A great way to start a homesteading lifestyle is by raising chickens. Whether raising for meat or eggs, the chicken will provide you and your kids with some great experiences.
No matter if you have a city backyard or acres of country, it is a good way to start small and scale up as your homestead and skills grow.
There are a variety of places to find chicks. You can order directly from a hatchery and they will be delivered through the postal service. Or you can find local people selling chicks through 4-H, Craigslist, or your local farm store. You can also buy hatching eggs and incubate them yourself. Now if you don’t want to go through the process of raising chicks you can buy adult chickens instead.
If you plan to order chicks from a hatchery, winter or early spring is a good time to get them ordered. Ordering early in the year gives you a better chance of getting the delivery date you want.
Here are some places to order chicks.
We’ve had good luck using Sunnyside Hatchery, Beaver Dam, WI, for our Cornish Cross broilers. Their meat birds, egg layers, and ducks are very reasonably priced. Online ordering isn’t available so I place our order over the phone and send a check when they send an invoice.
Another popular hatchery for the homesteader is Freedom Ranger Hatchery. They are a family business in PA with a nice selection of chicks, waterfowl, guinea keets, and hatching eggs. We haven’t used them yet but may in the future. They are also reasonably priced.
Murray McMurray Hatchery out of Iowa is well known for their wide selection of poultry and very useful descriptions for each breed.
If you are just getting started with meat birds I recommend getting 20 to 60 to get started. If you have some experience and hope to sell them, 200 is a good number for efficient use of your time.
Don’t forget to set butcher dates!
Research the recommended butcher age for your birds and schedule the butcher date ~6 months in advance. Cornish Cross are typically 8 weeks old and Rangers are typically 9-11 weeks. Butcher dates for processors have been filling up quickly during the pandemic so be sure to get in early. Search online for butchers in your area and see they process poultry. We hire Clean Chickens & Co., a mobile butcher operation from Elk River, MN, to butcher the chickens on our farm. It can cost more than taking the birds into a butcher but it saves us a lot of time.
This about wraps up how to order your chicks. Watch for an upcoming blog about the equipment we use for our chicks.
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