Whether you have a large or small chicken yard, just a couple chickens or hundreds, you can still have chickens help you with your compost.
The best way is to just throw all your compostable materials right into the chicken yard. It will better utilize their manure by incorporating it with the other materials, instead of causing mud, rain runoff and compacted dirt & manure… Continue Reading
Further Reading on Composting Manure
If you are considering keeping backyard chickens to provide fresh eggs for your family, it’s important to know how many hens you’ll need. If you don’t have a source for excess eggs you’ll want to make sure you don’t have too many hens. Maintaining a flock also means an extra chore, the more birds you have the more work there is, so it’s best to start sensibly.
The rule of thumb is two standard-size hens per family member. This will keep your refrigerator stocked with an ample supply of eggs every week.
Note: Although starting with a small flock, make sure you buy or build a coop that will allow you to add more birds later. More space is always better than not enough. Expanding coops size can be an expensive afterthought.
It depends on whether or not they are LUCKY. Hens on a mass-production egg farm can expect an unpleasant one or two-year lifespan before they are slaughtered. Not a rosy picture, but wait, it’s even worse if a chicken hatches as a rooster. One may be somewhat luckier than the other… but quite frankly I’m not sure which one.
Backyard chickens can live eight to ten years in an ideal situation. Meaning, quality grub, green fixins, fresh water, shelter, and space to exercise their instinctual behaviors. Of course, there are always chickens with that special gusto for life who continue scratching in the dirt far beyond the norm.
The older a hen gets the fewer eggs she lays. Her production cycle may even cease altogether. But this is just a part of their change of life, the same as ours. Chickens grow old, but let’s not overlook their other valuable ageless contributions. They provide an endless amount of fertilizer for your garden and eat ticks, flies, mosquitoes, and the creepy crawlers that destroy the foliage in your yard. Chickens are hard workin’ bug eating machines that are quite happy to earn their keep… at every stage of their life.
TBN Ranch Chicken Keeping Resources 