Chickens: The Gateway Drug of Farming
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? In my experience the answer to that question doesn’t really seem to matter. A much better question to ask is this: why did I end up with 35 chickens when my wife and I agreed only to buy 10? The answer is a phenomenon called “Chicken Math”. As the saying goes, “if you want 10 chickens, you might as well get 20, which means you’ll end up with 40.”
Broiler chicks in the brooder just after picking up from the post office.
They’re kind of addicting, let’s be honest. Those cute and fluffy feather-light puff ball day old chicks you pick up in the mail when you order from one of the big hatcheries are exhilarating. They grow so fast and really don’t require all that much care aside from the basics: water, food, shelter, and a heat source. Day after day they grow in such leaps and bounds that the fruits of your labor are perfectly apparent, and if you avoid overshooting the typical mortality rate of about 5%, you’ll be hooked after about a week or so, I promise you that.
Chicks, and their adult chicken end products, are small, require minimal financial investment, don’t require a ton of your time (though you could easily allow yourself to spend more than the necessary amount of time just watching the little fur balls do their thing), and can live in very quaint quarters through adulthood. It’s no wonder chickens are the gateway drug of farming. Believe me, it’s a pretty awesome high. All the hormone benefits of other drugs (endorphins, dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) without really any of the nasty side effects.
Our first go at building chicken tractors from second-hand material.
If you really want to maximize those benefits, build yourself a small-scale chicken tractor and try your hand at raising some chickens for meat consumption. Now, the term “chicken tractor” can be misleading to some people. It’s actually why there is confusion about the regular farm tractors you see pulling implements out in fields and the mislabelling of semi trucks and tractor trailers. Interesting for you history buffs out there, the word tractor was used in the english language for the first time in 1896. Stemming from the latin word “trahere” which means “to pull”, that is exactly how the work was intended to be used. Today we think of those red and green machines used in traditional farming and, while the word is correctly used as, on the whole, those machines are primarily used to pull farm implements, the lehman has improperly interpreted that to associate ONLY with the machine itself.
Thus, anything which pulls something else is performing the duty of a “tractor” whether it is motorized or not. Semi trucks are traditionally thought of as tractors, and so the trailers they pull, covered or otherwise, are considered tractor trailers. If I pull my children on a sled around the yard in the snow, I am the tractor (haha). And so a chicken tractor is just that, some sort of enclosure that affords the chickens access to fresh green grass, bugs, and grubs which can be pulled from place to place to ensure that access remains fresh over time.
At this point, please do not search “chicken tractor plans” online. You’ll be in over your head and likely over budget based on the current state of the lumber market. Instead, just know this. Your typical meat chicken breed, the large breasted tender birds not unlike what you’d buy at a regular supermarket, are about the easiest chicken to raise. They grow extremely quickly, reaching butcher weight in about 7-8 weeks (WHOAH). They just need food and water daily, some sort of shelter, and all that can be had from your local Tractor Supply with very little upfront investment.
For the first batch of broilers (meat chickens) we raised I just scrounged up some free lumber from a Marketplace ad for scrap barn lumber left over from tornado damage. We pulled 30 broilers around the yard (15 in each tractor) and after 8 weeks were able to put 30 whole chickens weighing anywhere from 4-7 lbs in our freezer. 8 weeks and we had enough information to know whether we liked raising broiler chickens enough to do it again (pssst, that answer is a resounding YES). It can be that quick for you too. Meat chickens are quiet. Unless you’re right on top of them you won’t even know they’re there. Give them protein-rich feed, plenty of clean water, and pull them around your yard in one of these tractors and you can do the same thing, even on a smaller scale than we did, with little more than a quarter acre back yard. You’ll have the greenest lawn in the neighborhood about a month after you process the birds too, I guarantee that.
A basket of eggs after a typical day of collecting.
From what I’ve seen most first-time chicken owners don’t begin with the broilers, however. I think the processing side of things is intimidating, though it shouldn’t be. You can quite easily learn all you need to know from any number of YouTube videos, but you could also work with your local meat processor to have them do it for you. In our area, I know of at least a couple places that will do it for a couple dollars per bird. Still, most newbie chicken owners wind up with a couple chicks to grow out as laying hens. Nothing inherently wrong with that!
In fact, that’s what we did. The results are quite a bit more delayed compared with the meat birds, with most layer breeds not reaching egg-laying maturity for 5 months or more (about 20 weeks plus). If you eat as many eggs as our family does, the wait can be well worth it. In addition, laying hens can be quite friendly, often allowing you to pick them up and hold them like lap dogs, though that can be breed dependent. And if you raise them right, give them the love, care, and nutrition they need, you can have some of the richest eggs money can buy. In fact, in some instances, especially with pastured laying hens as we raise ours, studies have show upwards of 1000% increase in the availability of some vital nutrients like folate when compared to regular store-bought eggs coming out of these vertically integrated factor hen houses form the large multi-national producers. For natures perfect protein, I’ll take the egg packed with even more of the good stuff.
In the end, chickens always seem to be where the ball gets rolling. From there, some farms turn toward ruminants like sheep or cows, others to goats or rabbits, and still others gravitate toward pigs or some other larger animal. Either way, most livestock farmers began, in some way, with chickens opening the door to those other enterprises. And so, it’s not whether the chicken or the egg came first, it’s that the chickens come before the farm takes off that makes all the difference. I hope you enjoyed this read, and if you have any questions about our experience with either laying hens or broilers, or if you want some help dipping your toes in the waters or raising poultry, feel free to reach out. As always, have a blessed day, and I’ll chat with you next time.
Cheers,
Jake Miller