Backyard Chicken Farming

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Backyard chicken farming

If you have decided on raising chickens the next step is selecting a breed suited to your purposes.

On the right are some of my flock, a Rhode Island Red Rooster, a Plymouth Barred Rock, a New Hampshire Red, and a Buff Orpington.

I should tell you that the colors in the picture are fine except that with the

Selecting the Breed

sunlight on the Orpington makes it look much lighter than mine are.

Each of these is considered to be a “dual purpose” breed in that they are good layers and still provide a good amount of meat.

My experience has been that if you want meat get a meat bird. Otherwise almost any of the reputable breeds are fine. I tend to shy away from the light breeds as they can be a little more flighty and harder to keep in an open pen.

The two common backyard chickens are the Red’s and the Rocks. The crosses of these two are amongst the best of the heavy breeds for eggs. There are many other hybrid's but because I am old fashioned I prefer the registered breeds that breed true.

Egg color is quite important to some people but I can’t say I really even consider this. I just personally like the heavier breeds which for the most part lay brown eggs.

The Rhode Island Red comes in just behind the White Leghorn in egg production which is a white egg layer compared to the red laying brown eggs. Leghorns are a light breed, lay very well, not worth anything for meat. I prefer a White Plymouth Rock/Cornish cross for meat but gave up raising meat a long time ago.

There are also Bantams which are about 20% or so the size of a standard chicken actually lay a decent egg but generally a pen with a top is required or they fly out and roost in the trees. The get “broody” regularly and are more for show than production.

Any reputable hatchery will give in the information the color of egg laid by each breed. Araucana’s lay 4 colors, blue, green, olive green, and pink. At least this is the approximate colors I have read about. They are of the lighter breeds but come in all sorts of sizes and colors. Novelty, more than a production bird.

I prefer Rhode Island Red for brown eggs, which I also prefer.

There are many hatcheries on the internet. I decided not to include their links on my site. I welcome links but because I do my site for “free” traffic isn’t important and I won’t include links unless I get paid for their ad, get an affiliate commission, or at least get a link on their site.

Just search for hatcheries, searching for chicks or baby chicks will just bring up thousands of porn ads.

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