Principles of Poultry

Livestock farming begins with chickens

Chickens were my first foray into crime, at least of the city zoning ordinance violation sort. 

My Mom never liked chickens, so we never had them growing up. I started keeping them when I lived in a good sized Midwestern city, which had recently legalized limited chicken-keeping. Zoning allowed us to keep four hens, with appropriate setbacks, etc, etc. I built a coop and bought four started pullets, girls just beginning to lay, from Craigslist. My daughters were around four or so at the time. 

The birds were an immediate hit. We started getting eggs within a week, nice brown ones, and the girls loved the birds. They would carry them around. They named them all, but I only remember Carmelita and Petunia from that first batch. Brown ones even make better Easter eggs, since, according to my daughter the art historian, the Renaissance masters started with a brown canvas to make the colors more lustrous. 

There really is no downside with laying hens. True, you have to feed and water them, as well as get someone to keep an eye on them when you’re away. And, of course, there’s cleaning the coop once in a while. 

But the upsides are legion. They are so easy to keep. They have surprisingly pleasant dispositions, usually anyhow. They make cool spaceship noises and sound so self-satisfied after they lay an egg. They are a great introduction to livestock for kids, as well as for adults. The manure is great for your garden. They have a relatively forgiving learning curve, and a chicken coop is the traditional first carpentry project. You’ll learn so much from chickens. Plus, you get delicious fresh eggs, about one per bird per day, with the occasional double-yolker. It’s hard to imagine not keeping chickens. 

Start by building your coop. The essentials are a roof and walls. Chickens hate to get wet— ever hear the expression, “madder than a wet hen?” That didn’t come from nowhere. They don’t really require insulation, and they definitely don’t need heat. Where I live, temperatures can easily drop to -20˚ F or below. The birds don’t care, except for a few breeds prone to frosting their combs and wattles, because they wear down jackets.  But they do need shelter from the wind and sun, and good ventilation. 

The other elements of a coop include a nesting box, a roost, and a run. The nesting box gives them a dark, cozy place to lay. Chickens instinctively roost in trees, so the coop needs to be a simulacrum. An old wooden ladder hung horizontally a few feet off the ground works great. A run is just a protected enclosure for them to scratch around in. The fence is more to keep predators out than to keep chickens in. 

Which brings us to predators, your major hurdle. Predators are usually worse in town than in the country. If you learn how to handle them in town, the country will be a cakewalk. 

Skunks dig under the fence, raccoons climb over, hawks swoop down from above, and foxes go through if they have to. You have to protect them from below and above. I had a fox kill seven of my eight hens one night, and I could only find one carcass.  I had to give the survivor away because it was so lonely. I have a friend with a large pheasant farm; a pair of foxes killed a thousand pheasants in two nights once, a true killing frenzy. Watching a fox stalk your chickens can be really fascinating if you’re sure their fence is impenetrable. 

On the other hand, I had a young raccoon get into the coop one night, and live to regret it. When I got there, he was cowering in the corner, wishing he’d never broke in, as the hens bullied him. He was glad to be let out. 

Layers come in pretty colors, as do the eggs. I go for the beauty. My flock is a mix of production reds (attractive, friendly, lots of brown eggs), cuckoo marans (also pretty, with eggs a deep copper color), a handful of birds of cool-looking breeds, and some green and blue egg layers to make an eye-catching basketful. 

After I mastered laying hens, I was tempted into more illicit activities. I began to raise meat birds. 

Now, I was really defying the law. I did batches of around 35 birds, based on the size of my broiler pen. I get day-old chicks through the mail, and you can tell they’ve arrived when you go into the post office and hear them cheeping. When my daughters were little, they’d spend the first day doing “chicky day care,” dropping them down their shirts to keep them warm. Cute it was. 

Broilers are as little trouble as the layers. And they are so quiet, I’m sure that no one even knew they were there. You need a brooder for the first three weeks, keeping them warm (95˚ F) until they feather out. This can be a bit tricky, using heat lamps or an infrared heater designed for the job (safer), and I do this outside in my broiler pen in fairly warm weather to avoid burning the barn down. 

You don’t need a lot of space. Broilers are not foragers like layers are. They’re kind of a couch potato, focused on eating and pooping. Keeping them in feed, water, and bedding is the biggest challenge, along with keeping predators out. Everybody loves chicken. But eight weeks from hatch you have a five pound bird, ready to roast. 

It’s kind of amazing. Just eight weeks to produce a crop, and with a very small environmental footprint, I might add. Broilers are incredibly efficient: just 1.8 lbs of feed are required to produce a pound of chicken. Most livestock systems have a feed conversion ratio in the range of 3-5:1, even as high as 10:1. It’s almost like waving a magic wand over a pile of corn and getting a chicken dinner. That means chicken production requires very low resource use, and leaves a very low carbon footprint. And in just eight weeks. What’s not to like?

You can raise them about anywhere. Again, they don’t need heat, other than the brooder for three weeks, but they need shelter from wind, rain, sun, and predators. They don’t need a nesting box, since they don’t lay, and they don’t need a roost, since meat birds don’t fly well and roost on the ground (on bedding). They do need good ventilation. Make it as easy to clean as possible. I use the deep litter method, where I keep adding bedding, and there’s a lot to fork out after eight weeks. 

I make a pen without doors that stands about 30” tall that I can step over.  I cover two-thirds of it with galvanized steel corrugated roofing for shade and rain protection, and a third with a removable chicken wire panel for access and ventilation. The two sides that face the prevailing wind are metal roofing panel and the other two are chicken wire. I place a brooder inside for the first three weeks and put up a temporary wind panel around it. You can raise 35 birds quite comfortably in an 8’ x 8’ pen. Larger than that probably requires some kind of roof over the whole thing to keep rain out. I only raise them when it’s warm enough not to worry about water freezing. 

The biggest challenge actually is processing them. If you have access to a mechanical plucker and enough family and friends you can dragoon into helping, you can butcher them yourself. It wouldn’t be hard. Lacking either of those things, however, you really have only two choices: take them to a commercial poultry processor, or do small batches. Small batches, though, defeat some of the efficiency that’s important if you want to grow all your own food. It’s not much more work to raise a year’s worth of birds (about 50 for us) than it is to raise ten. In either case, you have to go out there every day to feed, water, and put down bedding, but I would not want to butcher 50 or more chickens with just two people. So I use a commercial processor. 

The availability of a processor is going to make a very big difference here. There are only two in my state, and neither is very close. So I do large batches. Buying a plucker would be the other option. I do about 120 at a time, 80 broilers and 40 layers, that I start together for convenience. I sell some of both, keeping about 50 broilers for home use, and, currently, 20 layers, whose eggs I mostly sell. I’ll replace my layers about every 3-4 years when production declines. I do at least one batch of broilers a year to stock my freezer. 

Chickens are the simplest of all livestock, the place to start livestock farming, and a reliable and easy way to produce a significant portion of your food.