It’s hard to image a proper homestead that doesn’t have chickens. They’re great for providing of course eggs and a supply of healthy homegrown meat.
Having chickens have the added benefits of fertilizing the farm’s soil and eating pests like harmful beetles, caterpillars and ticks. Your chickens can also help dispose of kitchen scraps as they’ll eat just about anything from corn scratch to mice.
Once you’ve made your decision of whether to start keeping chickens, you still have several decisions to make. The first and most obvious is why? Do you want chickens for eggs, meat or both? Are you going to allow your chickens to free range or keep them in the coop or contained run?
When we began thinking of starting our homestead, we just knew we had to have chickens. The only question remaining was what kind?
There are literally hundreds of different breeds of chickens. Here is a run-down of over 500 different breeds and their primary purpose on a farm. I am certainly not claiming to be an expert, as we’re just starting our own farming adventure.
Our farm is a little bit different as we are starting a flock of chickens that is exclusively for eggs. We’re going to sell these at our roadside stand.
But we’re also going to have our own “homestead” flock of chickens. The egg chickens are going to be organic and pasture raised to provide the very best eggs for us and our customers.
The homestead chickens are going to be dual purpose. That means the homestead flock will provide us with eggs as well as being a source of meat. This is probably a good place to provide some definitions.
Egg Chickens – Breed of chicken that is raised for high egg production. Newly hatched chickens generally will start laying eggs in around 16-20 weeks. There are variables such as feed and weather that will impact that.
Meat Chickens – Breed of chicken that is raised for high meat production. These chickens will mature faster and are generally harvested in as little as 6-8 weeks after hatching.
Dual Purpose – As the name suggests, these chickens fill both roles in providing high quality eggs and can also be harvested for meat.
Given that each of our two flocks had different purposes, it made sense that we would consider different breeds.
For the egg flock, we want chickens that would provide high-quality and a high volume of eggs.
For the homestead flock, we want a dual purpose chicken. We decided we could sacrifice a little in the volume of eggs, meaning the number of eggs that a chicken would lay in any given year, to have this flock also be good meat chickens the family could harvest for the stew pot.
After considerable research, as beginning farmers, I narrowed my search down to two types: the Buff Orpington and the Lavender Orpington. Both are hardy and friendly breeds. They also do well as free range scavengers around the farm and are dual purpose birds.
I really like the Lavender Orpington for these qualities and because I think they are more attractive than their Buff relatives. Both breeds are dual purpose, and are good layers. However, the Lavender eggs are smaller than the Buff’s eggs. The Buff Orpington will produce over 200 large eggs annually. After this analysis, the Buff Orpington is our choice for the homestead chicken.
Now to consider which egg producing chicken will populate the farm’s flock. Again, with so many different breeds to choose from, this was not a simple decision. One of the aspects of the farm is that we want to stand out a bit from every other farm out there. And, just because its fun, we want our eggs to be a rainbow of colors while not sacrificing overall egg production or having healthy birds.
When I was a kid, eggs were white. There must have been other colors of eggs, but I never saw one. I don’t think I even saw a brown egg until I was in the Army after high school. I was surprised in the array of colors that chicken eggs actually come in!
Providing a rainbow of colors when our customers opened their carton of eggs was not going to be as difficult as I first imagined. To make things even better, the chickens laying these eggs met all of our other criteria for the farm’s health, pasture raised organic chickens.
The chickens we chose will provide a substantial quantity of eggs over their lifespan, are good foragers and produce large eggs. Our flock will have the chickens below:
Rounding out the rainbow will be the traditional large chalky white egg. For these, we chose the Anconas.
We never considered not having chickens when we made the move to start our own homestead organic farm. The benefits far outweigh the work and expense and fit right into our organic, permaculture farm setting that we are starting.
I hope this brief article helped a little in your decision of whether keeping chickens are is right for you and helped to decide which kind of chicken you’ll include in your own homestead.
Thanks for stopping by and be sure to share this with your friends!
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