often find the water by themselves and will die if they don’t get water quickly.  I took each chick out, counting with E (which is how we discovered the extra bird), stuck their beak in the water then set them down.  

After making sure they were secure, we left them to be for a bit to acclimate.  I checked on them 15 minutes later and discovered that most were huddled under the heat lamp.  This is a sign that the lamp needs to be lowered, so I moved it down a few inches and the chicks then started milling about.

The first week, the chicks had their food trough and water bowl refilled in the mornings.  In general, neither were empty but just needed refreshing.  By week two, the chicks were already grown enough to widen their ring by a few feet.  We laid down new bedding on top of the old to fill the empty spaces the widening of the ring created.  At this point, the chicks needed new food and water in the morning and in the evening.  Right now, they are in their awkward teenage phase, growing feathers which are reminiscent of teenage acne.  The yellow ones are especially deranged looking; the blacks all have their feathers now and look pretty cute.

Now at week three, we have upgraded to the larger feed trough and are getting a larger waterer as soon as we make it to the store.  They have almost gone through the huge bag of starter feed we purchased when they first came.  We also had to widen their ring another few feet to accommodate their rapid growth.  By now, the yellow chickens are almost twice the size of the blacks and will be ready to butcher in about 5 weeks!  It truly is amazing to see how rapid they grow- even in the time of checking on them in the morning to night you can see a difference!

A friend came by and checked the chickens and said they all looked great and was shocked we hadn’t lost any.  Though, he warned us to not be surprised if we walk in one day and find a chicken flat on their back.  Apparently, they grow so rapidly, it is not uncommon to have one die from a heart attack.  Seriously!  What is more gruesome than that!?!  We are not aggressively feeding the broilers, so hopefully this will not be an issue for us.

Yesterday, Andy went with our previous chicken supplier to arrange for butchering with an Amish family nearby.  Though Andy REALLY wanted to do the butchering himself, I didn’t want the bloodbath on the farm and though killing is pretty easy, the cleaning and plucking was not appealing.  This Amish family takes the live chickens in the morning (imagine us, driving our mini van with 15 full grown chickens in a cage in back, YIKES!) and returns them in evening, cleaned and individually bagged.  To prepare for all these chickens, we purchased a second freezer for the basement.  

E helped us shop for the freezer and asked what it was for.  

I said, “For the chickens.”  

She replies, “Mom!  They will get cold in there.”

Me… trying to decide how in depth with this I want to get in the middle of the Home Depot. “Well, when they get a little bigger, they will be killed for us to eat.”

Esther, “No! I don’t want my yellow chickens to be killed.”  ::hysterical crying::

I tried to explain that the black ones would be staying with us and we would get to collect and eat their eggs and then I went for the tactic of this is where our food comes from, don’t you want us to make chicken nuggets from our chickens.  Well, nothing got through to the hysterical child in the back seat of the car so I finally had to say, let’s move on for now and discuss it later.

Fast forward a few days after a McDonalds run.  

Esther:  “I guess you can turn my chickens into chicken nuggets.”

Phew!  Crises averted.

The Novice's Guide to Preparing for Chickens

In the next day or two, we will officially be true farmers with the arrival of 25 tiny, adorable chickens.  This is our first endeavor with any kind of livestock (are chickens even considered livestock??) so we are excited/nervous about their arrival.  We have done a lot of prep in the last year or so including reading every book we could find, searching the web and talking to/badgering every chicken farmer we knew.  We are by no means experts or really have any idea what we are doing, but based on our research, anyone planning on having chickens for the first time may find some helpful information complied here instead of having to look a ton of places like we did.  So here we go:

Chickens-

Obviously, the most important ingredient in having a chicken farm is the actual chickens.  I found an online supplier that had a good refund guarantee (if chicks die in the mail) and had great prices:  www.dunlaphatchery.net.  The minimum order from this supplier is 25 chickens but you can mix breeds/types.  

