We have been raising free range chickens for a few years now, and here are some casual observations that you might find either interesting or useful (if you plan on keeping chickens for yourself). Feel Free to add your own thoughts or observations in the comments! 🙂
1. Chickens Love to Eat Weeds
This might sound mundane, but it is a major life-hack, especially for a homesteader. If you have any kind of yard, weeds are simply a fact of life. No matter how hard we work to eliminate them, they will always find a way.
Enter chickens. They will eat pretty much any kind of weed. If there is something that they aren't sure about (maybe it will make them sick, etc.) they generally know not to eat it.
Thanks to chickens we can look at weeds, unwanted grass, etc. no longer as a resource and time sucking nuisance, but rather a free, clean, egg creation fuel.
2. Chickens Have a Pecking Order
You may have heard of this, but it really is a thing.
As soon as you introduce a new chicken to the flock, that chicken will be tested by other chickens who feel the need to assert their dominance. Usually a new chicken will be shy at first, but if she (I assume we're talking about layers) gets it in her head that she should be the new girl boss in the yard, then she can give it a try. If the other challengers relent, then she will be the new boss. She may need to assert herself again here and there to remind the other ladies of the new, proper pecking order.
3. More Black Chickens Make for Less Hawk Food
Just think: you've worked for 6 months to raise a chick into an adult egg-layer, you finally get a few eggs, and then a hawk swoops in one afternoon and turns your hard work, time and money into a pile of feathers that blows off in the wind. Here in central Texas this is common occurrence.
BUT .. Hawks are scared of crows. So if a hawk is flying overhead and looks down to see a flock of what looks like black crows milling about, she will be much more likely to leave those birds alone. This isn't a fool-proof plan, but it's a simple, low maintenance, low cost strategy that will help quite a bit to minimize your chicken losses.
My preferred black feathered breed is the Black Australorp. They are solid egg layers as well.
4. Chickens Love to Scratch
Again, this might be obvious, but it affects how your chickens work within your homestead ecosystem.
Give them dirt mixed with organic matter and bugs, and they will keep themselves busy all day scratching away, eating pretty much anything. This can be good for composting, as they will convert rotting old food and organic matter to chicken manure. They will also do the work of spreading piles of mulch, so you just have to dump it in the middle of their pen.
This can also be troublesome, as they will tear up the ground and eat pretty much anything that tries to sprout up out of the ground. This means, if you have a seedling of any kind, it needs to be protected by a simple fence enclosure.
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There are hundreds of other potential things to write about but these are some few conversation starters.
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