Beginners Guide To Egg Laying Chickens - Egg Chickens 101

hey friends and neighbors just chuck out at sheraton park farms welcome back to the farm so something we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about well a little bit but not much um is egg chickens so we'll talk a little bit about chickens today we'll talk a little bit about eggs we're gonna cover some basics just some basic questions related to raising egg chickens and what you need we're going to talk about a little bit how um how eggs play into our farm business and just look at some chickens so hang around so before we get into talking specifics about chickens i want to encourage y'all if you're interested in chickens or you're interested in any kind of farming enterprise and i encourage you to go for it the only way that you're going to figure it out is to just do it um i appreciate everybody watching the videos and i when we got started that's what i done we watched every chicken video of course at the time we were just interested in chickens we watched every chicken video we could find but until you get a couple of birds and just go for it man you're not gonna you're not gonna get the experience that you need chickens are not difficult people been raising chickens for thousands of years there's no reason why in the day society with all the information we've got access to anybody can do it so if you're interested in chickens get you some all right so just some basics on on egg chickens so all of these minus a couple there's there's a rooster in here there's a couple of of young males the majority of these birds are pullets and a pullet is a female chicken that's less than a year old so if you're going to your local track supply rural king feed and seed store or wherever you're buying your chickens from if you're buying them from you know a hatchery through the mail um you want egg laying chickens make sure you get pullets again pulitzer female chickens those are the ones that's going to give you the eggs roosters we'll talk about roosters here in just a few minutes and do you need a rooster and if so how many we'll talk about roosters in a little bit but you want to get pullets so all of these girls out here uh are right now about 12 weeks old it typically takes about 16 to 20 weeks for a pullet to start laying eggs so these girls have got on average about about another month to go before we can start seeing some eggs from them and then it's going to be slow they're going to slowly ramp up and uh they'll start laying over time um these birds are again they're out in our garden we've got them here for a very specific purpose they're digging the ground up scratching it up putting down some manure we're getting this area ready for our garden later on but chickens are gonna tear up the ground if they're in an enclosed area and you can see here the majority of the space or where these chickens are spending the majority of their time right in front of the right in front of their tractors they're coming in and out that's where they're spending a lot of time you can see they're they tear up the ground pretty good so if you're gonna keep chickens in a run which is um a fixed coupe with an area that they can can go in and out of you're gonna need to make sure that you've got some kind of bedding or some kind of material um to put down inside these tractors we're using uh wood chips uh we refill the wood chips every couple of days looks like they're about ready for some more and we've also been scattering some cracked corn in here that will give them uh the encouragement to dig and scratch and kind of stir all that stuff up and gives us a little more life out of those out of those wood chips so that's a little trick that you can that you can apply put down some crack corn or some um some seeds or something that that will encourage the chickens to scratch and fluff that to fluff that bedding material up and in addition to that we also keep these feeders out here and they make a terrible mess but we do supply them with a little supplemental feed this is just a a layer pellet that we uh that we get from bartlett millen i think it's a 20 layer pellet we keep those just in some free choice feeders out here and they kind of come and go and get as much as they want finally on water for these girls we use a bell water and these things work really nice they hook up to a bucket in the back got a plastic hose that comes down these work kind of like a reverse toilet valve whenever the chickens drink the water the um the bell will float upward and opens the valve and allows water to run down into the trough and then as they drink it lightens up and just kind of keeps itself full so these work great for these birds to to have plenty of fresh water so once you get your chickens up to egg laying age and again that's after typically about 18 16 18 20 weeks somewhere in that neighborhood depending on the breed these are what our adult egg chickens look like and there are two ways to manage your egg chickens one is in a portable type system where their coop or their housing unit moves around from place to place and the chickens go with it which is the system that we elect to use here or you can use a static system where the chickens have a coop that's in a single place it stays in a single place and then they've got a run that they can kind of come in and go out of we like to do this because we want to spread their manure around different parts of the farm so these are our adult chickens so a common question around raising chickens is do you need roosters to have eggs do you need some of these guys here if you want to have chicken eggs and the answer is no you don't need a rooster in order to have chicken eggs hens are going to naturally lay an egg about every 25 hours so you're going to get about an egg per day during the season whenever chickens are laying very very regularly spring summer and fall you'll notice a drop-off in egg production in the winter time whenever we have fewer hours of daylight which is why we've got a uh an artificial light in our coop to help stimulate some some egg production but if you are going to keep roosters and roosters are very important roosters are actually handy to have around they provide protection for the flock and also roosters will help to find a food source and will alert the rest of the chickens that they found a food source whenever they are out foraging around if you are going to keep roosters you need to keep your rooster numbers uh at a manageable level typically one rooster for every eight to ten hens is plenty if you have more roosters than that you're going to have a lot of competition between these guys and they're also going to be kind of hard on your hands you'll start to notice that they're saddle feathers the feathers across the their back they start wearing down they're going to have a lot of comb issues where the roosters are grabbing hold of their comb during mating so if you're going to keep roosters with your hands which we recommend um one rooster per eight to ten hens if you are going to keep roosters around you will have fertilized eggs so that's another added benefit if you want to buy an incubator hatch some of your own chicks that's a great way to hatch some of your own chicks by keeping