What it’s like to live with 85 chickens

[Music] so today we're gonna talk about what it's like to raise chickens pacifically the number that we have eighty-five chicken so the first thing we've got to do is let him my funders had its way [Music] kindness portrayed as my little to the race we are Jake and Becky and we currently have 85 chicken every morning when we first get up we come out we open up the coop turn off the electric fence we fill up the feed bowls for the chickens check on the water and we let them out almost forgot to introduce you here this is our rooster our lavendar Orpington rooster we just named him Tin Man right now we have chickens divided into three areas we've got our main flock over here that we have a coop and a large attached run to it we have sixteen chickens in here right now they are some older laying hens and we just have them separated out so we can sell them we've got 19 little chicks over here pullets and cockles veteran just in training they're not laying yet they're not big enough to be going with the main flock so we put them in this separate pin to kind of give them a little more time to grow a little bit bigger until we put them in with the main flock so why do we have 85 chickens it's a good number we've settled on we're still trying to get the number down a little bit we started out with six chickens then we increase it to twelve and our first year we weren't getting any eggs because you have to wait about five six months until they start laying and so we kept adding chickens in from different farms to get some egg layers at the end of year one we had about 30 chickens going into year two we were really psyched about chickens we loved everything about them loved the different breeds the different egg colors and we increased that up to almost a hundred middle to end of last year and with our meat birds we did raise Birds for meat we got that number up to about 125 at the maximum and then this year we started the year with about a hundred and we've been able to decrease that down to about eighty five and we're still looking to take that number down a little lower some are our favorite breeds are americanus because the blue eggs that they lay and there are just a gentle breed they're good breed we also like the olive acres they are a mixed breed between a Americana and summer and we also like the Maria eggs the dark brown eggs you can see how vibrant all these colors are against each other throughout the day we will usually come out we'll check on the chickens will gather the eggs just to make sure the nest boxes are clear make sure everybody has water plenty of food and just check on their well-being during the day a few times a day we come outside and we'll refill their waters to make sure the Ducks the chickens turkeys they all have enough water to one stay cool and stay high so do we free-range our animals yes we do they are in a protected area in the electric fence but they are able to go anywhere within there they're not restricted to just a dirt patch that we feed them just grain they can get bugs and get grass they can get all different kinds of weeds and so they are they're free-range they can go anywhere they want so the fencing we use is a premier one electric fencing made for poultry just kidding that will keep the birds in and keep predators out of course you can solve aerial predators but with our rooster they do a really good job of staying safe from any aerial predators during the day with some of our smaller Birds or some of our meat birds we'll run them in chicken tractors we have a video on how we made our Johnson's Kovich stress-free chicken tractor and those tractors are great for keeping birds and an enclosed area especially when they're small in an enclosed area and also keeps them on a concentrated area of grass that we can move them to a new patch every day and they don't just eat over a whole area and kill all the grass they just get all the grass in one area and then we move them to a new patch each day and this run is a great example of what happens to when chickens are on a specific area because this used to be all grass if it's all part of this same field we've got these posts and fencing up and if we move the chickens out from time to time some grass will come back but because especially this part is shaded grass is not going to come back in here and that's one of the reasons we love rotating our chickens with the mobile electric fencing this door right here used to be the main entrance and exit for the chickens and we moved it to that side of the coop because the grass was all dead here this was all totally dry total dirt and now it is all virtually come back to the way it was so being able to move the chickens with a different door with this electric fencing allows us to move the chickens onto different graphs on a new areas and so they don't ever beat up one area too bad so let's talk pros and cons what are the pros of having chickens I love the fresh eggs I love having fresh eggs every morning we have plenty so we never really run out and the fresh chicken we put your own chicken so that is amazing when you can actually taste the difference in your fresh chicken versus something you can get at the store also we just love taking care of animals we love seeing them run around just free-range and kind of do their own little thing in the yard so I think that's kind of fun though just a chicken TV so we call it that's right what about the cons what do you dislike about having chickens getting up every morning to let the chickens out you got to get up and and get them out every single morning yep there's no vacation days with chickens they've got to get out and and eat and drink every day just like we do you got to put them up and at night or something you'll