Are Back Yard Chickens WORTH THE HASSLE? Smells? Nasty? Flies? Annoying?

Howdy folks. Welcome back to the Stony Ridge Farm. Today, what we gonna talk about is chickens, raising chickens, having chickens, the pleasure of owning chickens, and whether you save money by raising chickens and having your own eggs. We're going to talk about all the purposes of having and owning and keeping chickens, and all the real hard work that goes along with this, which is not a lot of hard work. They feed us. They take care of us. They do a lot of stuff for us and let's just have some fun and have an open discussion. So, if your wife is trying to talk into getting chickens or if your husband's trying to talk into getting chickens or your lover is, this might be the video to show them cuz it's so And that's Randy. [laughter] Ry's not going to shut up the whole time. So, get ready, Hey Randy, welcome back to the Stony Ridge Farm. That's Randy the Rooster. And today we're going to be talking about chickens. We love to have chickens on the property on the farm and they love us just like Randy right here. So, is it worth it to have chickens? I guess is the big question that a lot of people are asking themselves. You're probably watching this right now and you're That's annoying. [laughter] Uh you're watching this right now and you're showing your wife, your husband, your boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever else. Get some chickens. It'd be cool. Eggs are super expensive. If you're buying chickens to save money on eggs, you're you're barking up the wrong dag on tree, guys. You're just barking up the wrong tree. First of all, if you've got roosters and you live in town, expect to be complained about. You hear Randy over here? Ry's great. Ry's who fertilizes the eggs for us. And Randy has been absolutely awesome. He protects the hins, but can he protect him from a serious predator? [screaming] Not really. He's establishing his dominance with me. He doesn't crow unless I come out the door or he hears the chickens across the farm crowing. That's just Randy. That's what he's going to do. So, right here, we got Randy the rooster and we've got three hens. While Ry's over here crowing and showing off, do you need a rooster to produce eggs? Go ahead and answer that question. Look at your family member, your spouse, whoever. No. The answer is no. We don't need no stinking rooster to produce eggs. The rooster is a male. Does a woman need a man to produce her eggs? [screaming] No. According to Randy, no. So, we've got four, one, two, three, four hens in here. And Randy the rooster. I like to have fertile eggs because we'll hatch hatchlings from these roosters. So, we never have to buy chickens again once we bought them once. These are American breeze chickens and they're good for eating. They're a dualpurpose birds. There's several different types of bird you can get. You can get a commercial egg layer and the cheapest ones I've ever seen to raise are the white leg breed. They'll lay just about 365 eggs a year. [screaming] Randy, they'll lay about 365 eggs a year. just about every day they're going to lay if you treat them right. Do the chickens lay in as much in the winter time as they do in the summer? The answer is no. How can I increase egg production? Chickens lay eggs based on light cycles. So, if you want your chickens to lay eggs, go ahead, Randy. Go ahead, bud. >> [laughter] >> If you want your chickens to lay eggs in the winter time, [screaming] [laughter] put a light in your chicken coupe and let that light burn till about 8:00 p.m. so that the chickens get a longer day and they'll start laying. If you want to really trick them up, put a light with a timer on it and have it come on in the middle of the night and then cut back off and come in the middle of night and cut back off. If you do that, you'll start to get double ykers and all kinds of fun stuff. And you will get double yolk eggs once in a while no matter what. So, anyhow, the goal with Randy here is to annoy me to death and to help these chickens to have fertile eggs. Is it gross to eat fertilized eggs? There is such a minute amount of the [screaming] things that Randy produces in order to fertilize those eggs. It's just one cell, one organism, one cell, one yolk, and one sperm cell is all it takes to fertilize an egg. And we'll show you guys hatching eggs out here very soon because I'm saving them back. We're getting into spring. We need to repopulate the chickens, especially over there in the pasture. So, these chickens serve not only as egg producers for me and as meat producers. They also serve as companions and kind of pets. They're pettish. They're fun. They're enjoyable. I love to spend time with them. If everything in your day is going bad, you can come down here and grab a lounge chair and sit down and watch them chickens peck the ground and listen to Randy Crow and your mind will just simply clear and everything will come clear to you. I call that chicken therapy. But the more Randy Crows, the worse your chicken therapy gets. Right now, I got these four hens in here. I'm getting three to four eggs a day, something like that. It's winter time right now. I'll still tend to get maybe one or two in the really coldest part of the winter time. And in summertime, they basically lay every single day. They serve several purposes. Meat, eggs, fertilizer, companions, and we'll talk about fertilizer. Well, over here is a garden. There's a reason why the garden is right beside the chicken coop. [screaming] Randy, shut up. [laughter] The garden's right beside the chicken coop because these guys put out the best dang fertilizer you can even think of. So, I take the eggshells and I put them in the garden. I take the chicken manure, I put it in the garden. I eat the eggs, I consume them. If I want to eat Randy, I can eat Randy. But he's kind of my buddy. So, we don't [screaming] we won't be thinking we don't even talk about that around Randy, right? [laughter] If you live in town and you decide you want to get chickens, don't get a rooster. Don't get a rooster. Especially one that's loud like Randy, cuz he's going to worry the crap out of you and your