10 Things To Know BEFORE You Buy Backyard Chickens

Don’t start with too many hens

So there is something called chicken math that chicken owners all kind of joke about where you start off thinking you’ll need three or four and somehow you end up getting like seven or eight and then two or three years down the road you end up with like way more than that. This isn’t a horrible thing, it should be taken as a pretty good sign because a lot of people who get chickens find that they really enjoy them and there’s kind of this logic that goes on where it’s like, if five chickens gives me x amount of joy, then 10 chickens must give me two x amount of joy.

It doesn’t necessarily work that way, but we all fall victim to it anyway. Long story short, most of us end up getting more chickens than we plan to get and for that reason I always kind of recommend that people err on the side of fewer chickens in the beginning.

If you’re trying to decide between like three to six chickens, it might be a good idea to start with three or four. And then if you want to move on to six, seven or eight in a few months or next year, then you’ve got room in your flock. If you wanna get three or four in the beginning and you just start straight off with 10, there are some issues that come with that.

Egg production is not consistent

I’ll talk about those in the next points. So kind of along those lines, one thing that a lot of chicken people don’t know when they get chickens but that they soon find out is that laying is not consistent throughout the year or the frequency at which chickens lay eggs doesn’t stay the same throughout the year and it actually doesn’t stay the same depending on the age of the chicken.

If you’re an experienced chicken keeper, I’m sure you already know this, but ironically we didn’t really know this when we first got chickens.

So that’s one of the reasons why I recommend that people get the lower end of the number of chickens that they want because since laying generally slows down as chickens get older, it makes a lot more sense to say if you want 12 chickens, to start with three or four and get three or four for a few years because that way the number of eggs that you’ll be getting each week stays a little bit more consistent than if you just got 12 at the beginning, had a ton of eggs for the first couple years and then ended up with a lot fewer eggs for the rest of the time that you have them.

Kind of along those lines, the frequency that they lay eggs tends to fluctuate depending on the time of year. So chickens lay more or fewer eggs depending on if there’s more or less daylight. For this reason, sometimes people will put artificial light in their coop during the winter, especially if you live someplace with really long winters like we do in Wisconsin.

However, that’s not a practice that I use because various reasons I like their systems to regulate, we like them to have have a break. But also there are some theories that if you do use the artificial light to speed up their laying during the winter, that that actually means they’ll lay fewer eggs over the course of their life.

The theory being that a chicken is born with however many eggs it’s gonna have for its lifetime similar to humans and that when you force them to lay more eggs in a year, it just means that they’ll lay fewer over the course of their life. So if you’re somebody who buys chickens and butchers them after like two to three years when they start to slow down, that might make sense for you.

For me, it doesn’t make sense because I like my chickens to live as long and happy lives as possible, so I prefer to kind of spread out their laying over that time instead of trying to make ’em lay faster.

Chickens are actually very social and pretty darn cliquey, too.

I tend to get around five chicks a year and it’s really interesting because they tend to stick with their buddies that they grew up with even as adults. I guess that’s not a super important point when it comes to how you care for chickens, but it is kind of good to know because for example, last year I experienced quite a few predator losses and out of the five chickens that we got, the five egg laying chickens, we only actually ended up with two that survived one rooster and one hen.

Fortunately I was able to integrate them with our other chickens just fine. If you’re a first time chicken owner and you experience heavy losses with the first round of chicks that you get, you might wanna think about getting some adult chickens to be with them because from what I’ve been told, a chicken shouldn’t live alone.

Kind of on the note of being social too. You might be surprised how much they bond with you if you spend time with them. It depends on the breed but also depends on how you raise them.

That first round of Easter Eggers that I got, they are like dogs. They are so tame and so friendly and it means I trip a little bit more when Ie take care of them because they’re always underfoot.

Another thing to know about getting chickens is that everything loves to eat them. Coyotes, raccoons, possums, dogs, sometimes cats, minks, wild cats, bears, hawks, birds of pre of all kind, you name it everything loves seed chicken. Because of this it’s really important that you look into practices for predator proofing depending on your area.

So I really recommend looking into different predator proofing practices, whether it’s electric fences or digging in hardware, cloth or covered runs and then kind of having those at your disposal in case you need to use them. Of course, if you put everything in place sooner rather than later, you might not have to learn the hard way.

It is important to know chickens are not naturally used to confinement.

So even though kind of the factory farming practices these days tend to be to confine chickens when a chicken is just allowed to be a chicken, they don’t wanna sit in a box all day, they love to get around, they love to peck and they love to scratch, they love to be free on some level. They also, I’m pretty sure, want protection on some level, but if chickens are too confined, you’re gonna run into problems.

You’re gonna run into feather picking and bullying more diseases, things like mites and sicknesses, possible nutrient deficiencies too. So generally speaking, the more space, especially protected space, that you can give them, the better off you’re gonna be and the happier your chickens are gonna be.

Now of course there’s that chicken math problem where usually we plan for a certain number and end up with way more, but there are ways to mitigate that problem.

For example, you don’t necessarily need a stationary run that is X amount of square feet where it’s just huge. You can use different chicken keeping techniques like chicken tractors and pasture rotation. It dDoesn’t have to be a whole pasture, it can be within a backyard, but there are ways to make sure that the place where your chickens are exploring every day stays interesting. It prevents waste buildup and it prevents your chickens from starting to turn on each other from boredom.

