10 Things To Know BEFORE You Buy Backyard Chickens | Poultry Care For Beginners | Homesteading Tips

hey guys welcome back to oak abode it is almost 2022 chick season and we get so many questions about chickens all the time but especially this time of year so i just figured i would start out a little series called 10 things i wish i'd known about chickens before i got them even though i'm just gonna talk about 10 things that everybody should know before they get chickens in this video there could probably be about 100 things so we're just starting with the first 10 but if you have others that come to mind and you think are really important please drop a comment below because i plan on doing some sequels to this video as always i did link all the notes from this video in a blog post below in case you prefer to read instead of watch first thing you should know about chickens before you get them is know that they are addicting so there is something called chicken math that chicken owners all kind of joke about where you start off thinking you'll need three or four and somehow you end up getting like seven or eight and then two or three years down the road you end up with like way more than that this isn't a horrible thing it should be taken as a pretty good sign because a lot of people who get chickens find that they really enjoy them and there's kind of this logic that goes on where it's like if five chickens gives me x amount of joy then ten chickens must give me two x amount of joy doesn't necessarily work that way but we all fall victim to it anyway long story short most of us end up getting more chickens than we planned to get and for that reason i always kind of recommend that people air on the side of fewer chickens in the beginning so if you're trying to decide between like three to six chickens it might be a good idea to start with three or four and then if you want to move on to six seven or eight in a few months or next year then you've got room in your flock if you want to get three or four in the beginning and you just start straight off with ten there are some issues that come with that i'll talk about those in the next points so kind of along those lines one thing that a lot of chicken people don't know when they get chickens but that they soon find out is that laying is not consistent throughout the year or the frequency at which chickens lay eggs it doesn't say the same throughout the year and it actually doesn't stay the same depending on the age of the chicken if you're an experienced chicken keeper i'm sure you already know this but ironically we didn't really know this when we first got chickens so that's kind of one of those reasons why i recommend that people get kind of the lower end of the number of chickens that they want because since laying generally slows down as chickens get older it makes a lot more sense to say if you want 12 chickens it makes a lot more sense to start with three or four and get three or four for a few years because that way the number of eggs that you'll be getting each week stays a little bit more consistent than if you just got 12 at the beginning had a ton of eggs for the first couple years and then ended up with a lot fewer eggs for the rest of the time that you have them kind of along those lines the frequency that they lay eggs tends to fluctuate depending on the time of year so chickens lay more or fewer eggs depending on if there's more or less daylight for this reason sometimes people will put artificial light in their coop during the winter especially if you live someplace with really long winters like we do in wisconsin however that's not a practice that we use because various reasons we like their systems to regulate we like them to have a break but also there are some theories that if you do use the artificial light to speed up their laying during the winter that that actually means they'll lay fewer eggs over the course of their life the theory being that a chicken is born with however many eggs it's going to have for its lifetime similar to humans and that when you force them to lay more eggs in a year it just means that they'll lay fewer over the course of their life so if you're somebody who buys chickens and butchers them after like two to three years when they start to slow down that might make sense for you for us it doesn't make sense because we like our chickens to live as long and happy lives as possible so we prefer to kind of spread out their laying over that time instead of trying to make them lay faster number three chickens are actually very social and pretty darn clicky too we tend to get around five chicks a year and it's really interesting because they tend to stick with their buddies that they grew up with even as adults i guess that's not a super important point when it comes to how you care for chickens but it is kind of good to know because for example last year we experienced quite a few predator losses and out of the five chickens that we got the five egg laying chickens we only actually ended up with two that survived one rooster and one hen fortunately we integrated them with our other chickens just fine i did make a video about how we integrate our chicks with other chickens so i'll link that for you guys if you have questions on that but if you're a first time chicken owner and you experience heavy losses with the first round of chicks that you get you might want to think about getting some adult chickens to be with them because from what i've been told really a chicken shouldn't live alone kind of on the note of being social too you might be surprised how much they bond with you if you spend time with them it depends on the breed but also depends on how you raise them that first round of easter eggers that we got they are like dogs they are so tame and so friendly and it means we trip a little bit more when we take care of them because they are always under foot thing number four to know about getting chickens is that everything loves to eat them coyotes raccoons possums dogs sometimes cats minks wild cats bears hawks birds of prey of all kind you name it everything love sea chicken because of this it's really important that you look into practices for predator proofing depending on your area i've talked a bit