get on so you got to make sure that you're very diligent on taking care of them another con would be them tearing up the yard they like to dust baths and so they put little holes in the yard and they they get all this dirt and they kind of make a mess of stuff can't let him out in the yard if you want a nice manicured yard they also like to scratch and so if you dig it in your garden your flowers they're gonna just tear them all up how'd you get back over here like chicken this and white chicken is your favorite chicken why do you like this chicken glow-in-the-dark chicken this is our blue Old English Bantam it's gonna be a very small bird we looking like a rooster right now he'll be our smallest chicken on the farm you rack hot on himself a black Sookie you like these so keys don't you what breed is this Eli this is a you guys favorite breed the barred rock why do you like the barred rocks black and white stripes that's right this is a silver lace wyandotte this is one of our new unique looking birds the lacan builder so let's talk about costs the cost of raising chickens that's often a deal-breaker for a lot of people is that they're not free that it takes time and money to produce the eggs and meat and the entertainment that chickens provide so of course every day we've got to feed our chicken we get the majority of our feed in Kansas City at a place called Valley feet and they have some really good stuff there but it's about an hour away from us so when we go we'll grab ten or twelve 50-pound bags of food but the problem with that is that you've got to be able to store it because otherwise you have mice that will get into your feet so each time we do a food run it will cost somewhere between 150 and 200 bucks and that'll be for about three or four weeks of food for all of our birds and I calculated out the amount it cost us to feed our chickens every morning a bucket of feed that we bring out to them costs about two dollars and 20 cents to bring out to them we also supplement their feed by fitting them food scraps from the kitchen and they get grass and bugs from the yard so if we calculate out the hosta feed to produce an egg every day here in the summer where we're getting the most amount of eggs and having to give them the least amount of feed because there's more grass and bugs for them to eat from so it costs about 10 cents to produce an egg in the middle of summer but that doesn't calculate in the cost of labour a spending time coming out to feed and water them to take care of them infrastructure building the chicken tractors the cost of electric fencing but in the winter the egg production goes way down there were some days this last winter when we got five eggs when we got two eggs some days even no eggs at all because of how cold it was and the chickens were having to stay inside all day and with feed we were giving them twice as much feed because there was no grass on the ground outside so then our cost was totally flipped and we were making little to no money off the birds or they were even costing us money so we've got to make as much money as possible off them in the summer to offset the costs in the winter we put the chickens up each night making sure they're all locked up into a coop or their mobile tractor and when everybody goes into the night we can get them all locked up as we're closing up the coops just go around collect the eggs and this coop we do have fifty birds you can tell on the majority of on will roost on these three bars probably about 3035 of them there then we just have a few of them that pick a few other spots around the coop so this coop is perfect size for the 50 birds that are in here it could probably do pretty well up to about a hundred and then it would start getting pretty cramped in here collecting eggs so we talked about at the beginning but why 85 chickens why not 30 chickens why not 10 chickens we could probably produce enough eggs with a dozen chickens potentially to feed our family or why not 200 chickens why do we have 85 chickens we like to have a variety of breeds and so we've got we were just going to the store or going to a hatchery and getting different chicks making sure that we got a variety of different breeds for different colors of eggs and it kind of got to where we just had that many and we'd like to have enough eggs for ourselves but also to serve the community and to offset some of the cost of the feed so is it worth it is it worth all of the work cleaning up after them feeding them collecting the eggs processing the birds doing all the dirty work buying all the feed and equipment and building shelters and tractors is that worth all the effort to raise chickens yes it's been a dream of ours it's been a dream of mine to have lots of animals on our farm and chickens have been a great start to that it's taught us what we need to do how to take care of animals before we get a bunch of different kind of animals chickens have been a good start to that I know we'll always have some chickens even if we downsize just a little bit more but they are part of our family we all enjoy them so we'll always have our chickens [Music] [Music]

Channel: White House on the Hill

Views: 2,162,728

Rating: 4.7116041 out of 5

Keywords: 85 chickens, what it's like to live with 85 chickens, what it's like to raise 85 chickens, pros and cons of chickens, living with chickens, pros and cons of raising chickens, White House on the Hill, Chickens, Family vlog, Backyard chickens, Chickens Missouri, raising chickens, cost of raising chickens, cost of chickens, are chickens expensive, are chickens cheap, raising chickens affordably, raising chickens cheaply, how much does an egg cost, how much to produce an egg

Id: l3ULdXGVtW0

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 07 2018