Keeping chickens costs more than they are worth

[Deleted]

I got 10 young blue speckled guineas a month ago, as well as a young duck from my mom. It was supose to be a hen, turned out to be a drake, so I will bringing him a girlfriend or 2 home in October. I am thinking a Khaki Campbell hen adn a Muscovy hen, since both are good layers and good brooders. Other than the muscovy hen in your pic above, what breeds do you use?

[woodyz]

I just have the two and their two hatches, so the breed is the same. THE hen is 1/2 muscovy and drake all muscovy. i'll have to get back with you on hens other half.

[woodyz]

Back to the original statement, "chickens cost more than they are worth".

I agree! Except maybe in a farm setting where a lot of their feed comes from cleaning up from the other livestock and fields.

And, maybe in a SHTF situation where meat with your wheat straw soup is worth a lot. Eggs, just like meat will be full of protien, so you would try to save the chicken for need to situations and be catching the eggs as they drop out. The chickens get to eat what they can find.

So that is why I have had chickens for the last 18 months. I have been testing what they will eat and what it does to the production cycle of eggs and meat.

Number one: They can survive and continue to produce on what they can find, provided its greens and/or grain. The cheapest dog food you can buy, those ones the size of your little finger nail are made from fat and grain and they can swallow it whole. Add a field to run around in and some gravel in a stream or road and water they will continue to produce protein for you. So my solution for chickens is dog food and kudzu. Keep four hens per person.

Number two: If you eat them all, they stop producing protein for you. If chickens are to be a part of your diet for any length of time you will need to hatch out twice the number of chickens you eat. So eat half of the eggs and one chicken per person per week.

Which gives you two problems:
1. You have to be able to hatch the eggs and you can't depend on a hungry chicken sitting on a pile of eggs long enough for them to hatch.
2. For a minimum of six weeks you have to raise them and keep other things from eating them. Getting water to the babies, as much as they want, is better than letting them run with the flock. At six weeks you can tell which are roosters and which are hens. It is usually about 50/50. You can start eating the roosters at the same one per each person per week anytime after the six weeks.

Tie a small piece of thread around the leg of the hens. Once the hens you hatch start to lay, start eating the ones with out the thread. Eating the older/bigger hens first.

Repeat the cycle and you should always have eggs and chickens.

If you have to leave or winter is bad, keep two hens and a rooster inside where its warm.

There are solar, batt. and electric incubators. The size or the number of incubators depends on the number of people. You need to hatch 2 eggs per person per week. It takes 21 days to hatch a chicken. So roughly you need to hatch 8 chickens per person each hatch.

Its possible with care and forethought to load an incubator and hatch some eggs each week. It is harder to control the heat and humidity inside the incubator, but it can be done. If your survival depended on it.