Introduction: Quick Guide: How to Raise Chickens in Your Backyard

By Google+
About: Ivan Dimitrijevic is a seasoned blogger and SEO consultant with years of experience. His skill sets include Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and blogging on a wide variety of topics. He is a …

If you want to eat your own food, why not use your backyard? Many people have considered this, one of them being Bill Gates himself, and some have already started growing organic produce. One of the options you can explore is raising chickens for fresh eggs. One of the obvious benefits is that you will be able to control what the chickens eat and how they live.

Having three hens will provide you with enough eggs for your Sunday morning breakfast, but before you start daydreaming, it is important that you understand exactly what you need to do in order to raise chickens in your backyard.

So, if you can cope with a lot of chicken poop, which can by the way be excellent for your compost, and you like the whole idea of raising backyard chickens, you are going to need several things to get started, like chicken feeders, chook feed, a henhouse and so on. So, let’s move on to the first step you need to take.

Step 1: General Inquiries

First, you need to find out whether it’s legal to raise chickens; that all depends on where you live. There is a great possibility that it might be illegal to raise chickens in your backyard to provide food for you and your family. If it is against the law in the area where you live, you can start visiting town hall meetings and get involved to make some changes and to organize support for local food production.

Step 2: Financial Readiness

The next step you need to take is to do the math. Since you are not building anything big, you won’t have any major costs, but you need to ask yourself if you are willing to share your home with several chickens. We recommend that you purchase baby chicks who will be only several days old, because that will help them get used to the people who will be surrounding them.

Do not buy more chickens than your space allows, because you are going to need approximately 2 square feet per chicken as far as the henhouse is concerned and approximately 9 feet of the outside space. Chickens need their space to wander around, stretch their wings and interact with each other.

Step 3: Time to Build

This is where you need to start planning your hen house. So, before you order your new chicks, you need to make sure that your hen house is properly installed at the right spot. Go online to find plans for small and urban hen houses. You can build one yourself, or hire a carpenter to do it for you. The size of the coop can range from rather small to storage-shed size, and this also determines the cost, which can be anything from a couple of hundred dollars to over $10,000. The floor of the coop has to be above ground, it has to have a door for the hens on one side and a regular, human-sized door on the other, so that you can easily clean it.

Step 4: Predators Are Everywhere

After you have decided on the location and size of your henhouse, now you have to predator-proof it, so to say. Chickens will be most vulnerable at night, so you need to make sure that they spend their nights in a secure hen house. But, even the outside area, where your chickens can walk around and play, has to be secured. You should not overlook that, because critters are capable of digging under the fence. You need to find out if there are any predators that live in your area, so that you can successfully guard your chickens from them.

This was our quick guide on how you can raise chickens in your backyard. This is not a complicated project to undertake, you only need to invest a small amount of time and effort, and in return, you will receive fresh and organic eggs for you and your family to enjoy. So, start doing your research, check the regulations in your area to be certain you won’t be doing anything illegal and you are all set to start your own little chicken farm.