Working Chickens

I’ve heard a lot of folks ask if they need to keep a rooster in order to get eggs. The short answer is no. Hens will lay eggs without a rooster, so if all you’re after is eggs, you don’t need one. In fact, there are many municipalities that don’t allow you to keep roosters in city limits.

However, you do need a rooster in order to get fertilized eggs. Roosters are great for more than just fertilization, too. Roosters protect and watch over their flock. I’ve personally witnessed our rooster find an insect or pile of grain, not eat it, and call the hens over for them to eat first. He’ll even watch over them while they eat.

So, if you want to raise your own chicks, and if you’re allowed, you’ll want to keep a rooster. Not all roosters are mean, but all roosters are territorial. That’s a good thing. You just have to be aware of it.

Broody Hens

When a hen gets broody, she’ll sit on a stockpile of eggs. Her body temperature rises, she’ll stop laying new eggs, and she’ll get very moody. Whether you want to let her stay that way is entirely up to you.

If you decide to let her sit, you’ll need to keep a close eye on her. We had a hen who sat for nearly two months straight because her eggs weren’t hatching. (That’s a long story!) Eggs are supposed to hatch after 21 days of incubation. If mamma hen sits much longer than that, she’ll get stressed out or sick.

If your mamma has a successful hatch, you should soon see baby chicks trailing after mamma. One of the greatest benefits to letting your hens hatch their own eggs is that incorporating the new birds into the flock is much less stressful on you and your flock.

If you don’t have chicks after 21 days, you could have a couple of issues: your eggs aren’t fertilized, your eggs are getting stolen by predators and replaced by the other hens in the flock, or they’ve somehow died during incubation. Candle the eggs about once a week, if you can, to check on the chicks development. Also, I recommend marking your egg with a pencil on both ends. If you go out there and there are “new” eggs, you can and should collect them to make sure you don’t have chicks at different stages of development.

Chicks

Whether you’ll be hatching your eggs in an incubator or letting mamma hen hatch them, you’ll need to know how to take care of the chicks once they hatch. When you let mamma hen hatch them, she’ll take care of most of this for you.

Incubator chicks need a bit more attention. Chicks need to be kept warm right away. Their yolk will feed them for 24 hours after hatching, so food isn’t necessary immediately, but do put food and water in your brooder so they can start eating when they’re ready. Just don’t panic if they start to hatch and you haven’t gone to the feed store yet. My only really important suggestions are that you make sure that they can’t drown in their waterer, and you’ll need to give them something to roost on so they don’t smother each other.

There are a lot of really great resource books on raising chicks. I recommend picking up a copy of “Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens” and “Hatching and Brooding Your Own Chicks,” both by Gail Damerow. These books are chock-full of great information on how to raise chicks and chickens. There are plenty of others out there as well. Find one that works for you, and don’t be afraid to use it!

Counting Hens

It’s really important to consider why you want to keep chickens before you talk about how many you need. If your purpose is just for the pleasure of watching their antics, then one or two is more than enough. Pest control? Same. You don’t need many chooks to keep pests at bay, depending on the size of your garden. However, if you want working chickens that provide eggs, compost, and tilling services, you’ll need to figure out what size flock fits your purpose and space.

Numbers Matter

In flock management, numbers really do matter. You need to make sure you have the right number of birds, as well as the correct amount of space per bird. Too many birds in too small of a space means endlessly cleaning poop and a big, muddy, stinky, mess of a chicken run. Too few means you’ll be working more than your chickens. The amount of space you need will greatly depend on what you have, how many eggs you want, and what your hens will lay, so you’ll need to do a little experimenting on your own. Hopefully this helps give you a launching point.

Counting Hens – The Formulas

I’m going to share with you my “formulas” for deciding on the correct number of chickens to keep. These formulas are meant to be a starting point, and you can take them anywhere you want to go.

You can either start with the number of eggs you consume or the amount of space you have. Space wasn’t a consideration for us, so we started by thinking about how many eggs we eat each week. My family of four goes through about 1 to 2 dozen eggs per week, though that fluctuates. When choosing a breed, consider how many eggs a week each bird will lay. One of our Black Australorp hens produces about 5 to 6 eggs per week. By that math, we will need 2 to 4 hens to meet our egg needs. Unfortunately, it’s never really that simple. So, to cover for times when chickens are molting or broody, I recommend doubling that number.

