Chicken Mama

I've been raising chickens for about 3 years now. I've been buying chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html since long before owning my own farm. My mother used to purchase chickens from them when I was a kid.

Anyway, I raise chickens for eggs. I sell their eggs. Upon raising several different breeds of chickens I've become a bit of a chicken addict. I love chickens!! They're easy to raise, easy to handle, easy to sell and easy to buy. They are cheap to feed and profitable if you sell their eggs.

I'm currently researching egg incubation so that I can hatch eggs and sell the chicks for an extra income.

I've had everything from standard breeds, to the best egg layers to bantams and silkies which I'm raising right now for the chicks they can produce. I have them in 2 large sister runs. Each run has it's own coop and they can be kept divided or opened and allowed to blend flocks. At the moment, I have the fence closed and I have a flock of 35 laying hens in one side and a flock of 55 plus 12 turkeys on the other side.

I also have a small coop within my largest coop specifically for breeding pairs. My current flock of 55 will be ready to start laying eggs in September. I chose a large blend of breeds for the different color eggs they lay. So I'll have a beautiful rainbow of eggs by then to sell to my customers.

The reason I want to begin hatching/raising my own chicks is for three reasons: One is that it can be rather expensive to continuously purchase layer flocks every year. Also, I could potentially make money off the chicks. The last reason is to kind of right a wrong I committed as a child.

My siblings and I used to play a game called "Who's the Rotten Egg". We would go down to the barn and collect eggs. If we happened to find an old nest we would begin the egg fight and whoever got nailed with the stinky rotten egg was the loser. Well, one day I threw an egg at my sister and I missed. It went flying past her and broke on the ground. To my horror, there was a nearly fully developed baby chick inside, then dead because of me. So now, I'd like to bring some chicks back into the world, perhaps replace the ones I so carelessly killed as a child.

The breeds I will be focusing on will be White Silkies and Mille Fleur D'Uccles. Both are bantam breeds. I will begin the breeding practice in the spring of 2019!