Raymond Lai's List: chicken n eggs

• You can feed four free-range chickens for about eleven cents a day.
• the bigger the chicken, the bigger the mess. A few of the biggest chickens will turn your yard into a barren wasteland. If it moves they eat it, if it’s green they eat it, if it’s brown they scratch it.
• Four chickens can produce about twenty eight eggs per week
• Each chicken can lay an average of seven eggs per week.

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• A mixture of straw and chicken manure is ideal for garden compost.
• I use crumbles for my chicks and pellets for the older birds.
• For chicks, grit is only necessary  if the chicks have access to grain or other foodstuffs. Chicks on mash or crumbles don't need it. You can get a chick-sized granite grit through your feed store.

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• Over the winter, 20 birds will   go through a $6.85 bag of layer pellets in about 10 days, about   $2.00 worth of cracked corn, and another $2.50 in straw.
• While you don't need roosters   for hens to lay eggs, they provide an important role in the social   structure of the flock, and if you don't provide a rooster, one   of the hens will stop laying, and start acting like one! Again,   a commercial operation would cull her, and cull the next one that   did it, on down the line. But we like our roosters, they're colorful   and have neat personalities.