I got a text from Southern Belle. Her family likes to eat eggs and the price is skyrocketing. Some of that is due to flocks getting culled due to bird flu. Some of it is due to Michigan's Democrats aping California and outlawing birds kept in a cage-free environment.
As a side-note, I have to wonder if the cage-free environment accelerates the spread of bird-flu. In general, any kind of fire-break is helpful in slowing the spread of epidemics while any kind of mobility is bad.
Southern Belle asked for a brain-dump.
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Hello Southern Belle:
There is nothing wrong with having several breeds in your home flock. I think it adds visual interest.
At their peak, you will probably get five eggs every week from each hen. Four hens will give you twenty eggs. Six hens will give you thirty eggs.
You do not need a rooster.
Breeds
#1 ISA Brown. In my opinion, this is the best choice for a backyard flock in our part of Michigan.
#2 Black-sexlink is a close second place
#3 Tied for third-place are Barred Rocks, Black Australorps, Rhode Island Reds and Gold/Silver Lace Wyandottes
Honorable Mention: Americana (Green egg layers). They have better free-range "survivability" because they are a little more paranoid than the breeds listed above. Unlike the other breeds, Americanas are not standardized for colors so you will automatically get a mixed looking flock.
General notes:
White birds tend to get picked-off first if you let them free-range.
Breeds with large "combs" (the pink growth on the top of their head) suffer in cold weather.
"Roll-out" egg nests are a wonderful thing. Even better if you can make it so you have a trap-door in the side of your coop and can access the eggs from outside.
If bird flu hits the local hatcheries then chicks will become very hard to get and will be expensive. Beat the rush.
You can buy one-year-old birds that are molting. There is a local guy who "dumps" his flock this time of year. He charges $15 a bird.
Consider ducks!
#1 Khaki Campbell duck
Ducks can be superior to chickens for free-ranging. They are more effective at catching bugs. They are more resistant to the cold. They WILL foul any open water, so maybe not the best choice if you have a swimming pool.
Lifting notes: 135 X 6 raw. 205 X 6 with straps. (225 x 6) x 3. Total of 6090 pounds
My biggest problem w/ the free ranging chickens we have is they tear up the landscaping pretty fierce. Some birds are worse than others. The Coocoo Maran (spelling?) does well and stays close to the coop.
ReplyDeleteBe prepared however, you no longer get to mulch your tree's or beds if the chickens will be allowed to go there. Now w/ the winter weather they're ranging further than normal as well. Tree's that used to be safe are having to be re-mulched.
Hens will definitely rearrange mulch!
DeleteProof that there are lots of creepy-crawly-squirmy things living in it.
I've found Khaki Campbell ducks excellent year-round layers IF you keep them inside the duck house until 8AM and give them treats to return by evening, and if monitored well excellent in keeping my gardens clear of many bugs.
ReplyDeleteThey DO LOVE ripe Strawberries and such but can be fenced out pretty well.
They love water and a fishing pond IS their natural habitat. Their fertilizing of it keeps the pond going well.
Sorry incomplete thought, Campbells have poor mothering skills. I use an egg incubator. Once hatched they seem to blend in well with the rest unlike the "Hen Pecking" I've seen in chickens.
DeleteI have no experience with ISA browns, but they look similar to our Cinnamon Queens. Both are "hybrid" breeds with high egg production. If she plans to cull older hens for meat, the Cinnamons aren't a heavy breed, don't know about the Browns.
ReplyDeleteIf she starts with chicks, then once they begin laying, young birds seem to lay well through their first year without much drop off for winter or molting. You can use lights to help in the winter, but when ours molt, they pretty much just stop laying completely. Our future plan is to replace about 1/3 or 1/4 every year, cull the older birds for stew hens, to be sure we have eggs through the summer. We always start with baby chicks, since we have a hatchery less than an hour drive away.
May I be so bold as to suggest that you rotate through different colors each year. That makes it dirt-simple to know which old biddies to cull.
DeleteSay red birds one year, black birds the next and then a speckled breed/hybrid the third year.
That'sour plan we went with rhode island reds last spring,
DeleteDo you have an opinion on geese? They appeal to me because they eat grass and need less feed.
ReplyDeleteGeese supposedly make great watch-dogs. Predators tend to leave them alone although Great Horned Owls will have their way with them
DeleteHybrids with the Canadian Airforce can get you too much attention from the DNR.
