Raising Chickens

They produce eggs, meat and down (chicken feathers).

Some Basic Chicken Info

• Male chickens are called roosters
• Female chickens are hens
• Young chickens are chicks
• Chickens weigh about 5 lbs each
• The average chicken can live for about 3-4 years. Some rare chickens have been known to have lived for as long as 25 years!

Unlike grazing animals, chickens must be consistently feed and watered. Getting water is not much of an issue worth considering. Food however is. Wheat, Barley, Alfalfa and Corn make adequate feeds for chickens. Each chicken requires 1/20th of a pound of grain daily. Most grains weight about 40 lbs per unit. There are 28 day a month, therefore figure that each chicken you have will consume 1/25 a unit of feed per month. ( only worry about feeding roosters and hens, what chicks scavenge I've already included in the ratio)

Chickens do not particularly like to huddle together like many other produce animals do. Unlike sheep and cattle, chickens are naturally temperamental to each other and will try to distance themselves as much a possible. This means your going to have to build an enclosure of sorts to keep them from getting away. You can build a chicken coop from just about anything, but each chicken needs about a square ft of floor space. This seems like it will pack um in pretty tight, but simple makeshift shelf like racks along the interior walls at a couple different heights makes for a lot more room to spread out over.

Chickens are very easy animals to tend. They need to be watered, feed, cleaned up after and have their eggs managed and sorted. Tending to chickens may be done by farmers, ranchers or shepherds. Any of these professionals may tend to as many as 100 chickens per rank they have in their occupation.

Chickens live 3.5 years on average. If your keeping all your Hens around for egg production and not slaughtering them before they become worthless, you can expect that 2.5% of your hens will die off monthly.

If you consistently slaughter a good portion, at least 5%, of your hens monthly, only about .5% will die of other causes; and you'll get some meat out of the deal.

First we must realize that Hens will lay about 150 eggs per year. They lay them if they have been impregnated by a rooster or not. Eggs laid by an impregnated Hen are not commonly eaten and eventually hatch into chicks. Those laid by a Hen who has not been impregnated are good for little else but eating. If your managing a chicken farm, you can do a pretty good job of deciding how many of your hens do each.

To reproduce your chickens, you'll need 1 rooster for every 15 hens. From that, you can expect each Hen to lay about 12.5 fertilized eggs per month. Chickens have a very high mortality rate of about 65% and they mature at 18 weeks of age. Therefore you can expect that about 5.5 chicks will be born each month that will make it to maturity some 4 months later.

you have set aside to produce eggs for human consumption need no roosters at all. Each hen will produce about 12.5 of these monthly. Because we use the 1 cubic ft unit system, assume that 600eggs makes one unit. (48 chickens will produce 1 unit of eggs per month). Also keep in mind that you actually can't get 600 eggs into a 1 cubic ft box. It's a volume measure that is confounded by the eggs shape; if you broke them and poured them is the estimate I've made based upon a dozen medium eggs being 21 oz.

Butchering chickens can be done by anybody, and even butchers are not particularly more efficient at it. For any adult chicken ( rooster or hen) you slaughter, you obtain about 3 lbs of meat and 1/4 lbs of down. Because we use units as a standard measure in this game, and a unit of meat weighs 45 lbs, each butchered chicken produces 1/15 a unit of meat. Generally speaking, 15 in 16 male chickens are butchered in this way. Many hens are butchered after their first year of egg laying because egg production slows then.