Keeping Chickens On A Homestead

Dig in and learn more about keeping chickens on your backyard homestead.

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Why Do You Want To Keep Chickens?

In return for being fed, watered, and having a secure shelter, chickens provide so much for the homestead. So why do you want them?

Maybe you want meat or maybe you want eggs. Having a clear reason for wanting to keep chickens will help you find the right birds for your homestead.

Choosing Chicken Breeds

After owning a fair few chicken flocks now, one mistake we made with our first chicken flock was just getting whatever was available at the feed or ranch store rather than thinking about the breeds that would do best. For the farm, we discussed what chicken breeds we had and what breeds we liked from our suburban backyard chicken flock. We also talked to local farmers with chickens. I’m now in a much colder region and not in a suburban setting, so I’m looking for something a little different than our small backyard flock. In our backyard chicken flock, we focused on:

dual-purpose breeds for eggs and meat
breeds that were ok in a confined space due to the restrictions from the city we lived in
a nice temperament
did well in the heat

We had mixed flocks in our backyard with the Rhode Island Red, Sussex, and Wyandotte being the best breeds there.

On the farm, we want good foragers or thrifty birds. Birds that are good at foraging mean less money spent on grain or chicken feed. Breeds like Golden Campine, Javas, Dorkings, Rhode Island Reds, Leghorns, Minorcas, Lakenvelders, Icelandics, and Scots Dumpies come to mind as breeds that are well suited to foraging.

We need excellent layers since we plan on sharing eggs with our neighbors who are sharing their garden or food scraps for the chickens and the breeds need to be cold hardy since my winters in Maine are cold. Canadian breeds like the Chantecler are known for their ability to live in cold winters. But we also want a mixture of egg colors so Ameraucanas, Whiting True Blue, Olive Eggers, Whiting True Green, and Marans all come to mind. We also want breeds that are good for producing meat, such as Dark Cornish.

Keeping Permaculture Chickens

In a permaculture chicken setup, chickens and composting cycles go hand in hand but so do chickens to cultivate garden beds. We plan to turn the chickens into the garden area in the fall to scratch through the soil and eat any pests that may be trying to over-winter in the garden. Chickens will also eat any weeds or plants that are in the garden reducing their reliance on chicken feed and saving us money!

In permaculture, we are looking to create systems on the homestead that use waste to produce something useful. We have a few composting methods here on the homestead, we have a worm composting set up out of a plastic tote and a cooler, so the hens can get some worms as a treat, my hubby has some fishing bait and I get worm castings for the garden. This is a little system that can be done in a suburban homestead setting easily.

Another example is using a Bokashi composter where the meat, fish, bones, and dairy scraps get composted. It is how we composted the bits (innards, feathers, and such) from harvesting chickens for meat when we lived in the suburbs. Bokashi composting produces a liquid fertilizer tea that makes a great plant fertilizer when diluted down. The effective microbes in the Bokashi also help to speed up a slow regular, cold compost bin. The bokashi bin means we can add more waste back to the soil that can go back to feeding the land, our plants, animals, and of course us!

Last but by no means least, we could create a system with a regular cold compost bin that we could move to where the chickens might be penned so they can scratch through the compost tuning it adding their manure and eating some of the scraps. If you look at permaculture chicken coops online by doing a quick search, you will often see compost bins integrated into the run area as a means to feed the chickens and to process waste into compost faster.

Another piece of the permaculture and self-sufficient homestead is that my husband is an avid woodworker and since he uses hardwoods, wood shavings are collected in his woodshop so they can be used in the coop as litter. The mixture of wood shavings and chicken waste can be composted together in a separate pile. Once composted, I have fertilizer to spread on the garden beds.

Chicken Housing

Your backyard chicken flock will need somewhere to roost for the night and in bad weather. They need a safe shelter. In the suburbs, we had a little prefabricated coop and one that we built ourselves.

Chicken coops can be a great beginner homestead-building project and I much prefer ones that we have designed and built ourselves. One tip that helped us find the right sort of coop we wanted to build was to watch or read chicken coop tours. This gave us ideas of what we like and don’t like from other chicken keepers. If you are wanting to buy a coop, check out the reviews and see what other owners liked and didn’t like about the coop design.

Here on the farm, we have permanent coops for winter and movable coops for spring, summer, and fall.

To Free Range Or Not To Free Range?

