I understand how it is.
- You keep checking out chicken books from the library and reading them instead of sleeping at night.
- Instead of picking out curtain colors, you’re dreaming of feather colors and deciding on backyard chicken breeds.
- Your spouse keeps trying to engage you in conversation but your eyes wander to the shed as you wonder if it could be converted to a chicken coop.
- You set out for the grocery store, but end up at the feed store, standing helplessly in front of the chick cages, paralyzed by their cuteness.
What are you going to do? How can you be sure you’re ready? Where do you even find poultry for sale?!
If you’re new to the chicken world, we hope this will help you feel a little more ready to take the leap! Here are a few other articles to read when you have time:
Backyard Chickens for Beginners
How to Hatch Chicks in an Incubator
3 Best Places to Find Poultry for Sale
The following discussion is about how to buy egg laying chickens, but this information equally applies to buying meat, or broiler, chickens.
Every homesteader who has even a small bit of earth to call their own will most likely keep chickens at some point. Often, our focus in on egg laying chickens, but as prices go up, broiler chickens become equally appealing. (If we can wrap our brains around harvesting chickens for meat.)
Larger scale homesteaders often egg laying chickens to be a good source of income or trade and have a large variety of poultry.
There are four places a new homesteader usually acquires chicks to begin their chicken keeping adventures.
- One is the feed store, a dubious place of health and breed identification.
- The second is a hatchery, either local or online, which may require shipping.
- Thirdly, you can find sweet deals on chickens of any age through your local classifieds after you’ve checked out the poultry’s living conditions.
- For a fourth option, you can purchase chicks from your chicken breeding friend since you know and trust them.
Each of these sources for chicks has merits and drawbacks.
Find Poultry for Sale at Feed Stores
Feed store typically have various systems set up to house baby poultry come spring and some are more effective than others. The babies are kept warm, fed, and watered regularly and don’t lack a single thing, except an owner to come along and claim them.
However, because feed store employees deal with such large numbers of baby poultry, and because there are other things to do in the store, it can often happen that the breeds of the various chicks get mixed in their pens. This is especially true with larger birds like ducks and turkeys.
- Also, more seriously, illness can occur in the animals waiting to be purchased, as well as stress from being in such a busy environment.
For these reasons, I don’t recommend you begin your poultry keeping days by purchasing your stock from a feed store. At least, not in large quantities and not until you know how to spot classic signs of illness and stress.
A few of these signs include:
- Panting and open beaks
- Lethargy and listlessness
- Diarrhea or pasty butt
- Pale wattles, combs, or legs
- Scales and flaking on legs
- Spots or mites/lice
Find Poultry For Sale From Hatcheries
I’ve had chicks shipped to me over the years from several of the big poultry producers that sell online – McMurray, Cackle, Ideal, etc. – and have had good experiences with all of them.
I usually go to whomever has the stock I want – heritage turkeys, a layer I want to try, shipping dates I can work with, non-hybrid meat birds.
Hatcheries are often the places supplying the feed store, so by going directly to the source, you cut out the middleman and some of the potential problems inherent with feed store birds.
Hatcheries, whether local to you or online, can provide you with specific dates for hatching and shipment. This means you can plan for their arrival down to the day.
Poultry houses can also provide large numbers of birds shipped to your local post office with the utmost care.
- Mortality during shipping can occur and so there are usually one or two extra chicks provided to cover that possibility. The shipping charges can be steep given the delicate nature of the cargo, however.
Minimum Shipping Requirements
If you decide to purchase online, be aware that there will be minimum shipping requirements. The poultry houses aren’t trying to cheat you, they’re ensuring the health of the chicks that require a very warm temperature in their first few weeks of life in order to stay healthy.
During shipping, the chicks keep each other warm so shipping more chicks is easier and safer than shipping only a few.
Read up on each poultry house’s shipping policy to learn more. Further, be prepared for breeders not to ship in the dead of winter or the dead of summer because both are just too hard on the chicks.
There are a few places that will ship fewer birds, but they must spend more on insulation for the packaging and you will pay a pretty penny for that service.
Where are the Chicks Shipped?
Another thing to be aware of when ordering online is that the order will go to your post office, not to your house.
- Be sure to call your local post office ahead of time so they know your live chick shipment is coming and have them post a big note for you to be called immediately upon their arrival.
Which can mean as early as 4 am – ask me how I know.
Most post office staff are really good about this and will call you on their own to get the peepers off their hands, but it’s always good to be proactive when you’re talking about chicks.
- Expect to lose a chick or two during shipping as it’s just really hard on their little bodies. The hatcheries account for loss, though, and always give you one or two extra chicks.
If you have a problem or a question, reach out to the company’s customer service right away. Connect with your poultry provider in meaningful ways and establish a good relationship.
