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Chickens are often the first “livestock” people get when they are starting to become more self sufficient. There are a lot of benefits of raising chickens. They are easy to raise and are a low cost way to feed your family wonderfully fresh eggs. We wrote a book all about raising chicks.
It’s all about how we raise meat birds and called 8 Pounds in 8 Weeks: Raising Day Old Chicks for the Dinner Table. Use the information for raising laying hens from chicks too!
Top 10 Benefits of Having chickens
1. They lay eggs almost every single day. Healthy nutritious eggs – if I add flax seed to their feed ration, they become Omega 3 farm fresh eggs!
2. They don’t have a smelly house. I make sure to completely clean out the coop twice a year. At all other times I make sure there is a good layer of hay being thrown on top of the bedding. This way the chicken coop will not smell.
3. If I have a rooster and a broody hen, chances are that I could get baby chicks at no extra cost – Having our hens hatch out their own chicks is much cheaper than buying chicks.
4. Chickens taste pretty darn good – older laying hens can be stewed for a delicious meal. Young meat birds are fantastic roasters and can reach 6 pounds easily.
More Benefits of Having Chickens:
6. Chickens eat weeds – Instead of throwing our weeds on the compost, we throw them to the chickens. They love them and the greens are really healthy for them.
7. Chickens love to work – Put some temporary fencing around any area in your yard that needs to be worked over. Chickens will do that for you and they will let you know how happy they are by laying some nice eggs for you.
8. Chickens eat almost all kitchen scraps – We don’t actually have compost piles. With our kitchen scraps, we keep them all in a bucket in the kitchen and each morning, bring the contents down to the chickens.
Leftover veggies from dinner, scraps of meat, old bread – all these things get fed off to them. We have found they don’t like onions or citrus. They do love everything else and gobble it up quickly.