about this in my other videos but every property is different as far as predator threat and as far as what kind of what kind of predator proofing you will need so i really recommend looking into different predator proofing practices whether it's electric fences or digging in hardware cloth or covered runs and then kind of having those at your disposal in case you need to use them of course if you put everything in place sooner rather than later you might not have to learn the hard way but that being said our last property we didn't need basically any any predator proofing at all and we were totally fine number five chickens are not naturally used to confinement so even though kind of the factory farming practices these days tend to be to confine chickens when a chicken is just allowed to be a chicken they don't want to sit in a box all day they love to get around they love to peck and they love to scratch they love to be free on some level they also i'm pretty sure want protection on some level but if chickens are too confined you're gonna run into problems you're gonna run into feather picking and bullying more diseases things like mites and sicknesses possible nutrient deficiencies too that's rambo a rooster so generally speaking the more space especially protected space that you can give them the better off you're gonna be and the happier your chickens are gonna be now of course there's that chicken math problem where usually we plan for a certain number and end up with way more but there are ways to mitigate that problem so for example you don't necessarily need a stationary run that is x amount of square feet where it's just huge you can use different chicken keeping techniques like chicken tractors and pasture rotation it doesn't have to be a whole pasture it can be within a backyard but there are ways to make sure that the place where your chickens are exploring every day stay interesting it prevents waste buildup and it prevents your chickens from starting to turn on each other from boredom feather picking is a pretty darn good indicator that there are way too many chickens in a too small of a space and actually there was this one like csa that i was gonna buy meat from at one point we were walking the farm and their chicken pen man all of their chickens had bare backs because they're all kept in this tiny pen even though they were technically classified as free range so i ended up not buying from that csa but it really goes to show how important it is that they have plenty of space they'll be happier and your care for them will be easier too number six you might get a rooster so sexing or determining the gender of chicks is not always foolproof and the reason i mention this is because many people like how we started out live in suburban areas where chickens may or may not be legal but roosters most of the time are not legal in suburban areas for most hatcheries or places where you buy chicks they'll say there's roughly a 10 chance that a pulit or a young female chicken is actually a cockerel which is a young male chicken so they do their best the sexting techniques are usually about 90 accurate it's a technique called vent sexing but there are some breeds that are basically 100 accurate as far as telling the males from the females from day one those are called sex link chicks i believe we have never purchased any ourselves we've actually gotten really lucky where every chicken we've ever bought has actually been the sex that we were told it was gonna be however if you cannot have a rooster in your area and you cannot handle the thought of trying to butcher a rooster if you can't keep it i know a lot of people think well i'll just find it a good home on a farm someplace you might know someone you might have a connection but believe me it is a lot harder to find a good home for a rooster than you think it is a lot of people have that same thought and there are very few farms that want to shell out feed for dozens of roosters so even though there's a small chance you might find a really good home for one most people struggle with it and a lot of people who are just first starting out don't necessarily want to get right into the butchering scene either so if that's the case you might want to look more at sex link breeds where you won't have to deal with a rooster pretty much for sure if you can't have one kind of on a more lighthearted note number seven they're easy and this is relative the term is definitely relative but if you're anything like me and you grew up with small caged animals i mean we had dogs and cats too but we grew up with guinea pigs and parakeets and hamsters and gerbils and all sorts of different stuff keeping those small caged animals was a lot of work it was a lot of cleaning up messes honestly i don't have any desire to have more of them at my adult age now because now that i have outdoor chickens wow they're so much easier than small caged animals that you keep indoors now there's obviously more infrastructure that has to be in place in order to care for them outdoors that being said it is so nice that they can have a self-composting system we only clean it out about twice a year they pick up their own food mess they're just they're a lot easier to deal with outside so i did a whole video on the basics of chicken care i'll link that video for you guys but the basics are that they need food water shelter and protection from predators that pretty much sums it up thing number eight you should know if you are getting into backyard chickens is that the eggs are not free in fact they're usually more expensive than the eggs you buy at the grocery store but they're much better quality and if you compare the price of the eggs that you'll raise yourself with the price that you would pay for similar quality from a farm that treats their animals really well in that case generally people do end up saving money but between the cost of the chickens the bedding occasional medical care i did a cost breakdown video a while ago the eggs are not free but they are more dependable especially when things like the supply chain are in question these days and if you're comparing them to like regular factory farm eggs that are on the cheap they taste way better and they're a lot healthier too