We decided we wanted chickens for eggs as well as chickens for meat.  Yes, if you grew up in the suburbs like we did you probably had no idea that there ARE two different kinds!  The chickens that you get for egg production stick around for a few years and provide eggs for your consumption.  We chose to get females only so we wouldn’t have a noisy rooster to deal with and so we don’t have to worry about vaccinating babies- the chicks come vaccinated from the supplier.  You want the egg layers to be friendly and produce a lot of eggs.  You can choose breeds that lay brown, white or blue eggs.  So why are brown eggs you find at the grocery store more expensive than white ones?  No reason at all- it just came from a different breed!  

We ordered 10 egg layers, all pullets (females under a year old):  

5 Barred Plymouth Rocks 

and 5 Black Astralorps.

These both lay brown eggs.  We chose these because people claim they are both friendly breeds and huge egg producers (generally 1 a day; though in the winter production slows down).  Also, they are both black which helps with camouflage from predators (ie. eagles).

We also ordered 15 boilers (chickens meant for butchering for meat)- White Cornish Cross.  

There wasn’t much choice from our supplier on this and the cornish cross seemed the popular choice.  These are straight run so they will be mixed male/female.  This doesn’t matter as much as the egg layers since they will be dressed (killed) at 7-8 weeks old.  Any roosters in this batch while grow a bit faster but that will be the only difference.

The chickens are overnighted from the supplier and should show up at the post office tomorrow or Thursday.  The post office will then call me to pick the box up.  I think it will be a completely surreal moment, carrying a cheeping box home with me.

Housing-

Since we live on a farm, housing is pretty simple for us.  If you have to create your own coop, there are tons of resources online- the most important thing is making sure there are no places for predators to get in.  We decided to use an attachment on the barn as our coop.  

We chose this area because we only needed to add chicken wire to a couple spots, it had access to electricity and it would give the chickens easy outdoor access.  

I was worried about air flow in the summer, so Andy built a screen door attached to a screen wall on the outside wall of the attachment.  He added a spring to the door so it slams right behind you as well as a lock so the kids can’t wander in their unsupervised. 

E posing with Murphy outside the door.  The  red metal to the left is a sliding door that covers all the screened in areas.

On warm days, we can open the metal sliding door all the way to get nice air flow.  I imagine on these nights, the screen wall will be lined with raccoons eying their wanted supper.  In the winter, we can close the sliding metal door to give some escape from the elements.  

The space has a door that also opens to the interior of the barn, so Andy built a screen door for this side too.

We have some time before the egg layers start producing so we haven’t built the nests inside the coop yet.  This will come soon!

Supplies-

I am very lucky to have a friend who lives across the field from us who raises chickens as a hobby.  She brought by her baby chicken supplies and told me what else to get.  

Since the chicks are so little, you keep them in a ring for a while.  My friend brought by a ring she made which is metal and has holes drilled in every 2 feet so you can make the ring bigger as the chicks get bigger.  

Above the ring, I hung a heat lamp about 1 1/2 feet from the ground.  

The heat lamp stays on at all times when the chicks are little.  A nice tip I learned today- if the chicks are all huddled under the lamp, they are too cold and the lamp needs to be hotter; if the chicks are scattered outside the lamp they are too warm.  They should be meandering around the ring kind of equally.  Apparently, they are so dumb that if they are all huddled under the lamp they can suffocate each other.

I picked up some food, grit and pine shavings at the local Farm and Home.  

I got medicated chicken starter for food.  I opted for the medicated just to be safe, though since these are our first chickens, they would probably be ok without but I wanted them to have a good start.  They also need fine grit mixed in with their food to help with digestion until they can go outside and pick up their own grit.  When you fill their food tray, you sprinkle the grit on top so they are attracted to the glitter of the rocks.  Finally, the pine shavings are their bedding which we laid on the floor inside the ring.

So now the stage is set and we are all ready for our new arrivals.  Everyone on the farm is very excited!