Adding more chickens to our flock?

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Today dd7 has a siddur party; they’ll be rehearsing in the hall where it will be held, and she needs to be picked up early. I’ll need to drive there to get here (it’s an hour away), then go back together with her for the performance after an hour or so at home. That will give her time to shower and for me to braid her hair, and to eat something before we leave. That means that most of my day will be busy with getting her to this performance and then attending it, with us getting home in the evening past her bedtime.

Of course on such a full day I need to add completely voluntary activities to my schedule, like going to look at some purebred Brahma chickens for sale locally before I leave to pick up dd.

Why am I thinking about getting these chickens?

On Friday we finally processed our homegrown roosters. (That same morning we had an amazing hatch rate from the eggs my son incubated; we now have almost fifty chicks from a batch of a bit over 60 eggs!) Previously we had five roosters that were shechted (slaughtered) by someone who wasn’t expert in mixed breed chickens (they swallow their windpipe when alarmed and that causes problems in the kosher slaughtering) and they all came out not kosher. We took the eight remaining roosters (we’re keeping two of our purebred Plymouth Barred Rock roosters) to a new shochet (kosher slaughterer). Six of the eight were kosher, and we were very satisfied with his price, approach and skill.

My husband and sons are able to pluck, clean and kasher the birds. Not having a shochet who could kill our birds was our biggest impediment to raising our own birds for meat. Now that we have a reliable way to process our homegrown roosters, that changes everything for us.

If you can’t eat them, roosters are mostly a liability. But if we can eat them, then we have a good source of high quality chicken that we can produce ourselves.

Until now, my focus was on eggs so it didn’t matter to me what breed we had because if they reliably laid eggs, that was what we wanted. With the possibility of eating our chickens comes new choices to make.

The chickens I’m going to look at are a large breed that would be ideal for meat birds. They have a calm and gentle personality and are decent but not amazing egg layers.

My hesitation is that to keep the chickens purebred, they need to be kept separate. When my son bought two pairs of purebred Plymouth Rocks three years ago, his intention was to create a purebred flock. Plymouth rocks are good layers and good meat birds, so they’re called dual purpose chickens. They also are fine in our hot climate and have pleasant dispositions, so we’ve never had to worry about aggressive roosters.

However, he never separated them from his mixed flock, since it would have meant either getting rid of all his mixed hens or building a new coop. That meant that we continue to have a mixed flock with a few purebreds mixed in. All of their eggs look similar, so I don’t have the option of only hatching the purebred eggs. The mixed chickens are smaller which is fine for laying hens but not so much for eating.

I could easily sell off all of our laying hens and start again with only the bigger purebreds, but am reluctant to do that because we’re finally getting a good amount of eggs a day and I expect it to increase in the next few weeks as the youngest hens mature and begin laying- right now we’re getting 10 eggs daily, which is a nice amount. It takes at least five months for a chick to grow into a layer, and Brahmas can take a year until they begin laying.

To keep them separate, which would be the obvious solution, I’d need to build another coop and I don’t know where or when we would build it, plus that’s more financial outlay on top of the cost of the new chickens.

However, we’re already doing the work of hatching our own eggs and then raising the chicks, so if we could get offspring that would be a good size.

Sometimes decisions like this take so much headspace, the thinking and rethinking and thinking again…and no motion happens in any directions.

I finally decided I’ll just go look at the chickens and seeing them will hopefully help me have clarity and I’ll put all of this mental circling around to rest.

Avivah