Jubilee Farm

How many Chickens??

We are looking into getting dual purpose chicks early this spring.

We are looking at getting them so we don't know the sex, and

having the boys in a "meat pen" and the girls for laying eggs. So the plan

is to separate them within the chicken coop. Then we will keep a couple of roosters for when we want more chicks.  So the question is how many should we get?  We are going to use them for eggs, knowing that they won't be laying until Fall (if we get lucky), and planning to butcher the meat ones within 3 months of getting them. They sell them in groups of 25, 50, 100. I thought 50 would be good, but Farmer T is leaning toward 100. We have 5 children, the the first 4 are boys and getting to be quite the eaters. So it won't be a problem to have too many eggs or chicken I don't think. We can always give away any abundance we have.

We do not have a coop built yet, we will do that early this spring before we get them. But the size will depend on how many chickens we get. We have plenty of room for a large coop in the area we are planning on putting it.

The other thought was to get 50 of one kind like Rhode Island Reds, and 50 New Hampshires, and separate them into different pens for laying. That seems complicated to me, but Farmer T doesn't think so. Keeping the different roosters separated for fertilizing, the meat ones could all be together, I guess the layers could too??  So maybe it isn't as complex as I think. Do you have a variety of chickens or stick to one kind?

Thanks

Melanie

Wow, Melanie!

{ 03:34, 2006-Jan-7 } { Posted by rosehillranch }

You are putting a lot of thought into chickens already!! I don't have a single plan yet. Well, hopefully my dh does. hee hee.....Hope I don't get left behind on the chicken project!!! xo Jeani

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{ 02:05, 2006-Jan-12 } { Posted by zoooteacher }

We order sexed chicks since we currently don't eat chicken - we have 25 to 30 at any given time, plus our "main" rooster, and usually one up and coming (the sexing at the hatcheries is never 100%) I like to have a variety of breeds - why not, you know? It certinaly makes for a pretty flock...we keep dual purpose breeds mainly because they're easy keepers... I would order maybe 50 meat chickens since you can always butcher them and then keep them in the deep freeze till needed and aim for a laying flock of about 25 if you don't want to be bothered with selling eggs - two dozen eggs should be more then enough a day, LOL, and even in the winter with some lighting you should get enough to feed everyone. As you start "recognizing" the roos, just put them into the meat pen, and keep the pullets you'd like to hold back for eggs separate. You can order odd numbers and mixed breeds from Ideal - we've had good luck with them. We have Americaunas, Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, Barred Hollands, some Turkens b/c we love thier goofy appearance, and a White Leghorn Rooster. I love having eggs of every color in the egg basket each AM, hence my choice of breeds.