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Want Backyard Chickens? Here Are 3 Things You Need to Know First!

Backyard chickens

I never knew I would fall in love with chickens. Look at them. You’ve got to admit they are a little freaky. They’re twitchy, spastic and let’s be honest – they are tiny feathered velociraptors. Imagine my surprise when I realized how hard I had fallen for these pea-brained birds. I’m well on my way to becoming a Crazy Chicken Lady!

Backyard chickens

Like so many others, I fell under the spell of having backyard chickens. Seems like everywhere you turn, people are getting chickens. City folk, country folk, it doesn’t matter. Chickens are wildly popular.

Which makes one wonder, why DO so many people want chickens?

I can’t answer for everyone, but I’m guessing for many folks (like myself), keeping chickens is a political statement, declaring our frustration and disgust with the way industrial agriculture treats animals (and people).

Or perhaps because in a world where things seem to be spinning wildly out of control, it’s comforting to know that you can control one aspect of your food, even if it’s just a few eggs a week.

Maybe it’s because we’re confused and frustrated by all the choices (or lack of choices) when it come to buying eggs.

Whatever the reason, folks are flocking to chickens (pun intended).

The Joys of Backyard Chickens

Backyard chickens

We got our first batch of chickens nearly 6 years ago and have been getting a steady supply of eggs ever since. This sounds silly, but I am still excited and amazed every time I walk to the coop and find eggs. It’s so comforting knowing I can quite literally walk outside and collect my breakfast.

Whenever I know we’ll be having a family with small children visiting, I like to leave the eggs in the coop and let the kids “find” the eggs. It delights me to see their eyes grow wide with wonder.

They all ask, “Can I hold one?”. I always let them… and have lost many an egg as a result, but it’s worth it!

Watching my beautiful “Mobile Lawn Ornaments” wandering around in the backyard is incredibly soothing and entertaining. There is something so deeply satisfying watching chickens pecking, scratching and puttering around, engaging in their natural behaviors.

Happy chickens make happy people!

3 Things to Consider Before Owning Chickens

Before you jump in the car and head to the farm store to get some chicks, I do have some things for you to consider. It’s wise to go into the endeavor with some forethought and knowledge.

1. You don’t get “free” eggs

Believe me, you will be paying for those eggs (especially if you buy Organic feed, which is well over twice the price of conventional feed).

If you were to measure cost effectiveness, it would certainly be less expensive for you to just buy the cheap factory farmed eggs from the grocery store.

However, most people are raising chickens because they don’t want to support factory farming, so maybe cost is not your primary concern.

Read more about farming styles in Katie’s Farmers’ panel interviews. 

There will be lots of time where you are paying for chicken feed, but not receiving any eggs in return, such as:

  • Chicks – Chickens don’t lay eggs until they are roughly 5-6 months old. So when you buy those cute baby chicks in the spring, you need to realize you will be going through lots of chicken feed before you even collect your first egg in late summer/early fall.
  • Molting – When chickens are about 18 months old, they lose their old feather and grow a new set. This is called molting and it can take several weeks or even months. During the molting process their egg production reduces significantly…and sometimes stops.
  • Winter – Depending on where you live and how much sunlight you get in the winter, your chickens may stop laying altogether in the winter. Long days (hours of daylight) triggers egg production, so people living in northern climates (where winter daylight hours are very short) may notice a big drop in egg production.
    • Some hens stop laying altogether. The real kick in the pants is that the chickens require more feed to help them stay warm in the winter! You’ll be increasing their feed rate, while getting less/no eggs.

So keep that in mind – your eggs are not free. The money we spend on chicken feed (and buying new chicks, supplies, etc.) is actually taken from our grocery budget.

But… your ladies will also produce the most delicious eggs you could ever imagine and the satisfaction of eating your own “homegrown” eggs is not to be underestimated. There are some things that money cannot buy!

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Backyard chickens

2. You Don’t Need a Rooster to Get Eggs

Believe it or not, the #1 question I get about chickens is “Do you need to have a rooster to get eggs?” NOPE.

A chicken will ovulate and produce eggs, regardless of whether she has a mate (just like a female mammal ovulates regularly as well). So, if your goal is purely to have eggs for eating, there really is no reason to keep a rooster (although they are ridiculously handsome creatures!). Should you find yourself with a clutch of fertilized eggs, a short 21 day incubation period and you’ll be watching your very own baby chicks emerge. Which is shorter than other farm birds, such as duck eggs.

Backyard chickens

Most people avoid roosters because they are loud and can be aggressive (our own rooster was turned into soup after he went after my 3 year old daughter – don’t mess with this Mama Bear!).

It is a myth that roosters only crow in the morning. They crow ALL. DAY. LONG. And sometimes at 3am. True story.

Most chickens, at their peak, will lay about 5-6 eggs a week. It takes about 25-26 hours for a new egg to form, so each day she will lay the egg later and later. Chickens rarely lay after 3pm, so she may skip a day to get back on track.

3. You Need to Have an “End of Life” Plan

This is the biggest mistake I see people making when they decided to get chickens. What happens when your dear Mathilda gets old and stops laying eggs? What will you do?

It’s tricky. If you have a backyard flock and your city only allows you to have 5 chickens, what will you do when it’s time to replace the old layers?

If you just hold onto the old hens, pretty soon you will be feeding 5 hens that aren’t giving you anything in return. I know many people get attached to their chickens and cannot bear the thought of eating their “pet”.

