Ep. 67 – It’s Chick Day! – Backyard Chicken Basics

The Spring Tradition of Chick Day is Almost Here!

This back-to-basics episode is a backyard starter kit for raising chickens.

It’s Chick Day. This is the time-honored Spring tradition every year where the tractor supply and the other farm stores have chicks for sale. But with the egg shortage and the demand for chickens, there’s likely to be shortages of chicks at the farm stores for Chick Day this year.

Many people have asked me, “Can you hatch some chicks for me?”

Let’s dive a little deeper. What do they really want?

“I want eggs.”

Okay, so do you have any limitations?

“I live in town and I cannot have any roosters.”

Options for Buying Chicks – Sex Link or Straight Run

What kind of options do we have there? When you get chicks from the store, there are two specific kinds:

Sex-links –

These are chicks that are bred from two different types of heritage chicken breeds, and the resulting female chicks are one color and the males are another color. That way it’s easy to tell which ones are pullets, or hens, and which ones will end up being roosters.

Sex-links can be sold under these brands or titles:

Red Sex Link
Black Sex Link
Red Star
Black Star
Golden Comet

Straight-Run –

Straight run chickens are chicks from one breed of chicken, or from two that do not have specific sex-linked chicks. Your standard farm chicks are usually straight run.

You don’t know whether the chicks are roosters or pullets until they get a little bit older. Sometimes you can end up with almost 50% or more being roosters. And that’s a problem, especially if you live in town.

What Sex Is It? – Chicken Feather Sexing Techniques

Straight-run Breeds

Besides sex-links, these are some of the straight run breeds that you can buy:

Buff Orpingtons or Red Orpingtons are very calm birds. They are easy to take care of, but they’re going to be straight runs. You don’t know whether they’re roosters or pullets (hens). They will have brown eggs, sometimes even speckled eggs. There are also leghorns, which have white eggs.

I usually go with Buff Orpingtons, Red Orpingtons. I also have some really nice silver laced Wyandottes. These are silver birds with white tracing around some of the feathers. But once you get into the other breeds, then they start getting a little bit wilder in their temperament. They get a little bit harder to control.

A lot of my friends and family have Australorps, which are a black chicken which lays brown eggs.

You can also get chickens that lay blue or greenish eggs that look like Easter eggs. Those chicken breeds are a little bit more exotic. The greenish or blue Easter eggs will sell better if you are going to sell eggs at the farmer’s market because they look like “magic eggs”. However, those breeds are a little bit harder to take care of because they tend to be a bit more wilder.

Did You Know?

The average chicken lays up to 200 eggs per year.
Some breeds, like Rhode Island Red and Barred Rock, can lay up to 250 eggs per year.

Chicken Breeds – Egg Color List:

Chickens that lay white eggs:

Leghorn

Chickens that lay brown eggs:

Australorp
Brahmas
Wyandottes (my Wyandottes lay brown speckled eggs)
Rhode Island Reds
Most Sex-Links
Orpingtons – lay lighter brown eggs

Chickens that lay blue eggs:

Americanas
Easter Egger

Chickens that lay green eggs:

Easter Egger
Olive Eggers

Did you know?

Chickens that lay green eggs, like Olive Eggers or Easter Eggers:
the eggs are initially blue but a brown pigment is coated over the blue later in the passage through the duct, which makes an overall darker green color!

Cornish Cross are Meat Birds, not Laying Chickens

If you see Cornish Cross chicks – those are meat birds. Cornish Cross chickens are the kind that you see when you buy a whole chicken from the store. They are bred so that they have a larger than normal white meat breast and they also reach maturity really, really fast. The average meat bird takes sixteen weeks to reach maturity to the point where you could harvest it and then process it. A Cornish cross chicken is going to stand at the feed and eat almost non-stop for eight weeks. They will be big like the chickens in the store and then you harvest them and process them at eight weeks. Cornish Cross chickens are meat birds, not “layer” chickens. Make sure you don’t buy Cornish Cross chickens if you are looking for eggs laying chickens.

