So You Think You Want Backyard Chickens…
You do. Go pick some out. You can thank me later!
In all seriousness, adding livestock to a family home, homestead, or farm is a big decision and not one to be taken lightly! This post aims to provide the GREAT and the ICKY sides of raising chickens so that you can make the best decision for your situation and family. I’ll be honest upfront that I love my chickens. I think the #ilovemychickens hashtag is the most popular one on my Instagram posts. That said, there are definitely times that my hens gross me out and annoy me. It’s always a balance.
Here are the big PRO’s and CON’s to consider:
Pros:
Eggs / Meat
Adorable Antics
Bug/Vermin/Snake Control
Garden Help
Cons:
Destructive Habits
Vulnerability
Initial Financial Investment
Post-Prime-Egg-Laying-Age Decisions
Let’s look at the pros first, balance them out with some of the hard parts of owning chickens, and then ask some questions that will help you decide if chickens are the right animal to add to your farm!
The Pros
Food Source
The most obvious advantage of having chickens is a reliable food source. If SHTF or there are problems with the supply-chain, you will still be able to enjoy tasty eggs that provide almost all of the essential nutrients for humans. With your own backyard chickens, you can control what they eat and limit the pesticides and toxins they receive while also ensuring that they have access to fresh greens and are able to do “chicken things.” Eggs and meat from backyard chickens are both healthier for you and more ethical. According to the 2007 study done by Mother Earth News, eggs from a backyard flock have 3x as much vitamin E, 2x as much omega-3 fatty acids, 7x more vitamin A, 50% more folic acid, 6x more vitamin D, 1/4 less saturated fat, AND 1/3 less cholesterol than their factory farm counterparts. Those are some serious nutritional benefits! Pasture-raised poultry has a similar list of benefits over conventionally farmed meat, as well.
Adorable Antics
Chickens are enchanting to watch. From scratching dirt and hopping back to see if they found any grubs to dust-bathing in the sunshine or sprinting up to you for treats, chickens do hilarious things! I personally use time with my chickens as my stress relief each day. There’s something about watching them peck, scratch, run around, and come over for pets that centers my heart, makes me laugh, and helps me relax at the end of a hard, long day. They will steal your hearts, and your children may become hooked on spending time with them.
Bug/Vermin/Snake Control
That’s right, I said snake control. Chickens are adorable and friendly and hilarious, but they’re also vicious towards bugs, grubs, and all sorts of pests on a homestead. They keep your mosquito, gnat, fly, and other bug populations in check. And every once in a while, when the opportunity presents itself, they’ll even take care of mice, moles, voles, and (yes! I saw them do it in my yard!) snakes. It’s a win-win: more protein and nutrition for the chickens, and fewer pests for you to fight.
Garden Help
I use my chickens every year to help prep my garden. When they free range, they love to scratch and peck in my garden beds. While this isn’t welcome during the main gardening months, it can be downright useful at the beginning or end of a season! In our northern, zone 6 climate, there’s always a period of time where you think it’s spring, but you know there’s going to be one more hard snowfall or cold snap. This is my chickens’ favorite time of year because they have free reign to scratch up any garden bed they please. After they’re done with an area, the soil is loose and they’ve usually deposited some fertilizer right into my planting areas. They’re also fantastic at spreading mulch and/or compost. Simply dump a wheelbarrow load of whatever you’d like spread, and they’ll gladly kick it around until there’s an even layer of material. This saves you work AND satisfies their natural urges.
The Cons
Don’t read this the wrong way, but there are parts of chicken keeping that are annoying, expensive, and heartbreaking. It’s not for everybody, and it’s worth considering the good, bad, and the ugly before you make the decision to bring home some fluffballs.
Destructive and Frustrating Habits
Remember all that help that chickens provide in the garden? Turns out they provide that “help” all the time and everywhere - regardless of whether you just planted fresh baby seedlings that you spent months raising or it’s your prized, award-winning flower bed. Chickens scratch and disturb the ground, uproot and eat plants, and never concern themselves with the messes they’re making. If you have chickens and gardens (it really is possible to have both, I swear!), it is so important to put precautions in place to protect your yard from your chickens and to protect your chickens from potentially toxic plants. Chickens will also quickly develop their favorite spots, and try as you might, grass will not grow there. Depending on how ‘manicured’ your yard is, this may be a concern for you. For us, we just know that few spots around the coop and under the trees will be a bit sparse and splotchy. For us, the other benefits greatly outweigh the visual costs of our girls.