However, unless you want to start running a retirement home for chickens, you need to take matters into your own hands. As chickens age, they lay eggs more infrequently.

They can continue to lay for 5-6 years at an increasingly reduced rate (and can live for over 10 years!), but most people sell them or butcher them after 2-3 years, once the hen is costing more to feed than she is worth in eggs.

Older laying hens (“Stewing Hens”) make delicious soup and broth – they are generally cooked slowly and the meat used as stew or soup meat, not as a roasting chicken (meat chickens are usually butchered when they are only a few months old).

Backyard chickens

So when Mathilda reaches 3 years old and she is hardly laying anymore, you have 3 options:

  1. Sell her to someone else as a Stewing Hen.
  2. Butcher her yourself and make soup (admittedly not for the faint of heart).
  3. Start a Chicken Retirement Community. Not ideal as it will be very expensive (all that feed cost with no incoming eggs). Possibly preventing you from adding new chickens to your flock.

Our family has chosen all 3 of these options. We have a few special chickens that earned the right to a long and happy life. We’re sold several as stewing hens and we’re eaten our fair share of them as well.

Final Thoughts on Raising Chickens

One last warning… and I say this half jokingly and half seriously!

Chickens are the gateway animal.

Backyard chickens

You know how people talk about “gateway drugs”? Well chickens are kind of like that.

It all starts off so innocently.

You just want to try having a few chickens… and next thing you know, you’ve got turkeys, ducks, rabbits, goats, pigs, cows, llamas and a pony. Ha!

I’ve seen it happen SO MANY times and it happened to us too… So be warned! It always starts with chickens. 🙂

Not quite ready for chickens? How about gardening?

See how you can save money and enjoy fresh food grown by you with all our gardening posts!

Have you considered starting a flock of backyard chickens? What is holding you back? What are your reasons for wanting backyard chickens?
Unless otherwise credited, photos are owned by the author or used with a license from Canva or Deposit Photos.

14 thoughts on “Want Backyard Chickens? Here Are 3 Things You Need to Know First!”

  1. Jennifer Ostroski

    We’ve been wanting to get chickens for a while now. These are some excellent points (especially the end-of-life issue) that we hadn’t yet thought of. As much as I want them, this is probably the one thing that might keep me from it. Until I get a thicker skin at least. Thank you!

  2. We’re getting six chicks this coming week! I’m praying it goes smoothly ?. Have you ever ferment your feed? I’m looking into it to help feed last longer.

  3. I have 4 chickens and can relate to everything in the article. The eggs are not free but they are soooo worth it, with orange yolks. I love my girls and yes, I’m probably that crazy chicken lady. Who cares? I could be a crazy cat lady too but I don’t have any cats.

  4. We love having chickens because it keeps the bugs downs. We have significantly less ticks and spiders to worry about with having chickens on our property. I also love have almost zero food waste. The chickens get most of our food scraps!

  5. I don’t even want chickens, but for some odd reason I was intrigued by the article. I do like purchasing “better” eggs from chickens that are supposedly treated better. Great article with some pretty good humor.

  6. I was just commenting to my husband that I’ve not been without some chickens in my backyard for more than a few months since I was 10! (i’m almost 30 now…) That’s nearly 20 years of chickens, and I never tire of them. My young boys are now taking responsibility for them as well, and it’s so enjoyable to see how much they love their hens. We had a broody hen hatch out three chicks last week and it’s adorable to watch Mama hen with her babies. (And, yes, we have an aging rooster who is very gentle with the kids and we will be sad when he dies…) We love our hens!

  7. Butterscotch Babies

    So how much is the monthly cost? We have toyed with the idea of getting chickens, envisioning “free” eggs, and obviously not taking into consideration everything else.lol

    1. That is a great question! I’ve kept records of expenses for the last 5 years, but never added them up. I think I was afraid to 🙂 It totally depends on how many birds you have, what breed they are, what you feed them and how you house them. So yeah, about a million variables!

      I added it up (because you inspired me!) and one year we spent about $60 a month on chickens (I’m not exactly sure how many we had around that time… between 15-20). That includes: cost of purchasing chicks, chick feed, feed for the laying hens from the previous year, bedding, grit, oyster shells, etc. We buy Organic feed, which is nearly triple the cost of conventional, but we’re willing to pay that because we eat a LOT of eggs. Not included in that total is the equipment to get set up: a chicken coop, fencing, waterers, feeders, etc. You could potentially spend hundreds of dollars on that.

      With 15-20 chickens, I can expect to get about a dozen eggs a day (because some of those are not laying yet or they are molting). We go through about 5 dozen eggs a week, so that leaves 2 dozen to sell to offset costs.

      This simply a snapshot of what it looks like for us. I’m sure some people spend way less and some spend way more. For us, it IS worth it to have our own, because buying comparable eggs (Organic, free-range, pasture raised) would cost us at least $5/dozen. $5 x 5 dozen eggs a week x 4 weeks in a month = $100. We spend about $60 a month raising our own, so that is a $40 savings per month.

      I hope this helps!

  8. Beth @ Turn2theSimple

    We have had backyard chickens (12) for almost a year. We were excited for home-grown eggs but the main reason we got chickens was to help our kids learn perseverance, hard work and responsibility. Obviously, we help with “chicken chores” but we make the kids take responsibility and do most of the work.

    I can see how chickens would be a “gateway animal”…we are hoping for goats and/or a pony next!

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