Blog » Chickens. The End.

Our good friend Kath asked a few chicken questions over here on this post about the plucker, and that reminded me:  Hey!  I wanted to write about the chickens!  So here we are, talking about chickens. 

1. How hard is it to raise chickens?
   For us, raising chickens was pretty much no work at all.  Because we already have ducks, we had a place for the chickens to live (and keep them safe at night), and it was already part of our daily routine to go out each morning and let everyone out for the day, fill up clean water, refill food, etc.  I would guess that it added 5 minutes a day (so, 20 minutes instead of 15) to add 17 chickens to our flock.  Obviously, if you didn't already have livestock, it would change your life a bit more. 

   In general, though, once you have a safe house for them, the rest is pretty easy.  All those chicken books make it sound like chickens are these delicate little flowers, apt to catch colds and faint at the drop of a hat.  Well, no.  They're big funny (relatively) hardy birds.  Don't let a fox get them, and they'll be fine.  (If anyone wants to know more about poultry housing, just ask!  I could go on all day.)

2. Cost Breakdown 
   We were keeping pretty close track of our chicken expenses for a while, but then we stopped caring.  So this is a guess on costs, but I think it's fairly accurate.   The chicks themselves (15 + shipping -- they sent us 2 extra, so we started with 17 birds) were $40, food averaged about $10/week, and bedding (shavings/straw/etc) totaled maybe $15.   We slaughtered the first batch at around 12 weeks (strictly speaking, these birds were full-grown at 9-10 weeks).  So if we add in a few extra dollars for intangibles (running a heat lamp, etc), let's say that's $200 total.   That's $12.50 / chicken.
3. How does that compare to other happy tasty chickens?
   A) In our area, an H.T.Chicken runs about $15.  BUT!  That's $15 for a 3.5lb bird.  Our smallest hens dressed out at 5lbs, and the roosters (we ended up with 12 roosters of the 16 birds) are 6-7lbs.  So price-per-pound is almost half of a store-bought H.T.Chicken.  That price even makes our own pretty competitive with industrially-raised chickens, though obviously that's not really the point.  The size is actually kind of comical -- we cooked two thighs-n-legs last night, and they weighed in at 1 full pound each.  That's alot of food.
   
   B) These birds taste good.  Really good.  I've never had a chicken that tastes like this, honestly.  Some people say they taste more "chickeny", and they do.  It's almost like eating turkey.  In fact, the only bird I've had that compares is the turkey we had for Thanksgiving, which was a heritage breed raised by one of our dinner guests.
4. Did any birds get sick?
   You might notice that my bird numbers vary between 16 and 17, depending on what time period I'm talking about.  We had one bird get sick in some vague "medicine isn't helping" kind of way.  We killed it.  It was awful, because we hadn't, at that point, learned how to slaughter properly.  Let's just say:  try to avoid that. 

   In general, I wouldn't have any problems giving medicine to birds you want to eat -- Terramycin, which is a farm-brand-name for oxytetracycline, is available at most feed stores, and has info right on the package about how long it stays in the body of different types of animals.  It's not very long -- something like a 3 day waiting period for poultry.  Treating a sick chicken is not at all the same thing as giving all your birds preventative blanket-antibiotics.  Terramycin totally saved Guillermo's (one of the Cayuga ducks) life after she was attacked by a bobcat, so I have a fondness for the stuff.  Also, it is mad cheap.  Like $4 for a year's supply.

5. Did you give them organic feed?
   Our birds got plain old feed.  We have two really good feed mills nearby -- sometimes the birds got Poulin Grains, but mostly we gave them Morrison Feed.  The Morrisons have a family-run feed mill about 15 miles from us, and their feed is really beautiful -- full of big chunks of grain and it smells really sweet, like good fresh flour.  The birds like it.  The Morrisons also sell organic feed (all of Pete & Gerry's hens -- also a close neighbor -- eat it), but we figured that: Hey, we know that they're eating good food, and they're roaming around the yard eating bugs and grass and stuff.  Organic wasn't as important to us as the proverbial 'happy'.
6. What about the part where you have to kill them?
   Well, yeah.  That part is not great.  Honestly, it was not as bad as I (a surburb-raised gal) thought it would be.  I'm pretty squeamish around blood, and was frankly expecting to spend most of the day lying down with the vapors.  But the very first thing you do after killing the bird* is to remove its feathers, and then it stops looking like a animal-chicken and looks instead like a meat-chicken.  Then you take out the guts and stuff, which is icky but not awful.  If you've ever butchered (as in:  cut up into pieces) a chicken, it's not that different.  The lungs are crazy looking.

   * I did not help with this part.  Aaron and our friend Clarke (who has been raising animals since he was a kid on his family's farm) did that part.  It's gross, but the birds really do die right away.  And then they really do flap around for a while even though they have no head.  It's odd.

   If you plan on raising chickens for meat, definitely find someone who is a good slaughterer to teach you the ropes (so to speak).  It makes all the difference.  I honestly don't know how you'd go about slaughter in a non-rural area...  There's a bunch of blood, and a whole bucket ("the gut bucket") of chicken insides that I carted out into the woods for disposal, and the plucker throws feathers everywhere.  It's a messy business.

   ** Special Note!  I am perhaps the only person you have ever heard of who made the chicken stock from The French Laundry Cookbook with the optional chicken feet!  I did not, however, cut my pounds of onions and carrots into mirepoix, because that's loony.  Who do you think you are, Thomas Keller?  Honestly.  It's STOCK. 
   P.S. Tommy K doesn't tell you this, but if you're starting from actual-live-chicken for this stock, you need to peel the feet first.  FYI.

So that's chickens.  We'll definitely raise them again.  We're excited about trying different breeds, and also establishing some breeding stock -- it seems silly to buy chicks every year, when chickens can make more chickens with relative ease.

Raising chickens is pretty cool, and I think it's more do-able for most people than they realize.  If you have any questions or comments, ask away!