Chickens are also notorious for not knowing where property lines are located. If you live on a rolling expanse of land, this may not be much of an issue for you, but if you’re thinking of adding chickens to a suburban backyard, you’ll need to factor in precautions to not only protect YOUR yard, but also your neighbors.
And speaking of neighbors, nothing ruins neighborly vibes faster than frustrations over pets! While I personally love hearing the clucking and bawking and carrying on of my girls, I also live in a fairly rural area where people expect to hear chickens and cows and dogs singing the day’s songs. Chickens are typically quiet creatures when they’re just doing chicken things like pecking bugs and scratching the ground, but the egg-song chicken keepers talk about after a chicken lays an egg….let’s just say that the entire flock will start gleefully celebrating with volumes that will wake neighbors from their slumber and alert the entire community that a new egg has been laid! Depending on how your relationships are with your neighbors (and how interested you are in preserving/improving those relationships!), you will have to consider the noise as a potential nuisance. Even just a few hens can make quite a racket!
Vulnerability
Are you familiar with the saying, “tastes like chicken?” I have yet to learn of an omnivore or carnivore who doesn’t like the taste of chicken! And that includes chickens (gross in my books, and we don’t do it, but some people give their flocks chicken carcasses after roasting whole chickens. Rumor has it they pick the bones clean.)! Every meat-eating animal will be looking for a way to get to your tasty pets: hawks and eagles, raccoons, foxes, the neighbor’s dogs, cats, coyotes, weasels, possums, bobcats, skunks….the list goes on! We have yet (knock on wood) to experience a loss from predators, but every flock manager needs to be consistently vigilant and aware of the possibility. This can mean adjusting your lifestyle to be home at dusk to tuck the chickens in for the night, changing the amount of freedom your chickens have for grazing, and/or increasing your initial investment of time and money as your set up your coop to make your coop as predator proof as possible. At best, this is slightly inconvenient, and at worst it can be a serious hindrance to the kind of lifestyle you want to live.
Chickens are also vulnerable to a number of diseases and pests. While many of these can be prevented with careful management and planning, it’s also often tricky to treat chickens who are unwell. Many small-animal vets do not practice on chickens, and you will sometimes need to notice, research, diagnose, and treat issues on your own. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, birds will sometimes succumb to whatever ailment they’ve picked up.
Bottom line? Chickens often die before they’ve lived a full life. This can be heart-wrenching and make you question your decision to get chickens in the first place. Do everything you can to prevent issues, and then prepare yourself for the likely possibility that there will one day be an accident or ailment that ends with fewer birds in your flock. This reality check can be painful emotionally, so be sure to think through how you’ll likely respond to loss before you get attached to those fluffy day-old chicks.
Initial Financial Investment
I think a lot of people have the misconception that raising your own food and livestock helps you save money immediately. This is just that - a total misconception! Now, I’m not one to say that canning produce from your own yard doesn’t eventually become less expensive than store bought goods, and I’m not saying that the quality of those products are even remotely the same (homegrown is almost always more nutritionally dense and tastier!). But when you’re just starting out with these projects? There’s a huge initial investment.
When we decided to add backyard chickens to our operations, I was supremely naive about the start up cost. In my mind, we’d (ha! I mean my husband would…) build a coop and build a fenced in run around it. We’d get those adorable day-old chicks, raise them inside in some container that we scrounged up, and quickly make up those costs with ALL of the amazing eggs our girls would lay.
And that’s almost how it went….minus the whole “quickly making up those costs” part! Here’s a breakdown of our initial set-up costs to get from day-old chicks to a fully-functioning backyard layer flock:
$200 Chicken Coop (we bought a used playhouse a contractor had built for his kids and refinished it)
$50 Paint & Supplies to refurbish the playhouse
$600 Lumber for the fenced in 12’x24’ run
$200 Hardware cloth & chicken wire for the run
$100 Hardware for coop and run (U-Staples for wire, screws for wooden frame, etc.)