neighbors and they're going to be mad at you. No matter what, you got five neighbors. Four of them are going to love it. One of them is going to hate you and turn you into the city every other day. So, you don't want to do that. Okay. What do you need by your chicken coop? You need an outside run for them. Chickens need about two square feet per bird. In other words, this is huge. I could put probably three or four more hins in here and it would be just fine. I clean the chicken coop out probably three or four times a year. You can put shavings in there, wood chips in there, sand in there, whatever you want to put in the chicken coupe. So, you can utilize that manure as fertilizer on your garden. I've been growing this garden right here for almost 10 years now, and I've never put fertilizer on it. Every bit of it [screaming] has come from the butts of these chickens. So, all my fertilizer comes from them. The next thing that they do is they reduce your waste stream. I don't care if you go out to dinner or if you cook at home, there's always going to be some scraps. Whether you're cutting up asparagus or apples or anything that you have leftover food scraps, even onions, you can throw them in there and the chickens will consume them. So, you can offset their diet and your food cost or your feed cost by giving these chickens things like grass clippings and food scraps from your kitchen. If you go out to dinner and you got an unconsumable amount of food or if it's something that you just didn't like, scoop it up, take it home, and feed it to your chickens. It's awesome. It helps keep the food out of landfills. It helps take what you would otherwise throw away and turn it into eggs, food, and fertilizer. So, is it worth it to keep chickens? These four chickens consume somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 lbs of feed every month. That cost about 10 bucks. The chicken coupe. Probably got a thousand bucks in materials, maybe a little bit more in materials of this chicken coupe. When you build your chicken coupe, let's talk about that. Build it up off the ground. You see how this one's up off the ground? If you put it down next to the ground, the manure is going to rot stuff. That's important. And you don't want to be bending over to get eggs. You don't want to have to walk through chicken poopy to get your eggs. You want it easily accessible just like this. Open up. There's a be a video attached to the end of this. I think I got five hens. Someone was in there laying an egg. Uh, be sure you hang your feeder up just like I've got right here. Get it up off the ground. That will help with feed waste. And you're going to get some feed waste cuz the chickens like to dig. They they like to get in here and do that right there. Elevate it up off the ground. That will cut down on the mice. I will tell you this. And you also have to have a roost pole. So you got roost poles here. And this is where the chickens sleep at night. We're well ventilated. Okay, we're in North Carolina. It doesn't get that cold, but it's been as cold as 0° and we've had no issues with the chickens. If you're worried about them, build your coupe like this. There'll be a link at the end of this video to how this is all built. Build your coupe like this and surround that with plastic. Take a staple gun, just put some plastic around it. You just want to keep them out of the wind if it gets really cold and you're in a more northern environment than we are right here. Uh they tolerate these temperatures just fine. I store a wheelbarrow in here when I get ready to clean my chicken coupe out and I'll do that in the spring. I'll slide this little board up and out and I'll just take a rake and rake it all off into my wheelbarrow and then I'll have that for the garden or I'll have it for the compost pile. If you want to burn up your garden vegetables with too much nitrogen, put fresh chicken poop on it. It needs to age probably 6 months to a year before you can put it on the garden. Awesome. We're going to be planting the garden very soon. Now you guys know what the rub is. Chickens are fun. They're good companions. They save waste. They annoy you. [laughter] Don't get a rooster if you live in town. They save your waste. They feed you with the with the quality meat. You know what's in your food. You know what's in your eggs. You're not dumping food in the landfill anymore. And it'll change the way that you live just by owning chickens. Plus, if you got a really long day and you're stressed out or if you have kids, how curious and fun is it for the kids to just come down here and sit? You'll see in the floor of this chicken coop looks kind of nasty. Well, went to the grocery store and they're giving away avocados. I got a whole case of avocados and dumped them in there. The chickens are chowing down on them. They're going to turn them rotten avocados into delicious eggs for me and fertilizer. Thank you guys so much. Just wanted to talk to you a little bit. If you're fighting with your spouse, if you're fighting with your partner, or if you're fighting with yourself, whether you want to get chickens, it's so rewarding. It's so fun. It doesn't stink. They're not nasty. If you keep it clean, you'll never regret it. You've got such a multi-purpose critter here that's a companion that feeds you, that feeds the garden, and saves waste. There's no better way to live your life than having a life with chickens. Thank you guys so much. Hit that like button, subscribe to the channel. Love to have you back here on the Stony Ridge Farm with me. Right on Q. See y'all next time. >> Come on down [music and singing] to the Stony Ridge. Bring your wife and bring your kids. We're living life pure and sweet. That's the way it's supposed to [music] be. Stony Ridge. Cool, bud. Let's drop them. Oh man, I cannot believe I dropped those eggs and didn't break them. They're going to name them as we put them in. Except for goat chicken thinks he's a goat. Yo, Vanilla. This is Vanilla Ice. Cheryl Crow. Mike Mike Tyson to Snow White. BETSY, Don King, Juliana, Redhead, Maryanne, Alalfa, Powder, Powder, and Little Jerry Garcia. Randy, shut up. Y'all come back now. You here?