Feather picking is a pretty darn good indicator that there are way too many chickens and a too small of a space. I cannot emphasize how important it is that they have plenty of space, they’ll be happier and your care for them will be easier too.

You might get a rooster.

So sexing or determining the gender of chicks is not always foolproof. For most hatcheries or places where you buy chicks, they’ll say there’s roughly a 10% chance that a pullet or a young female chicken is actually a girl, which is a young male chicken. So they do their best, but that sexing techniques are usually about 90% accurate.

There is a technique called vent sexing, but there are some breeds that are basically 100% accurate as far as telling the males from the females from day one. Those are called sex link chicks. I believe we have never purchased any ourselves. We’ve actually gotten really lucky where every chicken we’ve ever bought has actually been the sex that we were told it was gonna be.

However, if you cannot have a rooster in your area and you cannot handle the thought of trying to butcher a rooster if you can’t keep it, I know a lot of people think, well, I’ll just find it a good home on a farm someplace you might know someone, you might have a connection, but believe me, it is a lot harder to find a good home for a rooster than you think it is.

A lot of people have that same thought and there are very few farms that wanna shell out feed for dozens of roosters. So even though there’s a small chance you might find a really good home for one, most people struggle with it and a lot of people who are just first starting out don’t necessarily wanna get right into the butchering scene either.

So if that’s the case, you might wanna look more at sex-linked breeds where you won’t have to deal with a rooster pretty much for sure.

Raising chickens is easy

The term is definitely relative, but if you’re anything like me and you grew up with small caged animals, we had dogs and cats too, but we grew up with Guinea pigs and parakeets and hamsters and all sorts of different stuff.

Keeping those small caged animals was a lot of work. It was a lot of cleaning up messes. Honestly, I don’t have any desire to have more of them at my adult age now because now that I have outdoor chickens, they’re so much easier than small cage animals that you keep indoors.

There’s obviously more infrastructure that has to be in place in order to care for them outdoors. That being said, it is so nice that they can have a self composting system. We only clean it out about twice a year if they pick up their own food mess, they’re a lot easier to deal with outside.

The basics are that they need food, water, shelter, and protection from predators. That pretty much sums it up.

The eggs are not free.

In fact, they’re usually more expensive than the eggs you buy at the grocery store, but they’re much better quality and if you compare the price of the eggs that you’ll raise yourself with the price that you would pay for similar quality from a farm that treats their animals really well, in that case, generally people do end up saving money.

Between the cost of the chickens, the bedding, occasional medical care, the eggs are not free . But they are more dependable, especially when things like the supply chain are in question these days. And if you’re comparing them to like regular factory farm eggs that are on the cheap, they taste way better and they’re a lot healthier too.

They’ve got a lot more in the way of vitamins, really free-range eggs or pasture eggs are a super food. It’s crazy when you look into how many micronutrients and even macronutrients they have that factory farm eggs do not have the same levels of.

Anyways, that being said, they’re not free but they are worth it and they’re healthier if you get them from an environment like this.

When it comes to weather and weather considerations, there is a lot to consider.

It’s not an overwhelming amount, but what you’ll need to do if you’re taking care of chickens in an Arizona summer is completely different than what you’ll need to do if you’re taking care of chickens in a Wisconsin winter, for example.

Where I am in Ohio during the winter, we’re dealing with air moisture, we’re working really hard to keep the air dry, to keep the chickens healthier. I am working to keep them warm, but from what I’ve heard, chickens being cold is less of a concern than chickens being too hot. So during the summer I have to keep an eye on the chickens, make sure they’re not overheating, and obviously if I lived somewhere where it was hotter, that would be an even bigger concern.

There are also a lot of weather considerations when it comes to raising baby chicks, especially when it comes to when to buy them, when to put them outside.

I would love to sit down and talk with all of you one-on-one and kind of brainstorm the best ideas. However, I really recommend joining a local chicken group chatting with the people in the local chicken groups, whether it’s online or in person. That way you can get the best advice from people who have dealt with the exact weather issues that you’ll be dealing with too.

If you’re getting into chicken keeping for the first time, old wives tales are plentiful.

There is so much false information passed around in kind of the chicken world and just in the home setting world in general, there is a lot of good information too, but make sure you’re not just talking to one person, taking what they say and running with it.

I really recommend talking to as many different people as possible asking them why. You know, if you just take every answer you hear at face value, some of it’s probably gonna be correct and some of it’s probably gonna be incorrect. So whenever I’m told something, I like to crosscheck it, but also I like to ask why.

If it’s a logical piece of advice, there’s usually science that’ll back it up too. If there’s no science to it and people just kind of pass it around because they’ve read other people say it on the internet too, it’s, it’s usually a little easier to spot.

I could definitely ticke a lot of people off right now by saying some of the things that are just kind of parroted around the internet that people see other people say and then they kind of say the same thing that I’ve tried out myself and found that it’s definitely not the case, at least for our flock.

But then you would only be taking one person’s advice. And I really wanna encourage you to ask around, get as much advice as possible from many different sources. Same goes for everything that I’m saying. Don’t take everything I say just at face value.

If you’re gonna get chickens, you’re gonna wanna know how to care for them inside and out. So watch as many videos as possible, read as much up on it as possible.

I kind of learned along the way that people say a lot of stuff that’s just totally untrue because they’ve never questioned it. So don’t be afraid to question things and look more into it.

If you’re getting into backyard chickens, there are so many things to know when getting into backyard chickens.