Hope you don't have any pretator problems like we do we had 12 chickens similar idea but free range during day had no problems until something got to half of them but we hatch our eggs now as well so it's growing back up we now have 9 chickens 4 of which are egg layers for future chickens and males for meat when needed. It's a good idea to have chickens these days
As I know, if someone order " straight run" from a hatchery then s/he has a big chance to get 70-80% male chickens, because they already picked the females out from the pool. So you if you order all female chickens from the hatchery, you will also get one or two male birds? Was that what you said? I have always suspected that, but I'd like to hear from someone that order a batch of all female chickens to confirm. I only ordered straight run duckies from Meyer hatchery once. That time the result was about 80% males/ 20% females.
@kqdwills yes the last two years I ordered all females. Last year out of 50 birds we ended up with 4 males. This year we ordered 20 birds and ended up with 8 males. I think I may have ended up with more males this year due to the the hatchery I used having shortages of chicks due to the culling they had do do from the avian flu the previous year.
Hope you don't have any pretator problems like we do we had 12 chickens similar idea but free range during day had no problems until something got to half of them but we hatch our eggs now as well so it's growing back up we now have 9 chickens 4 of which are egg layers for future chickens and males for meat when needed. It's a good idea to have chickens these days
As I know, if someone order " straight run" from a hatchery then s/he has a big chance to get 70-80% male chickens, because they already picked the females out from the pool. So you if you order all female chickens from the hatchery, you will also get one or two male birds? Was that what you said?
I have always suspected that, but I'd like to hear from someone that order a batch of all female chickens to confirm. I only ordered straight run duckies from Meyer hatchery once. That time the result was about 80% males/ 20% females.
@kqdwills yes the last two years I ordered all females. Last year out of 50 birds we ended up with 4 males. This year we ordered 20 birds and ended up with 8 males. I think I may have ended up with more males this year due to the the hatchery I used having shortages of chicks due to the culling they had do do from the avian flu the previous year.