a rooster around and then putting those things in an incubator and seeing what you get and sometimes we've got some pretty cool combinations this guy right here we hatched him out last year he was a cross between an americana and something don't know what else he was but he's a it turned out to be a really pretty bird so you can get some real interesting combinations on your chickens if you're keeping roosters and hens of different breeds another common question is how many nesting boxes do you need for your chickens general rule of thumb is you're going to need one nesting box for about every four to five chickens i think we've got about 22 nesting boxes in here and even whenever we've had 120 or 150 chickens they typically will only use about half of them chickens tend to go in and lay an egg where there are other eggs already at so chickens will tend to share nest boxes so you don't need a nest box for every chicken you got but you do need a nest box for about every four or five birds and these are commercial prefab nest boxes they're old nest boxes that were on the farm whenever we first came and i think we actually bought another one of these um but these are just old galvanized nesting boxes the floors on them uh lift up they've just got a little piece of plywood down in the bottom so the floors lift up and out of them so you can replace those as need be but these things work really really nice for your chickens nest boxes don't have to be anything fancy i've seen folks use buckets for nest boxes milk crates just cardboard boxes i've seen a lot of different things used for nest boxes the chicken just needs some place that she can get up in feel like she's got a little bit of privacy a soft area where she can lay her eggs and you're awful loud and that tends to work out just right so a couple things your chickens are going to need in addition to a safe secure house is they're going to need access to fresh clean water and the way we water our chickens is we just use a simple rubber bowl with a garden hose and a float valve hook this up to our main water source up at the well water comes down and as the chickens drink out of that thing the float valve opens up and allows the water to refill so it's basically an automatic chicken watering system we've got it sitting out here in the field where the chickens are at so they've always got access to it they can come over and get water anytime they want [Music] another thing you're going to need to make sure that you got some feed for your chickens and one thing we've noticed again these birds free range they're out here on the pasture they come and go as they please wherever they want that does create a little bit of problem with predators but these chickens are all going to be going away later on this year anyway because they're some of them are three years old egg production's starting to go down so it's time for these guys to go away but we're going to need to have some feed for them we've noticed on a free range system that they don't eat quite as much as they do if we keep them inside of netting so the feed system that we use we've got two bulk feeders just inside the door of the chicken coop each one of these will hold about 50 pounds of feed we fill these things up now about twice a week maybe so they're going through about 100 pounds of feed twice a week works out fine they just come in this is a gravity feeder they just get what they want out of the bottom and then the feed just continues to fall down and they just eat right there got these from duncan's poultry um just got them you know fastened the wall they work really good [Music] [Music] [Music] so let's talk a little bit about eggs and how they integrate into your overall farming enterprise if you're selling your products to customers we've ran it a number of different ways with different feeding regimens different numbers of chickens we plugged all the variables in a lot of different ways and we found it really difficult to be able to make a lot of profit on just selling eggs but eggs can be profitable for your farm in other ways first off keeping those chickens they're fantastic animals they're great kitchen recyclers they're great for bug control like ticks fleas that kind of stuff i mean they they love those those little creepy crawlies and do a great job eating them their manure is fantastic spreading those chickens around getting them to poop on your on your different parts of your fields can really help boost your grass and your grass growth and then finally the eggs that they do lay are a great gateway product for your customers buying a dozen eggs from a customer that's never seen you never met you don't know anything about you is a great way to start a conversation with a potential customer eggs are a fairly innocuous product they're easy to buy everybody knows what to do with them and they're relatively inexpensive we sell our eggs for five bucks a dozen that's just that's what we sell them for and we can't keep them we've built a good egg business but again where the eggs are valuable to you is if a customer can come in buy a dozen eggs and try those then that gets them to spending a little bit of money with you now they go home they try those eggs they see the high quality that you're producing in terms of a much richer yolk an egg that's got a lot of flavor it's not flat like a old store bought eggs going to be it's a great product to introduce them to what you're doing so they come back the next week they want another dozen eggs and this time maybe they want a pack of bacon to go with it so now they've tried your eggs and they've tried a pork product well they like the pork so maybe next week they come back they buy the bacon they buy maybe some sausage this time and they want to try a pack of of chicken breast so eggs are a great way to get customers introduced to your farm buying some of your product seeing the quality that you've got and just starting to build that relationship which is what this kind of farming is all about is that one-on-one relationship with your customers so if you're looking for a cool little enterprise to start this year or you just want to raise your own food and have a good source of eggs can't beat this crowd right here they're fantastic kitchen recyclers bug control fertilized spreaders they give you some great eggs in exchange and if you're if you're growing your farm these guys are fantastic to help get some business through the door and get customers used to purchasing from you so i'll post a link to a couple other videos over here some other stuff we got going on if you've not subscribed hit that subscribe button we got a lot of stuff going on spring's coming fast appreciate y'all watching we'll see you on the next video

Channel: Sheraton Park Farms

Views: 19,970

Rating: 4.9302692 out of 5

Keywords: eggs, hens, coop, feed, chicken, chickens, tip, tips, laying hens, chicken laying eggs, hen laying egg, chicken feed, chicken coop, hen house, raising chickens, feeding chickens, chicken eating egg, chicken flock, chickens pecking, chicken run, tips for chickens, tips for chicken coop, tips for hen house, rough cut homestead, backyard chickens, how to raise chickens

Id: i3dFZ601WKo

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021