1. Waste Disposal
When raising chickens you can vary your chickens’ diet by feeding them kitchen scraps and waste vegetable matter, and by doing so, keep them healthy and reduce the amount of biodegradable waste you throw away every day.
2. Generate Fertiliser
Keeping Chicken can also benefit your vegetable garden as chicken manure is a very good, strong fertilizer for plants. You can grow vegetables for your own supply, feed the scraps to the chickens and use the chicken fertilizer on the garden to grow better veggies!
Also if you have a portable chicken coop, you can just move it every year, and plant a veggie garden where it was no-effort fertilization!
3. Produces Eggs
The most direct benefit of keeping chickens is of course the eggs produced, with each chicken laying an egg a day (normal for a good laying hen, although also dependant on climate), making it easy to match your flock to your household needs.
The savings on grocery expenses is clear.
Also if you produce more eggs than you need then you can sell the balance to make a little extra cash. The most common ways are either directly to friends, from a sign at your house, or if you talk to your local supermarket or even an egg supplier, you may be able to sell eggs to them.
4. Meat Production
Raising chickens for meat is usually a major effort and rather specialised, old chickens aren’t very good eating, if you want to pursue this I suggest you research it a lot first, as there are many details to it, also it usually involves raising a lot of young roosters for meat, so it would also not be very viable in an urban area.
5. Breeding
Breeding and raising chickens is usually in conjunction with meat production, but you can breed chickens to sell to other people which can be quite profitable.
Once again you will need a rooster, with are often not allowed in urban areas due to the noise and wherever you live, you will have to get used to it yourself.
Though if neighbors grumble free eggs could help to soothe feelings…
6. Pest Control
Horrible little bugs to us are a tasty snack to chickens; if your backyard is overrun with bugs keeping chickens will deal with that in short order.
If you want your hens to lay good eggs, you should also supplement them with laying mash or pellets (about a large handful per hen per day).
7. Weed Control
Chickens love greenery, and weeds are lovely snacks, but just be careful where you let them roam, edible plants and flowers taste just as good!
A suitable contained area is usually necessary if you have a large, precious, edible garden and want to keep chickens (trees and larger plants have nothing to fear from chickens).
8. It’s Fun!
For animal lovers, or just to liven the place up a bit, keeping chickens is fun. The various breeds all have different behavioral characteristics and are all interesting in appearance and manner, there are even a few breeds that lay colored eggs!
I personally enjoy keeping chickens, they make being at home more interesting, I think all animals end up adopting some humorous habits, from our old cat(Learn More about – Can chickens eat cat food?) that used to sleep on the chickens eggs, to chickens that enjoy playing hide and seek with their eggs (make sure they have a nest or they start doing that).
They are great to have around!
Shannon Stansberry has been engaged in the business of raising chickens for more than 12 years. In 2016, she accomplished the Agriculture & Natural Resources program at Mt. San Antonio College. At present, she tends to more than 80 chickens on her 4-hectare farm. Shannon regularly shares her insights and experience on how to raise healthy and contented chickens on the platform Typesofchickens.com
