We ordered 118 chickens yesterday!
Yes, we’re probably crazy.
But y’all, I am SO excited about this. This will be our first year doing meat chickens, and we’re also starting up a flock of egg-layers again!
For a little background, we’ve been eating a lot more chicken lately – especially now that we’re starting the GAPS protocol – and trying to find meat chickens raised to the standards that we’re looking for (soy/corn free, non-GMO, pasture raised, etc) is almost impossible around here.
The only chicken we could find locally that met our criteria were around $30/bird (ouch!), and the farmers collect a 1% tax on all the sales, which they then send to organizations that we do not want to support. So that pretty much left us with buying sup-par meat from the grocery store or growing our own.
We’ve also been going through eggs like CRAZY the last few months, and our local egg box down the street doesn’t always have enough in stock, which then means we have to pay the ridiculous prices at the store for the healthy ones that we need to be eating…
So yeah, we’ve decided to become chicken farmers this year! How hard can it be, right? 😉
Choosing Our Flock
Cody did most of the research regarding which birds to buy (he’ll definitely be the resident chicken expert around here!), but he walked me through all his reasons for doing these particular birds in these particular ways, and I think he’s made excellent choices for our current lifestyle and local environment.
The Ladies
For the egg-layers, we ordered 16 Buff Orpingtons. We wanted at least a dozen full grown hens, so 16 chicks allows us a little bit of wiggle-room in case any don’t make it (the unfortunate reality of chick raising).
Buff Orpingtons have a docile temperament, which was important to us so that we can safely let the little ones be highly involved in their care. They also tend to go broody often and make excellent mothers, so hopefully we’ll be able to propagate our flock naturally!
Orpingtons are also good in cold climates, are good foragers, and they tolerate confinement well. We’ve chosen to do a large stationary coop near the yurt, which we’ll keep clean with a deep-mulch bedding. This will provide a steady stream of rich compost that we can harvest for our garden!
These guys are due to arrive in mid April. They’ll show up at the local post office at only one day old (newly hatched chicks can go up to 48hrs on the yoke from their eggs before needing more food) and they’ll go straight into a brooder (which we still need to build). They’ll be in there for 5-6 weeks, and then they’ll head off to their new coop to make room for the meat chicks!
The Meat Guys
These fellas will be the Murray’s Big Red Broilers, which are an updated version of the standard Red Rangers. They are touted to be great pasture birds and excellent foragers, and are ready to be butchered in just 12 weeks.
While the white Cornish Cross is the fasted growing meat bird on the market, it is known to develop all kind of debilitating health issues such as lameness and heart failure, and they require a lot of babying to prevent them overgrowing too fast.
We chose the Big Red Broilers because they are a more hearty breed (fully feathered, which makes them harder to pluck but more suitable to living outdoors), and they don’t develop the heart and leg problems like the Cornish Cross, but they do grow faster and heavier than heritage breeds (which take 16-20 weeks to grow out) — which gives us the best of both worlds!
We plan to use chicken tractors in the field for these guys, which are moved every day to fresh pasture. This will allow them to always have fresh grass, new forage, and constantly moving them keeps disease from building up under them. Plus, it fertilizes the field!
Cody has been looking at several different plans for building chicken tractors, but he hasn’t settled on a design yet. We’re trying to figure out something that’s big enough to allow us to walk inside (easier the care for and eventually catch the birds) and heavy enough not to be a sail when we get heavy wind, but light enough to move by hand every day.
We decided to order two batches of 51 meat birds, the first of which will arrive mid-late May. The second batch should show up when the first set of birds are about 11 weeks old (which will give us time to get the new chicks settled before butchering day).
Doing two batches of birds will allow us to have fewer tractors and fewer bird to process at once, but it does mean we’ll be stretching that second batch into the late fall. Hopefully because they are a sturdier breed and we don’t tend to get hard freezes until January, they’ll do okay in the cooler temperatures. Worst case scenario, we might have to process them a little on the small side.
Choosing Our Hatchery
We ordered our chicks from Murray McMurray in Iowa, a family-owned hatchery that’s been operating since 1917 and specializes in Heritage breeds. They also sell ducks, geese, and turkeys! (I would love to do ducks and turkeys next year… ah dreams)
Their website has detailed information on each breed available, as well as a blog with helpful articles on poultry care and such. Brooders, feeders, waterers, and feed for your chickens can also be purchased there. They also hold photo contests, where account holders can submit photos of their chickens for a chance to be featured in their annual catalog!
McMurray’s says that they select each chick by hand to ensure health and quality, and they have a 48hr live delivery guarantee. Hopefully we’ll have all three flocks of chicks arrive happily in the mail over the course of year!
As far as their meat birds go, they offer the choice to buy all male, all female, or a mixed lot. We ordered all males, which are more expensive, but they grow bigger and faster than the females, which will give us 1-2 lbs more meat per bird for the same amount of work. And since we’re feeding up to six adults and 3-5 kids every night, the extra meat seemed worth the price!
Next Steps
While we wait for our chick to arrive later this spring, we’ll be busy getting chicken coops and tractors built and sited.
We have a couple different ideas for where we want the Ladies’ coop to go, with the priority being close proximity to the yurt. I don’t really want to have to hike across the field to go get eggs, and like I said earlier, I want the kids able to be really involved in their everyday care. We also want to be able to give them all of our kitchen scraps easily. So having the egg operation located in our A-zone will be a must.
The meat birds won’t need quite as much attention throughout the day. They’ll just need their food and water checked each morning and the tractor moved to the next spot, so they’ll be out in the field doing their thing. The only trick will be getting the dogs to leave them alone… that might be interesting lol.
We’ll also need to figure out if we want to invest in a chicken plucker (I’m leaning toward yes), and we need to make sure we have everything for butcher day before the chicks even arrive. Better to be over-prepared than scrambling at the last minute! We’re picking up another big freezer for the shop later today, which should give us room to store everything once it’s processed.
I’m really excited to be taking the next step toward getting a real homestead operation started out here! And chickens are such a classic first homestead critter. Some say they’re a gateway animal… Lol, I guess we’ll see what comes next!
But at least for this year, we’re gonna focus on one thing at a time and get real good at it, instead of trying to take on too much at once. So here’s to our chicken adventure – wish us luck!
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