# 13 free range chickens



## alterego (Jan 27, 2013)

For those of you that do not know a typical brown egg laying chicken when it is laying properly not moping it will lay one egg every 29 hours so we have about 13 free range chickens right now which is way down from what we normally have wandering around in the woods in the field in front of our house so we have eggs typically on Sunday morning for breakfast and when we go pick the eggs anything that looks ugly to us we just throw out in the chickens eat the shells or we feed them to the dogs over the top of their dog food so we have a bunch of eggs left over and we give them away all the time to people a dozen here 2 dozen there. And we still have this many.

So you really only need about three chickens.


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## James m (Mar 11, 2014)

Friends of ours have chickens. They gave us brown eggs a few months ago. The chickens officially belong to their little girl, which is precious and funny at the same time.


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## paraquack (Mar 1, 2013)

Do the chickens belong to you or just out free ranging in your area and lay their eggs on your property?


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## RNprepper (Apr 5, 2014)

I agree about the numbers of hens that are actually needed. I used to have a couple dozen and I sold eggs to pay for feed. But with feed prices really up for the past couple of years, I couldn't sell the eggs for enough to cover the feed costs. So I culled the flock (with a little help from coyotes) down to 5 hens, which averaged 4 eggs per day. That was fine for us. If you get too many you can make quiche or egg salad sandwiches. Because it is so expensive to feed with commercial feed now (and I cannot free range because of predators), I am experimenting with making my own chicken food. This is very reasonable for a small flock (6 birds or less.) When SHTF, sustainability is everything. There has to be a Plan B when commercial animal feed is unavailable. For my chickens, I am using mesquite bean flour and cricket flour (from my self sustaining cricket colony), combined with garden greens/veggies, carbs from old legumes/corn/scrap grain, and crushed egg shells.


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## 8301 (Nov 29, 2014)

A neighbor of mine runs free range chickens over the same fields he grows wheat, soybeans, and corn on in rotation. In addition to providing him with plenty of eggs the birds also give him plenty of fertilizer as a byproduct of the crop harvesting process. It seems that the harvester plucks the birds along with the wheat and rejects the chicken parts and feces which are then gently sprayed as across the just harvested field.

Grizzly truth but it does save him the expense of fertilizer before replanting and feeds him breakfast too.

Yes, this is a joke, Don't try this at home. : )


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