A nice resource for breeds of livestock can be found HERE: https://breeds.okstate.edu/poultry/geese/
Peacocks are even better. 'Country doorbell'
DeleteWe had Chinese geese, they crapped everywhere, shrieked relentlessly and were mean as hell. Never again.
DeleteOur mini flock has 2 Rhode Island Reds,2 Silver lace Wyandottes, 2 Sapphire Sky and one guinea. We get 4 to 6 eggs each day the Sapphire are the star they started early laying and hammer out 2 extra large eggs a day.
ReplyDeleteGrumpy Old Macdonald
Used to have Muscovy ducks. Very prolific egg layers and duckling raisers.
ReplyDelete...and lots of fun to watch when they go ' into conference'.
DeleteI'm curious what Michigan's "cage free" law actually requires. I looked up Nevada's law and it isn't actually cage free - it just requires a bigger cage.
ReplyDeleteIndustry standard has been 67 square inches per bird. Nevada's law requires a minimum 144 square inches per bird - to me, that is far from being "cage free".
Jonathan
Find out. Who can process chickens near you. Ifyou buy unsexed chicks you willhave half cockerels to kill young as fryers. Grown roosters will kill each other, and attack you for getting near the Hens. Free range birds attract hawks, eagles, raccoons and weasels. Coop must be tight and closed at dark. Went out one morning andfound a raccoon had gotten in, and eaten the heads off 21 birds. Turkeys OK to raise with chickens, but turkey cocks will try to bully small children.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds more like a mink or weasel killed your chickens.
DeleteI’ve had great luck with bielenvelder roosters, their big, beautiful, willing to engage predators to protect their hens and the three I’ve had were totally non aggressive towards people.
Hrmmmm.
ReplyDeleteBased on my (extremely) limited experience… I might quibble about barred rocks. (Plymouth Rocks is what our hatchery sold them as). Ours laid eggs as well as the reds, and were as well tempered too. I’d bump them up into second or even a tie for first!
If I ever get backyard chickens I’m going for bantams. They are great brooders and will steal eggs from other birds and hatch them.
I've had leghorns (white and brown), both laid a lot of eggs for the amount of feed, the whites were extremely high-strung, the browns looked like game cocks. Also had some dual-purpose breeds like barred rock and Americana which were decent layers, but if I wanted meat I'd rather raise meat birds.
ReplyDeleteThe last breed I had were Red Sex Link because they were available at the farm store for cheap, and they were reliable egg layers.
I never free-ranged any chickens because I didn't want to feed the local dogs, possums, or raccoons. Besides laying eggs, the chickens were in charge of making compost in an outside run off of the coop. Pile the compost materials up, let the chickens tear it apart, pile it up whenever it looks like it needs piled up again, then put the fertility where I want it to be put instead of all over the yard, and the chickens also don't seem to disappear one by one like they do if they free-range.
The use of bird flu as an excuse to destroy chickens by the millions is part of the criminal lefts war on cheap affordable food. Eggs and chicken have always been affordable quality protein for people of minimal means. Thus it is being targeted by the elite in their quest to "cull the herd". What happening is not complicated, evil but not hard to figure out.
ReplyDelete100%
DeleteI'd like to add my favorite chicken breed, the Bielefelder. A true dual-purpose bird, the hens can grow to 12 lbs live weight and roosters 15 lbs. They are reliably auto-sexing with distinct difference in color between males and females at hatch. Mine lay even better than my Australorps and all the eggs are extra-large. They are extremely hardy. Mine live in a mobile coop (Rhodes Chickshaw) on the pasture year-round. To preserve your yard, you can put them in a small mobile coop with a netting fence and move the whole thing to a different spot every few days. Even put them in the veggie garden as soon as the snow melts for a few weeks and pull them out a month before planting. To classify by age, I put a different color zip tie on a foot for each class.
ReplyDeleteMy chicken-keeping buddy says she and her husband prefer Cinnamon Queens... Very good layers, friendly to people, but more aggressive to other chickens in the flock than the recent addition of Sapphire Gems, which are less people-friendly, but less aggressive to other birds. Neither of the above are broody. She says Australorps are quite broody, if you want a hen to incubate and raise chicks.
ReplyDelete