The first year we raised chicks was 2018. We had just bought a house on 5 acres and Spring rolled around and I always knew I wanted to raise my own flock of chickens. Visiting our local farm supply, they had the tiny babies for $3.99 each and we went home with 6 of them. The next year we doubled our flock and our little chicken family grew to 12. The year after that, 24. And then I lost count after that but I think we had around 32.
We sold our house in 2021 and now we’re finally ready to bring chicks home again.
Not surprisingly, raising a backyard flock has become quite popular especially after the food shortages of COVID and then again when the US had egg shortages that was the result of bird flu around 2022. Chicks at our local farm supply were $7.99 each. Wow. And browsing Facebook chicken pages was even more shocking, some chicks priced at $15 each.
So we ended up with 9 chicks, straight run. Hopefully we will end up with a few roosters so we can choose a nice protector for our new flock and help ease our wallet next year with some broody hens to avoid having to buy chicks again. I remember the days when you could get a half dozen chicks for $6.99!
Since I am still at my in-law’s house in the “big city”, I have these cuties in a 58 gallon tough tote with a red heat lamp in the garage. There were quite a few breeds to choose from but we were interested in dual-purpose birds that were cold hardy and ended up with:
3 Golden Comets
3 Cinnamon Queens
3 Bielefelders
The Cinnamon Queens and Bielefelders look nearly identical as chicks but once they mature the Cinnamon Queens and the Golden Comets will look very similar. In the past we’ve had Rhode Island Reds, Turkens, Sapphire Gems, Buff Brahma, White Leghorns, Silkies, and Isa Browns. The Sapphire Gems were very flighty and they were more difficult to direct and control and so I wouldn’t choose those again, and White Leghorns are not dual-purpose and primarily egg-layers.
But we had a beautiful gradient of eggs and way too many eggs to eat. I’d bring in a couple cartons to work and sell them to coworkers for $4 per dozen up until 2021 and even made weekly deliveries to one of my parent’s neighbors.
We were swimming in eggs and I ended up giving a lot of them away to friends and family for free. Thirty chickens were absolutely too many in hindsight, haha.
As an off-grid family, we do plan on raising some of our chickens for meat and in the past we have culled the unlucky few in the fall before the vegetation died back to reduce the feed burden through the winter. We’ll wait and see to decide how many out of the 9 chicks will get to see next Spring but the plan is to keep around 3 broody hens and one rooster.
I love this picture of our old flock. You can see the Buff Brahma, Isa Browns, and the Sapphire Gem in this one. Since we had so many, we actually had 2 runs and split the flock.
I am hopeful for the future, and we’ll need to do some training with our dog, Ellie to stay away from the chickens, but I am so excited to have chickens again. The thing I miss most about our old house was the chickens and big garden and now we are bringing it to our off-grid homestead.
The hardest part of off-grid living is having to build our infrastructure little by little but it’s so rewarding to see our progress every year. When we first purchased our property in 2022, it was just completely wooded save for the small incomplete cabin and now we have a fully completed and livable cabin, a chicken coop, a shed, an outhouse, and there is a lot more we have planned to add. It’s a lot of physical work but it is very motivating to see how things are coming together.
I want to talk about the products I use. Disclaimer: Any links to products direct you to Amazon and if you choose to purchase from my link, I will receive a small kickback that helps us maintain and run this website and we appreciate it tremendously.
This is the feeder and watering container I use with our chicks and they are available on Amazon for $15.99! It holds enough for them for a couple of days between refilling. The only thing about the water is that they tend to kick bedding material into it so I placed a canning ring underneath to raise it up a bit and that seems to help. They’re too small at this stage to be able to use raised waterers but once they are bigger, we’ll be using a nipple waterer like this one:
This keeps the water clean and the little bowls can be turned over easily if they get anything in them. Plus, we use the handle to hang this waterer up off the ground outside of the chicken run to make it easier to refill and clean. You can find this one on Amazon here.
Let me know below if there’s anything else you prefer to use with your chicks and chickens! I’m always interested to know what works best for you!
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