Sources for Chicks

Another option for buying chicks, especially with the likely shortage of chickens in the demand this year, is to find a farmer and then buy from the farmer or perhaps Craigslist.

Chicks around here in Northeast Kansas run anywhere from $3 to $5 a piece. I think they’re will be more than $5 this year.

One thing to keep in mind that people just don’t understand is that it will take 20 weeks for a chick to grow to a laying hen and start laying eggs. So that means if you buy a chick in the normal chick days, which run March to the first week of May, you are not going to get eggs until September and maybe even into October.

Buying Pullets Rather than Chicks

It takes four to six weeks for the chicks to develop their adult feathers. They will need to be put under a heat lamp or heat tray for that length of time, even in warm weather. Once they grow out their feathers, then you can tell a little bit more whether they’re female or male at that point. Another option is to get with a farmer and buy six-week-old pullets, when it is clearer that the chick is a female. That way you will not end up with a whole flock of roosters or end up with a bird that starts crowing in the middle of your backyard when that’s not allowed in the city.

Pullets when they’re grown out for six weeks will be anywhere from $10 to $15 here in Northeast Kansas. Another option is if you don’t want to wait the full 20 weeks to have eggs: you could look on Craigslist or get with a farmer and buy a laying hen. Those can run $25 or more apiece depending on what kind of relationship you have with the person.

Pain Points for First Time Chicken Owners

I asked Perpend: What are the top three pain points for people looking to buy chickens for the first time?

There is no singular source for advice. There is a lot of noise out there.

There are a lot of questions about breed and everybody has their own favorite for breed. I’ve given you some options on some of the breeds that I’ve had (see above).

What do you do about a coop?

There is a lot of noise on the Internet on this topic:

“Oh, you need to have a chicken tractor. Oh, you need to have this or that”.

And you can go to Tractor Supply or you could go to Orscheln’s or some farm store like that and spend $500 for a cheaply made enclosure and coop that has a run on the outside that will probably only last you one or two years. The run itself is made 1x1s – very thin wood. And I’ve seen coyotes and dogs tear right through that type of run and then eat the chickens.

If it’s your first year of chickens, maybe you take it easy and just find something that’s a real easy coop. There are a lot of designs online. Take it easy. Make a little A-frame. Perpend took some cattle panels and created a hoop house, and then put chicken wire around them and a tarp over the top and that’s what he used for his enclosure last year. So don’t get stuck with analysis-paralysis and indecision on your coop and your run. If you know you are going to have chickens for a long time, then spend a little extra money. You can take pictures of the enclosure at the farm store, the ready-made coop that’s over at TSC or whatever. And you can duplicate that to some extent for probably less money.

You want to have a run that’s an enclosed fenced in area. People talk about electric fencing, electro- netting and all that stuff and moving your chickens around. You really don’t need to do that, especially in your first year.

If you’re going to have a run with an enclosed fenced area with chicken wire, make sure that you use something with a smaller hole than chicken wire from the ground to about a foot up the side. Because raccoons can get their hands in the holes of the regular chicken wire and actually grab chickens. I’ve had that happen before – I’ve lost lots of chickens that way. Add some kitchen wire (it’s like chicken wire but very small holes) for the first foot up. You can still have chicken wire the rest of the way up the run, but that way the raccoons can’t get their hands in there and grab some of the chickens. Those are some options on coop.

If you live in town, make relationships with farmers or with homesteaders. They will help you with questions and may be a source of chicks, or just some encouragement.

Take it easy the first year

Some rules of thumb: Don’t overpay and don’t overthink it. Take it easy. Figure out what you want to have during the first year. You may want chickens and get chickens going successfully. And then even though you don’t have roosters, the regular hens still make a lot of noise when they lay eggs. And your neighbors may not be very happy with that.

You may have a hard time taking care of chickens in the first year and decide you don’t want to do it anymore. If you’re new to all this, then start out slow.

Good luck to you on your chicken adventure in this year.

We are having a contest drawing in Feb for a copy of Roxanne Ahern’s book “Holistic Homesteading”. For details, and to sign up for the drawing, go to Feb Contest – Holistic Homesteading.

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