We have about a hundred egg laying chickens. We will let some of the broody girls sit on eggs until they hatch, and then pull the chicks, and there are some that hide out somewhere and surprise us with a half dozen to a dozen baby chicks all of a sudden. But when we hatch them naturally, we end up with half of them being roosters, which are the devil, and they have to die. Laying chickens are not very good for eating, so I just pull their breasts and use it for dog food. We have 3 crock pots going almost every day to make our own dog food.
We also buy birds from Ideal Poultry. We pay extra to get just hens. Usually we get from 20 to 30 at a time. Mostly we buy them to get more color in our eggs. We're selling close to 15 dozen eggs a week at $4 The main reason is for the flavor, but they always comment on the different colors and how much the enjoy that.
Sunday, my wife went to Aldi's to buy groceries and saw ten pounds of chicken quarters for $1.97 She grabbed 4 and then later went back and got 6 more. Now she is talking about heading back today and getting another ten bags.
Considering the amount of effort that goes into raising baby chicks, and the upfront cost of buying broilers, there really is no reason to do it yourself when you can buy them for so cheap. If they become harder to find, like so many other things, then we'll probably get into raising broilers. We are going to build another large coop for our layers and convert our smallest coop into an empty area that we can use when bringing new birds into the flock, or birds that get attacked by predators and need to be kept confined until they heal, and maybe for broilers if that needs to happen.