The next thing to think about is how much space you need for your chickens vs. how much space you have to keep them in. They need about 2 to 4 square feet per hen in the coop if they have plenty of run, or 8-10 square feet if you’ll be keeping them cooped up a lot. If you ask me, our coop is a little on the small side, but the hens do have plenty of run/paddock, so they do alright.

In mathematical notation, the formulas look something a little like this:

• #eggs consumed per week / #eggs per week laid by your choice of breed = #of hens needed. (Multiply your answer by two make sure you’re covered when hens are broody or molting.)
• #of hens x 2 to 4 square feet = coop square footage (plenty of run)    OR   #of hens x 8 to 10 square feet = coop square footage (not a lot of run)

Growing Forage

Planting Forage and Chicken Gardens

One of the biggest complaints I hear when people talk about keeping chickens is that they cost more to feed than the humans can sell the eggs for. This can happen, but if you do it right, it doesn’t have to.

I read this wonderful book called “Free Range Chicken Gardens” by Jessi Bloom. She does a great job describing how to create a chicken system that works! One of the things she focuses on is how to plant chicken gardens and forage. With a well-planted chicken garden, you can greatly reduce and maybe even eliminate the cost of feed. Though to eliminate it altogether would take a lot of space to grow a lot of food…

Chickens Like to Forage

Chickens naturally prefer foraging for food. In my free-range chicken days, I saw a pile of grain go mostly untouched for days while the chickens were out in the forest finding their own food. In general, I’ve found that chickens love berries, clovers, grasses (I’ll never have to mow my lawn), and quite a few herbaceous plants like comfrey and borage. Of course, they like their cereal grains, too. Letting your hens forage for at least some of their own food can be as easy as letting them into a pasture. Just make sure your fences are chicken-proof!

Roosts, Coops, and Nesting Boxes

Now, I’m not what I would call an expert on chickens, but we’ve been keeping them for a few years now and we love to experiment. That means we’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way here at Haven Homestead. Based on this, here are some ways you can make your chicken coops work for you.

The Chicken Tractor Experience

When we first got hens, my husband was greatly enamored with the idea of a chicken tractor. It was a moveable coop, we wouldn’t have to feed the hens as much or build a run, and we wouldn’t have to do any mucking out of anything. They pooped where you put them, and that’s where you left it!

In all, it wasn’t a bad experience. The trouble was that we didn’t give them enough roosts so they roosted in the nesting boxes. If you’ve ever had chickens, you’ll know why this is a bad idea. Chickens poop while they’re perched on their roosts. If your hens roost in the nest, that means you have to clean out your nesting boxes every day, hopefully before the hens start laying, or else you have to deal with poop-covered eggs.

What we learned:

1. Roosts should be somehow separated from the nesting boxes.
2. You need the right amount of roosting space.

The Free-range Coop Experience

After the tractor, we tried free-ranging. We thought it was much easier than having to move the pen twice a day, and we didn’t have to feed them quite so much. All in all, our free-ranging experience was pretty good, but I can tell you with surety that free-ranging isn’t for the faint of heart.

First of all, let me premise this with we did what we were supposed to, but the chickens didn’t. Whenever you move chickens to a new coop, you need to keep them cooped up for a while, so they get used to it. The idea is that they’ll remember where to roost and lay their eggs. Our chickens didn’t seem to know that.

At the beginning, most of the chickens roosted in the new coop, but almost from the start, the Americaunas preferred to roost about 15 feet up in our fir trees. After a while, we had hens roosting in the trees, under the farm truck, and we even hens roosting on our porch and pooping in our shoes. Not to mention the daily egg hunts were a bit much. I prefer to have egg hunts once a year. On Easter. And I prefer to hide the eggs. That was the end of free-range chickens for me.

We learned that having a dedicated coop with roosts and nesting boxes simplified the whole chicken-keeping, egg-gathering process, and it kept our shoes clean!

