Methinks that's a very good decision.

The other thing I thought of was that as your back recovers, construction of a chicken coop maybe shouldn't be on your top ten list of projects to undertake right now...

Will you have any roosters? Their crowing may irritate your neighbors. Hens will lay eggs with or without a rooster. Chicago allows residents to own chickens. There’s been a lot of complaints about rooster crowing so now the city is considering changing the municipal ordinance that allows chicken ownership if it hasn’t done so already.

Market update....Eggs at Costco are $3.19 a dozen for regular, $3.74 per dozen for organic.

The (now famous) NYT article about the true horrors of chicken farming, for meat or eggs, influenced me - at least, about which eggs to buy. If you read it and watch the video it might factor into the pluses of raising ones chickens. (Just remembered how cute the baby chicks are - my grandmother used to get some every year -
can even be kept indoors.)

I used to buy eggs at our local farmers' market until I thought to ask the "organic farmer" whether his egg laying chickens had been debeaked.

Hemmed and hawed, then admitted they had been - "they all seem to 'come' that way". I suspect many so-calledd organic or roaming chickens have been debeaked for convenience (if you didn't know, they do it so they aren't driven so mad from confinement they peck themselves to death. )

Another reason to raise ones own even if it doesn't turn out to be cheaper. I DO hear that closer acquaintence tends to make the heart grow fonder - that they ARE more personable than one would ever have suspected. (There was a major scandal covered in depth for months in our Nextdoor site, about the threatened heartbreak of a little girl, whose pet chickens were to be declared unpermissable by the township.

Demonstrations, complaints about officials supposedly responsible, heated online discussions, etc. (she won). They really were her babies.

After I was forced (complicated) to adopt a rabbit, and we made friends, I thought back quite differently on times I'd eaten rabbit. Also, how certain I'd been that they were completely brainless (seems to be almost universal - they're used for fur too), and I developed a gag reflex. Pretty much turned me vegetarian.

You might find a similar effect from raising chickens.

The true cost of those cheap Costco chickens

How 'Cage-free' chickens really live

(There are other articles and videos too that can be surprisingly persuasive in favor of raising ones own chickens for humane reasons.)

I've been watching this thread with some interest. I'll be curious to learn if anyone has changed or plan to change their egg and/or chicken consumption habits.

I pretty much know what home chicken raising involves. When I was growing up on the farm, we had a chicken coop for both eggs and meat. I helped my mother when we killed a chicken for meat.

We had a post with two spikes in the top with just enough space to snare a chicken's head while we severed its neck with a hatchet. A headless chicken would, as the saying goes, run around like a chicken with its head cut off. To avoid this, we would drop the chicken in an old nail keg while it bled out and stopped flopping.

Then came the part that I really didn't like - plucking the feathers off the carcass. First, the bird was dipped into boiling water. This loosened the feathers so they could be pulled off. After the carcass was bare, my mother would proceed with gutting the chicken to be ready for cooking, either whole for roasting or cut up for frying or other uses.

I grew to hate the smell of the wet feathers during the plucking operation. I still do not like to eat chicken if it is undercooked because the pink flesh brings back memories of that smell.

We also had a few hens that had escaped the fence outside the coop and taken up residence elsewhere. Sometimes we'd find where they were nesting and harvest their eggs. Sometimes we didn't find the eggs until they were rotten. We'd throw the rotten eggs away, far away, because the rotten egg smell was quite obvious if they were broken.

The reports of hens pecking other hens, sometimes to death, are certainly true. In my experience, it was generally a reaction to a hen being sick or weak and a response by the flock to eliminate a danger.

Big Al

quote:

After I was forced (complicated) to adopt a rabbit, and we made friends, I thought back quite differently on times I'd eaten rabbit. Also, how certain I'd been that they were completely brainless (seems to be almost universal - they're used for fur too), and I developed a gag reflex. Pretty much turned me vegetarian.

IMO, all animals have souls. Since we are in the unfortunate position of being predators, and for some of us the ingestion of meat is indispensable to our health, rather than become a vegetarian I became a hunter. When you hunt, you come face to face with the reality that another's life is lost to support your own. You can thank the animal for the gift of its life, and you can take that life with sadness, reverence, and gratitude. But mostly for me, hunting better informed me of the truth of what I was doing when I ate meat, whether from a hunt, or from the supermarket.

It creates a more conscious life--eating with greater awareness and with a conscience.

I do know what you mean about the gag reflex, though. I grew up the daughter of an avid fisherman, and became one myself. Until one day, I caught a beautiful, rare golden cutthroat trout high in a mountain lake in the wilderness. Rather than exulting in my catch, I found myself imagining what it must feel like to have a hook through your lip, and to be wrenched from the safety of your water element into the air, gasping.

I still eat fish, but again with more awareness for what was given up so that I may eat. And I haven't gone fishing since. I don't hunt any more, either.

Nationwide report on popularity of keeping "heavy egg-laying" chickens - inflation phenomenon.

raising chickens and egg prices

I think there's a difference between keeping a few egg-laying chickens around for personal use and "raising chickens." A chicken will lay about an egg a day, so it seems like 3-4 would give you more or less the equivalent of buying a dozen eggs a week. I know we don't go through a dozen eggs except under extraordinary circumstances, but we may be weird.