Our first adventure into the farm life is getting us a wonderful assortment of hens to provide us with some farm fresh eggs! Today we’re going to be talking about all the planning that went into figuring out where to order our chicks for late March!
First off chickens, where the heck do you start? With research and logic of course!
We started by ordering a few books to start of our adventure, though we had honestly been mulling around the idea of having hens for a few months by now. For Christmas we asked for a book called Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens. This book, from everything we read online, was the definitive source for all things chickens.
Over the holidays, between moving, and packing and unpacking, and moving and more moving, we each read a few chapters to learn more about what would be in store if we wanted chicks. This book was highly detailed and super complex/scientific about how to raise chickens for peak production and if your funds were unlimited. Definitely a great reference book but not really the best “what do normal people do with chickens” guide.
Coming from a dog rescue world, I was a bit worried about these massive hatcheries being akin to the dog puppy mill world. I wanted to make sure we were supporting happy, healthy momma hens. So we started our search to look at other backyard chicken owners. We expected to find a group of well educated, well researched chicken owners, breeding their chickens for specific traits, coloring, or egg production. But instead what we found was a lot more akin to the dog breeding world. We found families raising the chickens just for fun or simple for a few eggs per week. We found mass producers raising dozens of chickens in cramped cages and pumping them out for their eggs, or meat and being focused on money and profit instead of the hens health. We found people with duct-taped together coops and people who simply let the chickens range wherever, with predators ensuring these folks came back year after year in search of new hens. People unaware of the diseases and issues chickens could get, and their birds suffering and dying because of this lack of knowledge.
It was just too much variation to ensure we were getting hens from responsible owners, so we moved to looking hatcheries. Hatcheries too could suffer from the same issues as the family breeders do. Some hatcheries appealed to the “small” backyard chicken family, and would allow for the shipping of only three chicks per box (another fun chick fact is that chicks cannot maintain their own body heat when born which is why responsible hatcheries sell in larger batches to ensure the chicks will keep warm during transport). Others wouldn’t offer any vaccination options to help protect chicks from the common chicken illnesses like Marek’s Disease or Coccidiosis.
We made a list of requirements for our hatchery:
- We wanted to make sure we were purchasing from a hatchery which was a member of the USDA’s NPIP (US Department of Agriculture’s National Poultry Improvement Plan) which defines standards for keeping the birds healthy, clean, and disease free.
- We wanted a hatchery that offered a list of vaccines to keep our chicks safe!
- We needed a hatchery that sold somewhere between 10 and 15 chicks per order. And if not, we’d need to find someone to split an order of chicks with us so we could ensure they’d have enough room in our coop.
- We wanted a hatchery that was working to protect or breed endangered breeds (Yes! There are specific breeds that are at risk of going extinct!).
- We preferred a hatchery that offered sexed chickens vs straight runs (which requires a specially trained person to do, as sexing chickens is more challenging as all their important bits are internally located – the more you know!)
- Lastly, we preferred to buy local, as shipping is frequently very hard and stressful and Iowa winters are known for being frosty tundras!
We finally decided to select Murray McMurray hatchery out of the available hatcheries around us, as it met all of our needs and allowed for a local pickup of 10 chicks.
What makes hens different than most other critters with offspring, is that no roosters are needed for a hen to lay eggs. Aka, a hen will lay roughly an egg every day or two. Regardless of whether that egg is fertilized or not, the hen will still lay one. In small farms, hen’s “go broody” and will sit on her eggs (which ideally are fertilized) for 20+ days until the chicks arrive. While this natural process works for mother nature, oftentimes there are better ways to increase the likelihood of a successful hatch.
In hatcheries, these eggs are gathered up daily and then moved to incubators where (via science!) they are carefully monitored and managed in order to ensure the most optimum chance of hatching a chick! With a bunch of creative math, hatcheries are able to use these stats to determine the percentage of their total eggs that are likely to hatch. This allows folks, like ourselves, to preorder our chicks ahead of hatch day and have a reasonable likelihood of getting the types we wanted!
I’m going to save, what we ordered for breeds until our next post, but lastly I wanted to provide a list of resources we have found to be super helpful in expanding our knowledge of what breeds, coops, and what would be required for general chicken care. Here are our top picks and some basic info about each:
Most Detailed and Scientific:
- If you want to know all about raising chickens, and all the potential pluses or cons to owning them, this is the book for you. It would be excellent as a guide for reference when random events happen to your chickens. However, the over detailed nature of this reference book, doesn’t make it suitable for determining if chickens are right for you.
Most Practical and Detailed:
- This guide is the one we highly recommend for newbie chicken owners. Coming from a well known blog post writer, this Chicken Chick book is filled with fantastic practical advice for how to avoid the issues she ran into when first starting out. It goes into just enough detail to answer your question and covers exactly the right amount of topics to be extremely useful. We both highly recommend her book and her blog for chicken owners.
Most Basic and Kid Friendly:
- While researching Murray McMurray we found they published a book about how to care for your chickens in just 5 minutes a day. This was a very basic book which we think would be great for older children or for a very high level overview of the types of tasks you will be doing with your new chicks and hens. It also has some great printable single-page references materials which highlight the things you must do to keep your birds healthy.
Stay tuned to our next post on picking out the breeds of chickens and ordering our coop! Remember to like us on Facebook and sign up for our posts on the right!