I can’t let the birds fully free-range, even on a farm. Not all of my neighbors will be happy to see chickens visiting their property so they will need a movable chicken tractor or a poultry pen to help keep them in one area. We have several birds of prey that visit the garden as well as foxes, raccoons, coyotes, feral cats, fishers, bears, bobcats, and weasels so we need to think about that when keeping the chickens safe.

There’s the electric poultry fence type of pen for when the chickens are out of the coop that can be easily moved but not much protection from the birds of prey hunting. The electric poultry fencing gives the chickens a much bigger area to wander and do chickeny things.

Another option is a moveable run that is made from cattle panels and hardware cloth in a hoop house type of design. It is something I could build and move around the property and I can easily convert it to protect plants in the ground for winter by putting some greenhouse plastic over the structure. It is smaller and has less space for the chickens, but safer.

Moving the chickens in a chicken tractor or a moveable run to a new area also provides interest and encourages the natural scratching and pecking behaviors of the birds. Pastured raised chickens provide more nutrient-dense eggs and meat as well as using less purchased feeds and grains.

Keeping Chickens Happy

Chickens that are bored will fight and pick on each other. Chickens that are cramped in a small space will also show problem behaviors. We learned a lot from keeping chickens in the suburbs; the more space the birds can get and opportunities for them to exhibit their natural behaviors like scratching the ground looking for things to eat or adding things for the birds to do in winter, the happier and healthier the flock will be.

Our Tips

Here are some things we learned from keeping happy chickens:

Hanging cabbages or kale plants in the run for the birds to peck at was a favorite food and boredom buster. We would pull plants roots and all and hang them in the coop or pick up cabbages in the grocery store that were heavily discounted.
Adding hay or straw to the run for the hens to scratch at and look for seeds to eat. Hay was better than straw but make sure your birds have plenty of grit available.
Some hens enjoy pecking at Halloween pumpkins in the fall. I love the idea of reducing the waste from our jack-o-lanterns. The pulp and seeds always go to the chickens but the leftover pumpkins after Halloween were a hit with some of the birds that were the better foragers but not with some of the other breeds.
Spent grain from beer brewing was very loved by our backyard flocks. So much so that when we were outside brewing beer they would be clucking and foot stomping until they got the cooled grains. We would put them in the run and cover them with some hay or straw so they had to scratch for the grains. Don’t put too much in there at once though the birds won’t eat all of it in one go.
Natural branches from trees made good perches and roosts for some smaller birds. Thicker branches were good for heavier birds. They seemed to prefer those to perches and roost bars made from an old wood broom handle or wooden dowel.
Some of our better forager birds would scratch at wood logs and stumps for bugs and grubs. We would move those around the run and see the hens peck at whatever was under the log when we moved it.
When weeding the garden, the weeds we pulled would go into the coop for the birds to scratch through and peck at.
Hang sunflower heads in the run for the chickens to eat and peck at.
Some vegetable and fruit scraps would go to the chickens from the kitchen.
Ornamental corn being sold in the grocery store was on sale after Thanksgiving so I would buy it with the pumpkins to put into the coop or put in the cobs from the garden that were not all fully pollinated. Hanging up the corn cobs made the chickens work for the corn and as kernels fell on the ground, other chickens would scratch and forage for those.
Shrub prunings and twiggy branches placed in a pile for a day or two gave the birds something new to investigate. Any pests like slugs or snails, crickets, and grasshoppers would be tossed into the coop at these twiggy branches to encourage the birds to investigate the structures and forage for food.

Feeding Your Chickens

Your chicken flock will need feeding with a chicken feed. There’s lots to choose from to suit all budgets. From non-organic feeds that are the cheapest to the more expensive certified organic feeds. Some feeds have higher protein amounts and you can get specific feeds for growers (meat birds) and layers (egg-laying flocks).

Chick feed comes in a medicated and a non-medicated starter feed. We go with non-medicated, certified organic starter feed and ferment it for new chicks. For adults, we use a pelleted feed and ferment it whenever we can. Check out how we ferment our feed with fresh garden herbs in this video:

We stick with a grower feed because we have roosters in our flock. Layer feeds have more calcium in them so if you don’t have a rooster, your hens will be happy on a layer feed. We always give chicken grit and supplemental calcium or oyster shells that the chickens can help themselves to at any time. We provide feed, water, calcium, and grit if they are in the winter coop and run or out on the pasture.

What is your favorite chicken breed? Let me know over in the Facebook group!

Dig In and Learn More

If this post has started ideas for your homestead, be sure to check out these related posts and helpful books that have inspired my homestead:

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