they've got a lot more in the way of vitamins really free range eggs or pasture eggs are a super food it's crazy when you look into how many micronutrients and even macronutrients they have that factory farm eggs do not have the same levels of it's really cool anyways that being said they're not free but they are worth it and they're healthier if you get them from an environment like this don't we just love the wisconsin weather i wish i could control the sun for you guys i really wish i could but it is what it is i have two more points for you in today's video i guess that's a good segue to number nine which is weather considerations you get a lot of dms from people asking kind of specifics on chicken care and requirements it's kind of hard to answer most of them because i don't know your environment so i really recommend that people join kind of local chicken forums or chicken groups where you can get advice from other people in your area who are experienced with chicken keeping because when it comes to weather and weather considerations there's a lot to consider it's not an overwhelming amount but what you'll need to do if you're taking care of chickens in an arizona summer is completely different than what you'll need to do if you're taking care of chickens in a wisconsin winter for example where we are during the winter we're dealing with air moisture we're working really hard to keep the air dry to keep the chickens healthier we're working to keep them warm but from what i've heard chickens being cold is less of a concern than chickens being too hot so during the summer we have to keep an eye on the chickens make sure they're not overheating and obviously if we lived somewhere where it was hotter that would be an even bigger concern there are also a lot of weather considerations when it comes to raising baby chicks especially when it comes to when to buy them when to put them outside so again i would love to sit down and talk with all of you one on one and kind of brainstorm the best ideas however i really recommend joining a local chicken group chatting with the people in the local chicken groups whether it's online or in person that way you can get the best advice from people who have dealt with the exact weather issues that you'll be dealing with too okay finally the last point i want to talk about today number 10 know this if you're getting into chicken keeping for the first time old wives tales are plentiful there is so much false information passed around in kind of the chicken world and just in the homesteading world in general there is a lot of good information too but make sure you're not just talking to one person taking what they say and running with it i really recommend talking to as many different people as possible asking them why you know if you just take every answer you hear at face value some of it's probably gonna be correct and some of it's probably gonna be incorrect so whenever i'm told something i like to cross check it but also i like to ask why if it's a logical piece of advice there's usually science that'll back it up too if there's no science to it and people just kind of pass it around because they've read other people say it on the internet too it's it's usually a little easier to spot i could definitely take a lot of people off right now by saying some of the things that are just kind of parroted around the internet that people see other people say and then they kind of say the same thing that i've tried out myself and found that it's definitely not the case at least for our flock but then you would only be taking one person's advice and i really want to encourage you to ask around get as much advice as possible from many different sources same goes for everything that i'm saying don't take everything i say just at face value if you're going to get chickens you're going to want to know how to care for them inside and out so watch as many videos as possible read as much up on it as possible but also don't get totally paralyzed by analysis paralysis and just never get into it because you want it to be perfect but i just kind of had to say about the old wives sales thing because i think fortunately slowly kind of the homesteading community is realizing that a lot of things that have been said for years and years and years actually have no truth to them but like for me when i was first starting out i figured anything anybody said who had a chicken must be correct because i just must not know anything so i kind of learned along the way that people say a lot of stuff that's just totally untrue because they've never questioned it so don't be afraid to question things and look more into it so those are my can you tell i'm cold why do i live here so those are my first 10 points things that i recommend you know if you're getting into backyard chickens there are so many things to know when getting into backyard chickens so experienced chicken owners i would love it if you would leave a comment below with kind of the things that you wish you'd known but maybe took you a little bit to learn and hey if you disagree with what i'm saying leave a comment below so that you can share your side of the story too i actually just posted a podcast all about the different chicken breeds that we're considering this year and why so if you guys want to listen to the podcast i will link that for you below and if you want to join us again in the future don't forget to hit subscribe i'm so thankful the weather is finally warming up a little bit and i'm so jealous of all you who have been having the warm weather for a few weeks now i guess that's all for today thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Oak Abode

Views: 983,808

Keywords: backyard chicken care, egg laying chickens, hens for eggs, easter eggers, poultry breeds, livestock for beginners, homesteading in the suburbs, urban garden layout, caring for pet birds, colorful eggshell, feed and grain, feathered animals, grow your own food, self sustainability, prepared property, living off the land, training dogs around small critters, bumble foot care, sour crop remedy, raising baby chicks, best chick breeds, traditional farm setup, food supply chain

Id: aQMLQo-u7Sc

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022