Spring time on the farm means babies. Calves and foals are exciting and adorable. We wait all year and hope that nature will take its course and I won’t have to figure out what all those items in my ‘Calving Kit‘ are for! Waiting for large animal babies requires every ounce of patience I have.
But chickens satisfy that desire for instant gratification – well, almost instant. 21 days pretty much like clockwork. Chickens are addictive – but they require housing, feed and a plan for what to do with excess roosters. That’s where Chicken Math becomes important. Homesteaders and hobby farmers use that phrase, usually to describe the irrational need for more and more chickens. To me Chicken Math has 3 main components: costs, time and number of birds (which encompasses that irrational need for more and more chickens).
We were idealistic when we started with chickens in the spring of 2021. We were not going to do a ‘barnyard mix’ – we wanted one heritage breed that could produce meat and eggs. I was going to be in charge of eggs, while Ace would be heading up the meat operations. Then we made mistake number 1: we assumed bigger was better. With a large family like ours, big eggs and big birds seemed like a great idea. We looked at the cross-bred meat birds that were designed to grow out quickly – like seriously, they eat so much and grow so fast that they can hardly stand up at butchering time, which is at 8-9 weeks old. This was not something I was interested in. We chose the Jersey Giant breed: they were originally bred to rival a turkey on the dinner table, they lay a lot of big eggs and are decent mothers. We thought we had found the perfect birds. So we found a breeder and ordered 40 one-day-old chicks.
Chicken Math IRL: Having well researched chicks on order did not stop me from texting these random chick pix to my husband from Tractor Supply just to 'make sure' he didn't need me to pick any up while I was there...
Size matters, but so does time...
Our first spring with chickens was a roller coaster! We wanted to maximize the size of our meat birds – Jerseys take 8 to 9 months to reach a harvestable weight, so we went ARFA (against real farmer advice) and did not butcher early (mistake number 2). The cost of feeding these guys, even though ours are foraging and free ranging all day, is enormous. And the older they get, the tougher the meat is when you do harvest. And when you don’t butcher chickens before puberty, you have to deal with roosters. Dear diary!
We ended up with 15 more roosters than we needed (more chicken math – ratios! The male to female ratio is very important for a healthy flock). At one point, we had all those guys in a one acre paddock and it was like a war zone. We lived in fear of having to walk in there! This experience made our first butchering day a little easier emotionally though. Unfortunately, these guys became failed meals (went to dogs) or soup or bone broth – very expensive dog food, soup and broth – because we were learning.
I thought it was amazing how slowly time passed while I was waiting for my precious chicks to arrive, or while I was desperate for those stinky toddler chicks to get enough feathers to move outside. Somehow I was equally amazed at how fast time passed when the good butchering window came and went!
The Good Eggs
On the positive side, our Jersey Giant hens are beautiful, sweet and started laying right at about 5 and a half months old and we were so proud of those eggs. Given how much we have to feed these enormous birds, those are some high dollar eggs! Everyone that we share eggs with comments on how delicious they are. We decided to keep a flock of 14 (very expensive) Jersey Giants. At one point, two of our hens went ‘broody’ – which means they decided to sit on their eggs – but for a multitude of reasons, never actually hatched any of their own chicks.
So, unless we were going to eat some of our laying hens or their rooster – we didn’t have any more meat birds…Darn that chicken math!
The next spring, we decided to order a faster growing, dual-purpose bird, the New Hampshire chicken. This breed is actually ‘Threatened’ whereas the Jersey Giants are just at a ‘Watch’ level (yes, there is such a thing as Livestock Conservancy!). So we feel great about raising them.
I ordered a large number of New Hampshires and was determined to butcher early and have a freezer full of chicken. At the same time, I ordered Silkie chicks. Silkies are tiny and hilarious, but they are great mamas and are known to hatch out eggs that aren’t even theirs. I thought this was my super earthy solution so I wouldn’t have to mail order any more chicks!
We did butcher a lot of New Hampshires, and the earlier harvest was better, but we also kept a laying flock of those with 2 roosters. And of the 25 Silkies ordered, 19 were roosters!! (mistake number 3: ordering straight run on birds we aren’t going to eat – Silkie meat is bluish purple – for real). We gave away a ton of Silkie roosters, lost some to predators (mistake number 4: white birds) and ended up with a very small Silkie flock, or so we thought…
If you've been keeping count...
So now (Spring 2023) we are up to 3 flocks of chickens (plus Guineas but that’s a different story). We have 3 hen houses, tons of chicken feed, and more eggs than one family can eat, but found ourselves going into spring again with no meat birds… So I bought an incubator (Thanks Aunt Mary!) and started hatching out our meat birds. This is super gratifying.
It takes a few days to collect the eggs that we want to hatch, then it takes 21 days to hatch them, then it takes several weeks for them to feather out enough to go outside, then it takes a few months for them to fatten up. So now we can produce our own meat birds quarterly without buying more chicks! But you can’t just put them with mature birds… so we had to find them housing (mistake number 5: all chickened up with no place to go). We ended up buying a portable chicken coop (known as a chicken tractor) for our meat birds.
As the first batches are growing out, we have discovered that the separation of flocks that we have tried to maintain has not been 100% successful and we have generated some very funny looking cross breeds! Mistake number 6 – we now have a barnyard mix!
And lastly, if you look closely at the picture at the very top of this post, it’s a Silkie hen with a little black Silkie chick. We thought we had finally found a methodical, controlled way to handle our chicken math BUT the birds have their own ideas. She hatched out her own chicks and we have several other broody hens right now – no idea how crazy the chicken math will be this year, but I know we will have eggs, meat and an abundance of cuteness!!