Backyard Birds: What It Actually Takes
Originally aired on the NOFA Podcast, Season 4, Episode 3, “Backyard Poultry and Egg Production,” March 31, 2021. Hosted by Jason Valcourt.
Most people come to backyard chickens with a breed already in mind. The honest advice starts somewhere less interesting.
“Number one is know what your local regulations are.”
Not what anyone wants to hear first. But the alternative is worse. “You don’t want to go down the road of setting up your housing and your systems and getting your bird, you know, thinking you’re getting your birds and then all of a sudden have your neighbor report you to the authorities.” In most towns around here the rule is six hens and no roosters. Cross a certain acreage, two and a half acres in Lanesborough, and the numbers open up considerably.
Picking a bird
After the rules, two questions. What survives a Berkshire winter, and what survives everything that wants to eat it.
Combs and wattles are the first casualty of cold. A tall showy comb frostbites, and a frostbitten comb can turn into sepsis and a dead bird. The Buckeye has a pea comb, low and close to the head. Wyandottes and Dominiques run small too. Color matters for a different reason: “Number two is think about everything likes to eat a chicken.” A bright white bird in a field is easy for a hawk.
Then there’s temperament. Leghorns and the Mediterranean breeds are nervous and high strung, a poor match for children. Buckeyes and Black Australorps are the two we’ve settled on. Gentle birds, and the roosters especially.
Though roosters are their own subject. One in the early homestead years turned on my wife and didn’t like women generally. He’d chase her around the house and try to get in after her. There’s no fixing that. “The best thing to do is just to euthanize it because they’re going to cause potential damage to you.” Aggression that severe is genetic, and breeding from it only spreads it.
Heritage or hybrid
Heritage breeds are centuries old and adapted to a region. They reproduce naturally, forage well, and a bird can live eight to twelve years, still laying at a much reduced rate near the end.
Hybrids are a mid-century invention, bred for production. “Hybrid breeds are really meant as sort of like disposable commodities in the industry. They’re rarely kept for more than a year partly because they don’t live that long and partly because they stop producing. So the farmers just get rid of them.”
The Cornish Cross is the far end of that logic, and it is nearly all the chicken meat Americans eat. “In my opinion, it exemplifies all the downsides of commercial agriculture. The genetics are owned by two multinational corporations.” The bird can’t live well past about ten weeks. Its legs fail. Its heart fails. It has to be fed a restricted diet or the muscle outgrows the skeleton holding it up.
The money
Worth saying plainly: this will not save you money.
“If you’re going into this thinking that you’re going to be saving a ton of money versus what you could get in the supermarket, even in the organic section, especially if you take into account your labor, you’re going to be breaking even on that as far as a comparison.”
The economics only bend at scale. “There’s a reason that if people that are doing egg laying as a business jump right from a small flock of 100 birds, which sounds like a lot, right up to 1000 birds, because that’s about the point where you can start to make some money at it.”
Feed is most of it. A fifty-pound bag of conventional runs about eleven dollars; organic runs twenty-two to twenty-eight. That gap is the whole answer to why organic eggs cost six dollars a dozen. And freshness is a hidden cost most keepers never think about: “As soon as the feed is ground, within the first week, it’s lost 40% of certain nutrients.” A bird turning up her nose at feed is telling you something.
Housing that moves
The cute fixed coop, done up like a small Victorian, is usually a mistake. It’s too small and it doesn’t move. “That lawn is going to be torn up in a couple of weeks and then you’ve got a moonscape,” bare ground that can’t break down manure, which means flies and maggots.
Build it mobile, or build two runs off a fixed house and alternate, reseeding the resting side. Poultry netting is cheap for what it does. Chickens respect it whether or not it’s electrified, and it keeps them out of the garden. Rotate properly and you get the payoff for nothing: “You’ll have the greenest grass ever without having to buy anything from Agway or from Home Depot to feed your lawn.”
Inside, figure four to ten square feet a bird depending on size, and ten inches to a foot of roost each. Most manure lands under the roost at night, so put something there to catch it, or run deep bedding, adding on top as it accumulates until you’ve built six inches to a foot. It composts in place, throws heat in winter, and produces vitamin B12.
Winter
Ventilated but not drafty. Vents high, nothing moving at bird level.
“They actually don’t need heat in the winter, especially if you picked a breed that doesn’t have a big comb, they can acclimate to it.” Ours prove it every year: “We keep our breeders over the winter and we’ve got a small coop with 25 birds in it. It’s warm.” Twenty-five birds and some rigid insulation in the roof.
Water is the thing that actually needs attention. “Our mantra is if it’s not clean enough for you to drink out of, it’s not clean enough for the chickens to drink out of.”
Keeping them healthy
Most problems are management problems. “If there’s an issue of cannibalism, it’s almost always because your management isn’t right.” Crowding, boredom, bad light.
The rest is daily looking. Feather sheen. Bright eyes. Comb color, erect or drooping. Manure around the vent, and its consistency. Molting hits after the first year, usually around October, takes several weeks, and egg production falls off a cliff while it does.
Over ten years and many hundreds of birds, serious illness has been rare enough to count on hands and toes.
It helps to remember what they are. “They’re basically dinosaurs. They’re a couple hundred million years old, descended from, from dinosaurs.” Watch them long enough and it shows.
Start
Plan the regulations, the housing, the fencing, the feed. Then stop planning.
“Don’t wait. Just jump into it.”
Get chicks in April or May rather than February. Later birds need less brooder time, and Tractor Supply carries them well into spring.
If you’re working out a flock and want to talk it through, we’re on Route 7 and happy to.
