Raising Chickens 101

Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.
— Malcolm X

I was pretty well sold on getting chickens as soon as we decided to move to the ranch. Finding one with a great chicken coop sealed the deal. It’s been awesome (and not just thanks to bird flu driving egg prices up to the point our small flock was netting us $25/wk). Our boys love tending the chickens to the point our they ask to be left in the chicken run while I’m tending the garden.

And it’s easy – way lower maintenance than our dogs and way, way lower than our kids (who produce 0 eggs). But reaching that point of low maintenance, high returns takes some setup that’s not obvious if you’re a city slicker poultry novice like I was. With deep gratitude to our local poultry guru Nate, here are the basics to start your flock. (On the assumption you have a full time job +/- human kids and so are optimizing for time efficiency. People with less time pressure have successfully raised chickens for millennia with less technology.)

Start in Spring

While a hen in her prime will lay an egg just about every day, for reasons unclear to me, nature has decreed that fertilized eggs hatch in the spring. Around here, hatchlings come on the market Mar-Apr. Unless you find a friend selling older birds, that’s the time to start your flock.

Preparation

To prepare your nest, first you need a coop and a run. We were fortunate that the Xolo Ranch came with a very nice coop – like an 8×8 miniature of our house complete with matching color scheme. It opens onto a fenced area (the “run”) that’s a luxurious 40 x 15. But you can get by with much less. The essentials:

• By universal consensus, you need a coop that’s impregnable. Raccoons are tenacious & acrobatic. If there’s a small crack in the defenses, they’ll find it (even if they can’t pull their quarry through it in one piece – yuck).
  • Big & high enough for you to walk in is very convenient
• A run, ~1 sq ft per bird minimum where shade is essential where we live (more below).
  • Some of our neighbors truly free range their birds, that is the coop door just opens onto their yard not an enclosed run. Not our style, especially as we need to keep our dogs away from the chickens.                           
• Some sort of perch off the ground
• Pine shavings – 1-2 in coat over every surface in the coop. They like soft bedding to lay, and you’ll like making it easier to clean out their poop. A cubic yard sack is super cheap and so light, it’s fun to toss around and pretend you have super strength.
• Probably not strictly necessary but very handy:
  • Laying boxes, 12-18in on a side, elevated & somewhat secluded in the coop. Bonus points if it’s hanging off the side of the coop with a lid so you can pull the eggs out easily. I’m told 1 per 4 birds is enough.
  • At least 1 wooden wall for an automatic door, more in a bit.
  • Electricity, hardline is great but a sturdy extension cord can do the trick.
  • Water source like a hose bib nearby.
  • Bird netting, another tip from our man Nate, has been essential as hawks are constantly circling overhead. I mounted 8’ 2x2s around our run, strung heavy wire between them and tossed the netting over. This also came in handy as, at around 4 mo old, a few of our birds kept hopping the fence to explore our yard. Wrangling them before they got into a tiff with our dogs was a pain. It’s also nice insurance against wild birds popping in and spreading disease.

Hardware

If you get paid to do something like applying tech to a large pediatrics health system, your chicken operation needs to be very efficient.

• Automatic door. I had nightmares about forgetting to close the door and waking up to a raccoon massacre. Not to mention the need if you’re ever going to travel. This one has worked well. Careful, it requires wifi, and our coop is just barely in range of the house. Installation is pretty easy so long as the wall between the coop and run is wood and you can run some sort of electrical connection to the coop.
  • Caveat that it takes a while for the birds to get used to sleeping in the coop. Our experience began every evening with our toddler frantically running around trying to herd them into the coop while shouting “casa coc-cocs” – a little inconvenient but adorable. After a few weeks, they were reliably tucked in bed by sunset so the door closes behind them, no sweat.
• Automatic water! Your standard dog bowl can work, but it takes lots of attention. It dries out fast in 115 degrees even if your chickens don’t knock it over first. (And they’ll definitely poop in it.)
  • “High Tech”
    • All credit here goes to our previous owner. A tube (designed for a fridge water dispenser) comes off a hose bib. It fills the bucket until the water level closes the floating valve. Thus, there’s always water pressure into the hose running out the bottom of the bucket. That hose plugs into a simple piece of PVC with a cap at the other end. Drill holes into the PVC to screw in chicken nipples. The nipples themselves leak a bit, so I built a drainage trough from aluminum flashing stapled to scrap lumber just to avoid the muddy mess (where soil parasites can grow amid all the chicken poop).
    • “Low Tech”
      • We put a simpler version in for our new chicks – just drill the same nipples or similar valved scoops onto the side of a bucket. Even with some leaking, a 5 gal bucket lasts several days.
    • We use both systems now for:
      • Redundancy – the high tech version clogs with slime and needs a clean out a few times a year
      • Vitamins – I’m told they’re essential and way easier to introduce via the bucket.
• Feeder. Considerably lower tech but hanging it from a wire a few inches off the ground keeps the birds from knocking it over / pooping in their food. It’s big enough we can fill it and safely take a long weekend away. Keeping it sheltered is a major plus as rain makes a mess of feed crumbs.
  • As with the water, you can also drill valves into a bucket, great option if your flock is >7 birds. Or go big if your flock is.
• HVAC.
  • If you start with very young chicks, they’ll need a heat lamp overnight until they’re about 2 mo old and fully feathered. Heat bulb on a timer maybe does the trick. After that, even on winter nights – at least here where winter = 40 degrees, no heat needed.
  • It gets mighty warm here in summer, so shade on the run is a must.
    • We can get away with a tarp for extra shade as the chance of rain here is roughly 0% the entire summer.
    • Mesh shades work if rain pooling on the tarp will be a pain.
    • Either way, pro tip – be sure whatever is holding the shade up is rounded or squared off. A lone post jutting into a tarp / shade will definitely rip through in wind
    • I also mount a fan on a timer for summer afternoons that chickens occasionally lounge by, but good shade is definitely their priority.

Feed

Nate recommends broiler feed, the protein shake of chicken feed, until chicks are ~20wk then lower protein, higher calcium layer feed. Meat kitchen scraps go to our dogs, vegetables to the chickens so little more than banana peels and coffee grounds end up in our compost.

Starting the Flock

Now you’ve got a high tech, fully autonomous setup, the rest is gravy. I was nervous about where to put the birds…but it doesn’t matter. So long as they have shelter/shade and access to food & water, they’ll figure the rest out with little more than the occasional visit, which our 3 yr old loves, to debulk poop and freshen up the pine shavings.

While the fixed cost of everything above is low, admittedly it’s not zero. As such, once you take the plunge, the marginal cost of each additional bird is trivial. Thus, even for your first foray, get as many birds as can fit comfortably. Especially because adding birds in subsequent springs is bit of hassle (topic for a future post).

Opinions differ on the merits of having a rooster (male) vs just hens. Boys are loud & require some work, so our flock is all ladies.

And that’s about it! Chickens are independent little birds once you get the basics. Our family loves them, and we hope you’ll come to the area to try it out, too!