Teenagers started laying

Our "Teens" started laying

The eggs are a bit on the small side for one of them. We got 15 eggs today, including the Peewee egg. We are ramping up our bid for food independence by raising our own chickens for meat and eggs, and for that, we need hens. We are building our laying flock up to 30 adult hens and will maintain that level until we feel a need to change. We obviously can't eat 25-30 eggs a day so the surplus eggs are to being sold to offset the feed cost. We are already selling to a local organic restaurant in a town down the road a piece.

 

We keep our hens in a coop and run so while they are "Free-Range" according to the US Government, they are confined for many reasons. One of which is that we do not want our chickens to become our neighbors dog's dinner. Their Coop is 64 square feet, with a second internal story, and the run is 20x20, so plenty of room for our initial flock. The small 'Mini-Cooper' on the left is the brooder we intended to house the growing chicks, but proved to  be too small. The chickens just grow too fast. To keep to the recommended square footage per bird we will need to modify the pen to house the hens for 30 eggs a day. That means a new build and more will be coming on that. For now, we are living at the top of the numbers, but still within the guidelines. 

Annie the Araucana

If you noticed, two of these eggs are a bluish-green. Totally natural coloring from our teen-aged Araucana. We originally bought 4 supposedly 'white leghorn' chicks from a breeder down the street. 2 died and only the rooster turned out to be a leghorn. Leghorns are the breed most commercial egg producers use, though that is changing over to a new 'breed', the Red Ranger. Red Rangers are a Cross Breed like the Cornish Cross is for meat. They are not a fast grower like the Cornish Cross, but they are an early egg layer and prolific at laying eggs. 300-350 eggs a year is an awesome production rate but like most things, you give to get so their 'peak production season' isn't too long. 2-4 years and the bird is spent. We are thinking of trying a few of these birds, but I don't think we will be replacing them altogether.  

So the new teens are laying and we have the next wave in line ready to go. 22 chicks of mixed sexes and these are already 10 weeks old. We are doing successive breeding/hatching to both build and replace the birds numbers at a pace we think we can handle rather than just buying and then starting out with big numbers. Our incubator will handle 40 eggs at a time and between the sex division hatch rate (@50% Female to Male) and natural attrition, this builds both our laying hen numbers and meat production quota without too many of either at one time.  Pullets start laying at 20 weeks or so, and the roosters can be slaughtered any time after about 12 weeks so we decided that we will set a new batch of eggs for hatching every 20 weeks. Once the laying hens reach our goal of 30 birds, we will cut back on the number of eggs set out to hatch to the number of meat birds we need. Yes, even though it will be 40 every 12 weeks to keep the freezer full, we are thinking that we should do 20 every 6 weeks to keep both the feed rate down, and the freezer full. Until the hens total 30, we keep the hens hatched out, and the males go to the freezer, but once we reach 30 hens, both male and female chicks will become meat birds out the hatching.  

The Math: 

We are calculating 2 chickens per week (4 meals) so over the 20 weeks we'll need 40 in the freezer at a time. 

We want 30 hens laying that lay 25-30 eggs a day and that means that we'll have 

25 x 7=140 days  :

140 days x 25 /day = 3500 eggs  : 

3500 eggs/ 12 per dozen = 292 dozen

over the 20 weeks. 

Price for chicken at the local KTA is 20$ so
40 birds @ 20$ = 800$ in meat value or savings

Price for organic eggs at KTA is 8$ so 

292 dozen x 8$ =  2336$ in Egg value or savings 

That comes out to 3136$ of food value every 20 weeks, minus the cost of feed. extrapolated out for the year, that is 8,153$ in savings (not buying at the supermarket) for the year! 

We spend 25$ per bag of feed x 2.5 bags per week or 3250$ per 52 weeks for a savings of 8153$ - 3250$ = 4903$ in food savings over buying chicken and eggs at the supermarket. WIN!