$60 Chick starting supplies (chick waterer, chick feeder, heat lamp with extra bulb, chick feed, chick grit)
$30 6 Day-Old Chickens ordered through Martin’s Feed Mill (our local mill)
_______
$1240 Start Up Costs
And that doesn’t begin to include any of the supplies and tools we already had on hand such as their initial brooder (an old horse watering tank made from a 55-gallon drum), ladders, shovels, digging bars, drills, hammers, saws, plumb lines, truck and trailer to pick up the playhouse, plywood to build nesting boxes, and wood shavings for their bedding! Nor does it include the months (!) that we fed and cared for our birds before they matured enough to start laying any eggs.
So while I can confidently say that our day-to-day costs now are no more than we’d pay for the eggs we eat on a regular basis, we are nowhere NEAR recouping those initial investment costs. Now, if you consider the therapy I’ve probably avoided by spending daily time de-stressing with my girls, we’re probably way ahead financially!
In all seriousness though, there are definitely some hefty start-up costs involved, and those adorable little puffs of fluff that you see at Tractor Supply or Rural King or your feed mill need an entirely separate set of supplies than the preening, clucking, egg-laying princesses they’ll grow up to become. There are ways to limit the start-up costs, but I’m grateful for every penny we put into our coop and run. I truly believe that the initial investment has saved us heartache and costs when it comes to our girls’ safety, health, and well-being.
Decisions as Chickens Age
When backyard chickens live a life that isn’t cut short by disease or predators, they can live to be 10-12 years old - or older! This means that those silly chickens pose the potential to be in your life for as long as a family dog. However, we don’t usually expect household pets to “earn their keep” in the same way we expect of backyard chickens. While chickens can live to be 10-12 years old, they typically only lay eggs reliably for 3-5 years with decreasing production each year. This means that as time goes on, your costs stay the same, but you get fewer eggs. You’ll need to make a family decision about how you’ll approach this declining productivity in your girls.
These are the main options:
Pledge to keep your girls for their whole life and run a chicken retirement village, while being aware that you will need to periodically add birds to your flock to keep up production
Rehome/sell your chickens after their productivity decreases, while knowing that it’s easy to get attached to their individual personalities and that you’ll have no control over their quality (or length) of life after you rehome them
Butcher them for meat, while knowing that older birds are typically tougher and less tasty than birds raised specifically for meat and that butchering the animal you’ve raised since day one extracts quite an emotional toll
We’re planning to run a chicken retirement village, and we made that decision before we brought any of our birds home. Any of the options comes with its own costs, and it’s important to recognize that you will likely need to deal with this decision as your flock grows and matures. In my mind, it’s important to know your plan from the get-go so that you can plan and prepare for your chickens aging. I imagine that this would also be especially important if you have children who are building relationships with the birds.
Some Additional Questions to Consider as You Try to Decide
For us, adding chickens has enriched our lives, improved our nutrition, and brought us one step closer to self-reliance and sustainability. While I love my girls and can’t imagine going back to not having them, chickens aren’t right for everybody. Here are some additional things to ask yourself as you mull over the choice to add chickens to your life.
What do I primarily want chickens for? Meat? Eggs? Companionship? Garden help?
What sorts of rules and regulations exist in my area about having chickens? Make sure to check HOA rules, township ordinances, and county restrictions.
Who is going to be responsible every.single.day to take care of meeting their basic needs? It doesn’t take much, but you can’t take a day off to go out of town or because the weather is crummy.
What kind of flock management style am I most interested in using? What will best fit my preferences, priorities, and responsibilities to the birds? There’s always a trade off between the birds’ quality of life and their security/safety.
How will I respond emotionally when/if we lose birds to disease, predators, or other reasons?
What is the plan for when these birds stop producing as many eggs? How will I handle executing that plan?
How will getting chickens affect the relationships I have with neighbors?
Am I okay with the smell, mess (and destruction), and noise of chickens in my yard?
Of course, adding any livestock is a huge decision and not to be taken lightly. But chickens just might be the best “starter” animal to add in to your life for sustainability, food, and entertainment. They take significantly less space, time, and money than other animals, and they start adding benefits to your home in well under a year. If you’re on the fence, dive in! You won’t regret it, and you’ll wonder what in the world you were thinking when you only ate conventionally farmed eggs and meat!