The Coops

Next, we built a dedicated coop and run. Our first coop was four pallets nailed together with some tin roofing screwed on top. It was set right on the ground, and we could move it if needed. We kind of used it like a chicken tractor until we built our first paddock. It had no nesting boxes, and we just tossed hay into the bottom of it. We had sticks stuck between the pallet boards for their roosts. From this experience, we learned we needed nesting boxes that were easy to access from the outside.

We added nesting boxes that were above the roosts. Then we put the coop up on stilts. We thought it would keep them from pooping in the nesting boxes. It didn’t work like we planned, though. From that experience, we learned that chickens like to roost high up, and they like to nest low to the ground.

We still have the pallets nailed together and a tin roof, but it’s been reinforced and raised off the ground. We blocked off the higher nesting boxes and added some that were lower to the ground but were outside of the poop zone. We even had a broody mama hatch out a chick, and he did very well with our lower nesting boxes.

In Short …

• You need a dedicated coop for a lot of reasons.
• Make sure you have enough roost space.
• Don’t put your nesting boxes under your roosts.
• Keep the nesting boxes clean.

Grit, Dust Baths, and Other Necessities

Water and Feed

It goes without saying that your chickens need to be fed and watered. But what do you feed them, how much, and how often? As far as feed goes, chickens need three things: grain, greens, and proteins. For water, always make sure there’s easy access to as much water as they can drink. There are a lot of different styles of waterers on the market, but the important thing to remember is that chickens will poop in anything they can roost on — even the edge of a waterer.

Grit in the Gizzard

In order to masticate (if you can call it that) their food, chickens have to have grit in their gizzard. A gizzard is a special muscle that moves the grit and food all around to digest it. What does a chicken need for grit? Well, rocks, pebbles, sand, and oyster shells are all good. The oyster shell also has the added benefit of being a great source of calcium.

Dust Baths

Chickens get mites. It’s a fact of raising chickens. The best way to treat for mites is by having a dust bath available to your chickens. You can up the ante by adding diatomaceous earth, but regular old dust and dirt is okay, too.

Vent and Crop Health

One of the main anatomical differences that chickens and other poultry have when compared with mammals is that they have a vent. As such, this vent is susceptible to some problems such as vent gleet or prolapse. Chickens also have something called a crop. This is where they store all of the food eat during the day. At night when they roost, the food moves from the crop to the gizzard. If your chickens don’t have enough water, their crops can become impacted, so don’t forget to water them well!

Utilizing Your Flock

When folks first get chickens, they often think of the obvious reasons for having them: meat and eggs. While these are both great reasons to keep chickens, your flock could be doing so much more for you. Here is a quick and easy list of ways you can get the most out of your chickens.

Chickens scratch and till. It’s natural for a chicken to scratch and till up the top layers of ground. It’s what they do! It’s how they find food. You can put your chickens on a garden bed full of weeds and spent plants, and they’ll prep it for the next planting season with ease.

Chickens make great garden food. Chicken manure is hot. It’s recommended that you compost your chicken manure for six months to a year. If you’re using a deep mulch run, then you’ll have plenty of manure composting from year to year, and letting it set isn’t too much trouble.

Chickens can be good pest control. Chickens will make short work of nearly any insect that moves. Our chickens even eat slugs! Find out more about Gardening with Chickens for Natural Pest Control as a natural alternative to control pests. We often catch bugs, worms, beetles, and slugs and toss them to the chickens. We also toss aphid-infected plants into the chicken run. Our chickens love it, and our garden thrives.

Chickens can help clear unmanageable land. If you have a brambly, grassy, weed-infested piece of land, pen your chickens up there for a few months. Their scratching and grazing should at the very least help knock it back to where you can manage it. At most, you’ll have bare dirt that has been well-fertilized and primed and ready for the cover crop seed of your choice!

Chickens are great entertainment. Chickens are fun to watch, plain and simple. Just pack a camp chair out to the pen and chill. Watching your chickens can be more fun than watching TV; at least, I think so. It’s like meditation entertainment. I love it.

Chickens are great learning tools. We don’t just raise animals on our little farm. We raise kids, too. Having animals, especially chickens, is a great opportunity to teach your children responsibility, anatomy, biology, and more.

Haven Homestead

www.havenhomestead.com