Chicken Farming

One of our first steps in surviving a possible end of modern civilization scenario was to start securing food sources. Not only is this good in that type of scenario, it is good to have in modern times for good quality food to serve your family. We started this endeavor with 4 chickens, 3 hens and 1 rooster. All of these chickens were old enough to produce eggs. The problem was the darn eggs never came. I began to think that we got sold bunk chickens. So we started looking for other chickens, and this time we wanted young ones. Then before we could even get the new ones the predator struck! So now we were down to 1 Hen and the Rooster. Finally we located a family that was selling chicks so we jumped on it!

 So we bought 6 Wyandotte chicks that were 2 months old (5 can be seen 1 is behind the feeder). These chicks will be ready to start laying eggs in about 1-2 months. With this number of laying hens we will have roughly 3-5 eggs a day. This breed is also very good at laying through the winter and colder months of the year. I feed them layers feed currently and water them daily! Now in the event that we would have to live "off the grid" I would have to explore additional feeding options for my laying hens. Most likely I would feed my chickens corn from my garden that I would grind up. Once these hens start laying good I plan to let one of them lay and sit until it produces eggs that can become chicks. This will allow me to continue to grow my flock. One would ask why so many chickens? You can only eat so many eggs! Well number 1 chickens will not lay eggs forever so I will need additional chickens to lay eventually and there is a possibility that nice family I got these chickens from might not survive as long as my family does. Then number 2!

These are my 5 baby chicks I bought at the same time I bought the others. These are also of the Wyandotte breed. These hens are being raised for butchering purposes. Chicken is a wonderful meal and is full of many needed nutrients. By raising chickens to both harvest eggs and to harvest meat my family will have enough food to survive as long as my chickens continue to produce more incubated eggs. For that reason I will always need a rooster. I have a strong young one now and count on him to do the job for awhile. I will always have to be prepared to get another one if needed. Currently I am feeding these chicks cracked corn. In the event a tragedy would happen I would continue to feed them this product; however, it will not be as easy as buying it in a bag.

My plan over the next year is to be less reliant on feed store products and producing my own food for my chickens. This process will be found in a later blog post where I will speak about my gardening plans.