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CHICKENS

About the Crop

Although raising chickens for eggs has a nice cachet, and there are magazines and blogs devoted to urban chicken care, you would have to have a fairly large flock and a good egg marketing plan to have a microfarm based solely around chickens. Chickens are better as part of an overall diversified microfarm, such as a small dairy operation where eggs joined the other dairy products produced, like cheeses, yogurt, or ice cream. Because chickens are such excellent egg producers—each hen lays about three hundred eggs per year—your egg supply can have many uses. They can be ingredients in baked products, can be bartered for other foods that you’re currently not growing, and with proper permitting, sold along with your other microfarm crops at stands or farmers’ markets.

Pros

Raising your own microfarm flock will give you free garden fertilizer, natural insect control in your yard (they love grasshoppers and crickets) and growing areas (although chickens do eat vegetables), fresh eggs that are free from added chemicals, and when the hens are through laying in a few years, you’ll have them for the cooking pot. Caring for chickens is easier than most other pets and without a rooster in the mix, they are relatively quiet and make good household pets.

Domestic free range chickens should be part of a varied microfarm.

Photo by Aleks.

Cons

Chickens require a hen house to sleep in and lay eggs in, so you’ll have to build one or buy one. They need fresh water every day, proper bedding, and good food. They must be babied and kept quite warm until they get all their feathers, protected from all predators including the family dog and cat, and are subject to quite a few diseases and occasionally lice. You can be pecked occasionally because some chickens are ill-tempered. My friend who raises chickens (I trade her culinary herbs for eggs) had a rooster that was so mean that she had him killed and taxidermied, and he now occupies a spot of honor in her living room. And finally, chickens are messy.

Bottom Line

A small flock of chickens around your microfarm is charming and often amusing, especially if they fit into your overall plan for a microfarm. A flock of six hens will produce about 1,800 eggs per year, and that’s 150 dozen. If you sold a dozen in a carton for $3.00, your gross income would only be $450, and you would have to pay for the feed and other expenses. However, if your microfarm had other uses for the eggs, they could be transformed into more value-added products. Your challenge, if you want chickens, is to formulate that plan to incorporate them conveniently into your microfarm and not plan an entire microfarm around them.