Anyone else ever raise chickens for eggs or meat?

[Toy4x4]

On a rural 1/3 acre in NM back in the 70s, we had chicken (egg and meat), turkeys, and even a pig once (named Chopsuey ). Dad used to do all the harvesting and mom did the final cleaning and freezing. Liver, hearts, gizzards and gravy always followed with rice/pasta and probably our home grown veggies. Can't stand eating anything fatty and chewy so the gizzards were a NOPE!
After dinners, we'd take the chicken edible scraps out back while they were still free-ranging in the big garden. There was a certain call a rooster made when he found something good to eat and we would sort of copy it. Talk about a mad dash of chickens! No matter which batch of birds over the years, they all knew and loved those evening snackies and raced to get them!

 

[BrianF]

My wife and her sister raised meat and layers when they were kids. They said when they had over 100 to butcher, they farmed that out to the hutterites as they had a better setup for volume.

We are one step closer to having chickens. The past number of years we have been just too busy but perhaps we will shoot for next year.

While we have always had a steady supply of farm eggs (not always cheaper than store bought but always more flavorful), we want to produce our own.

We have a good supply of good farm birds, which I love to cook, we want to produce our own.

Much what we found buying our beef local, you cant beat the flavour and quality. Much of that store bought meat is sourced from high density feed lots, where the cattle are fattened up quickly and as cheaply as possible. Its garbage.

We want to get our kids into it, learn something and be less reliant than walking through the concrete jungle to the store for everything. Heck, I want to learn something.

On a side note, we were looking at various breeds of birds to release into the wild out here. Along the river valley there is lots of dense brush and grass lands. Its ripe with ticks and having birds around does help. Mind you that means I have to cull off more coyotes...

 

[walterjay]

I have 11 laying hens. Could probably buy eggs a bit cheaper from the store but the quality is sub par.

 

[wlk]

We have 6 hens for eggs and the quality is way better than store-bought. Between us and my neighbors who throw scraps into them as well, we buy a 50# bag of feed maybe once a month if that @ $12/bg. For us it is probably cheaper considering free range eggs, we get 2-3dz a week but have not calculated it all out considering over winter that drops. We currently have too many so we scramble up a couple dozen and subsidize our dog's food, win-win. The eggs have huge orange yokes and taste fantastic. The girls are great and will keep them.

 

[snarl]

We don't have chickens We have three (used to be four) black cayuga ducks.