Ensuring you have healthy stock that’s the right fit for your family is half the battle of successful backyard chickens.
Find Poultry for Sale Locally
Your town’s or state’s classifieds, especially those online, provide quick, easy to access to poultry for sale. Buying from a classified ad will mean that your purchase is basically local, even if you must travel a bit to get there.
You will also be able to inspect the birds before you purchase—something you can’t do with a hatchery unless it’s local to you.
- The biggest drawback to purchasing from a classified is that you have no recourse if there’s something wrong with the birds.
- If you’re completely new to poultry, you may not be able to tell which birds look healthy and which don’t.
Buying birds from friends or acquaintances may cause similar difficulties for the newbie so be sure to have an experienced chicken keeper come with you.
Things to Think About When Finding Poultry for Sale
Here are a few random things to think about before you purchase birds and while you are looking for poultry for sale.
- Consider how much space you have to allow for poultry housing and grazing. You should plan to rotate your poultry grazing area, if possible.
- If you have a small lot with no room for grazing, plan to have a place to move the coop once or twice a year to let the ground lie fallow. Getting the birds off the ground once or twice a year can break pathogen cycles and keep your birds healthy.
- Decide how many birds you will ultimately want to raise, as well as what their purpose will be. Egg layers and broiler chickens have different needs. For one thing, egg layers stay on the homestead for at least two years; broiler chickens are usually only around for months.
- Will you want to acquire mother hens that will set clutches of eggs and hatch them out to then care for them? If so, you may want to consider Silkie chickens!
- Or will you hatch all your poultry in an incubator and care for them yourself in a brooder? If so, do you have enough space to set up a brooder?
- How many times a year will you hatch and raise out chicks?
- Are you prepared to harvest your own meat birds? Will you need help?
- Which breeds and types are on your priority list? Consider that ducks can be grown for meat and eggs, not just chickens. Turkeys provide more meat per slaughtered bird than a chicken. There are many options!
Maybe No Need for Find Poultry for Sale?
I’ve used the first three sources before and had mixed luck with all of them, the best birds coming from my hatchery purchases. The second time we ordered chicks, I sat looking at:
- the purchase price of each one
- plus the shipping
- plus my time either picking them up or going to get them
and realized that constantly purchasing chicks was not a financially sustainable practice for us.
If you purchase chicks for a few years from these outlets and decide that you’d like to save money on the process, too, maybe it’s time to consider hatching your own chicks. This will require you set up your own breeding program for chickens.
Here are three articles that can help you get started creating a homestead chicken breeding system:
- Ultimate Guide to Successful Chicken Breeding, by Life on Milos Farm
- Breeding Chickens Naturally, by Melissa K Norris
- Organize and Manage Chicken Breeding Pens, by Silver Homestead
Here are some benefits to raising your own poultry:
- Raising your own meat birds or layers can be cheaper than purchasing organic finished fryers and eggs from your local health food store.
- Hatching out your own poultry removes your reliance on outside sources.
- Breeding your own chicks also reduces the need for them to be transported, sometimes from far away. This saves money and fuel.
We started looking into how to raise our own birds as it became apparent, as it so often does in homesteading, that it was really our only choice if we wanted to be self-sufficient.
Chickens from Scratch – a Great Beginner Poultry Resource
There are a lot of very, very worthy chicken books out there and I’ve read and own several of them. The one problem I have with some of them is that they’re simply too long and too wordy for the beginner.
However, when I was first starting out, I had this sinking feeling every one of my chickens was going to die from some dread disease or that I would simply kill them by being too uneducated to care for them.
May I suggest, if you’re new to chickens and want a simple reference guide to their care, that you pick up a copy of Janet Garman’s Chickens from Scratch?
This book isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing reference on raising chickens. It was designed to be a kind of pocket guide for newbies. It’s only about 60 pages long and it doesn’t have any froo-froo sections.
It’s short and to the point. The information given is basic but comprehensive enough that you’re not going to miss anything important for the health and well-being of your new flock.
Janet provides you with all you’ll need to know to get started with your chicks and raise them up to egg production. After that, you’ll be more comfortable in your skills and you can go off and read about butchering or showing at county fairs or breeding your own chicks.
Happy chicken keeping!
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My hubby and I kept chickens for a few years after a neighbor left us a few in the yard in a little dog kennel while we were asleep!! (we were so unprepared!) Luckily we were able to build a decent coop in a few hours and really fell for these animals. They are so entertaining!
We’ve been talking about getting a few more next year.:)
Wow, cheeky neighbor! Still, you have chickens, so I guess life is give and take. Yes, you’ll need more. That seems to be the absolute rule of chickens – you always need more. 🙂