Maggie's Farm

I live in town and have chickens but so do a few others - as well as deer, a turkey and a pig. I heard a rumor that possibly the mayor was raising pigs in his dirt floor summer kitchen basement but don't know if that's true or not. It'd be ridiculous to go after any of us who raise our own food when we live in an ag based area and the neighbors behind me have over 150,000 chickens combined.

If you don't want roosters, buy your chicks sexed. They are usually pretty accurate, although this last time I got one rooster out of 40. I start 30-40 usually 2-3 different breeds, keep about a dozen and sell the rest at auction. I make more than what it cost me to get them to that size (usually about 8-9 weeks plus the costs of what I'm keeping for myself). I start new ones every two years although I have a few leftover chickens that are approaching 5 yrs and they still lay. With a dozen hens I get 6-8 eggs a day now that it's been horribly hot, closer to 10 eggs a day in a cooler summer. 4-5 a day in the winter and fall months. People wil gladly buy fresh eggs from your overflow. the eggs in the store are usually weeks old.


If you buy already grown poults that are close to laying age (6months ) you're going to pay more but the mortality rate on chicks is usually high and the labor is significant. Don't plan on going away for more than a few hours at a time. I constantly change the newspaper and clean chicks' butts, the waterers, the feeders to keep them from getting diarrhea and croaking.



If you purchase all your feed, you will not break even, but chickens as a rule are not fussy. that 40% of wasted food that the ad council cries about going into the landfill - feed it to your chickens. grow some sunflowers. Throw an entire head of cabbage in once in awhile. They like protein once in a while, It keeps them from killing and eating one another if they are stressed or crowded. I let mine out a few hours in the evening for grazing, rolling in the dirt and eating rocks. Hawks will eat them during the day, other critters at nite. Hawks will eat them through the fence so hardware wire is a good idea. I use a dog kennel reinforced attached to a small shed with a hole cut in the side.


Likely you will need a "nutrient management plan". This is the enforced boot on the neck of the bureaucratic mucky mucks who regard manure as hazardous waste. Have a compost pile and a garden. buy a bag of dehydrated lime to sprinkle on it to keep the fly hatches down.

The price of eggs at the moment has cratered. The entire countryside is full of ginormous chicken houses that house 50,000-200,000 -1 millions chickens because the corporations pay to put the house up and the farmer just gets income from the finished product. This is why the farmer has no say in how they are raised or what they eat. This is your free range chicken that free ranges inside a building. This is why your organic free range egg is so much more expensive than "regular" eggs.
Oh and the organic label is a bunch of crap just like the "our chickens aren't fed antibiotics" line. It's a marketing ploy. Chickens aren't fed antibiotics.


This is why there is likely going to be another avian pandemic, as my neighbor who runs a hatchery just said. He likes deals more in ducks than chickens but sells both.
The pandemic will be caused by having huge amounts of one species in concentrated area, not because of anythign to do with antibiotics.