5 Reasons to Keep Chickens Besides Eggs

If you’re new to homesteading and have yet to even think about adding livestock to the homestead, I’d like to share with you five reasons to keep chickens even if you don’t eat the eggs. Even vegan homesteaders will find value in the many things a small flock of chickens can help you accomplish on your land. From natural pest control to free fertilizing to simple entertainment value, chickens are called the gateway homesteading animal for a reason!

When you’re new to homesteading, especially if you’ve come from an urban background like me, the idea of keeping an animal alive may be overwhelming. 

However, as your grow into your homesteading activities, you will probably see quickly that this lifestyle is a lot of work! The truth is, most of us can use all the help we can get to see to all the tasks to be done.

A Few More Livestock Articles When You Have Time:

3 Best Places to Find Poultry for Sale

10 FAQs of Homestead Livestock

Stop! You Aren’t Ready for Homestead Animals

If you have the space, and it’s legal where you live, allow me to walk you through five different functions that chickens can perform on your homestead.

• These little ladies can really lighten the load of your homestead chores!

5 Reasons to Keep Chickens Besides Eggs

There’s probably more backyard chicken keeping information online these days than for any other potential homestead livestock. It’s true that chickens are called the gateway animal into the homesteading lifestyle.

It’s not surprising when you consider that chickens are:

• small livestock that don’t take up too much space
• can be friendly and personable
• don’t require milking, hoof trimming, or shearing
• are good foragers and can eat a wide variety of food, even scraps!

But what if you are on the fence about livestock and aren’t really sure you want or need the responsibility?

What’s the Point of Having Chickens?

Ah, I’m so glad you asked that question! Today’s article is going to cover five areas of homestead life with which a chicken can help you out even if you never eat one of her eggs for breakfast.

1. Chickens lightly till the soil and fertilizing while they go.
2. Chickens eat bad bugs from both the soil and plants.
3. Chickens eat kitchen scraps and leftovers.
4. Chickens can turn your compost pile for you.
5. Chickens can keep the weeds down.

In permaculture parlance, we say that a homestead element stacks functions if it performs more than one job. 

• For example, the herb borage produces flowers and leaves that are edible to humans and livestock. It also happens to be a bee-friendly plant, attracting pollinators of all kinds to the garden.
• Borage is also useful as a green manure plant. That means that it produces so much stalk and leaf matter throughout the season that you can pull it up and lay it down to act as mulch in the garden beds. 
• Or you can simply add it to the compost pile.
• It also reseeds easily, so if your winters are mild, it will sprout in the spring without you having to plant it or tend it at all.
• Borage performs at least five different jobs; in other words, it definitely stacks functions!! To think about this more in order to apply it your homestead design, please read our article:

——->>>Stacking Functions on the Homestead

Returning to our chicken conversation, let’s talk about the various ways chickens can stack functions and justify their place on the homestead.

Keep Chickens to Lightly Till the Soil

It’s in the nature of a chicken to use their clawed feet to constantly scratch the soil. They do this to find bugs and roots to eat.

The result is a light tilling of the soil around the homestead. While we don’t want to deeply till soil unless we absolutely have to, light scratching at the surface can:

• keep the soil loose
• expose damaging insects
• cut up botanical material and till it into the surface of the soil
• integrate mulch or compost we put down in the chickens’ path
• lay down fertilizer as they go

To make the best use of this habit of scratching, it’s best to provide a moveable pen for your flock so you can take them to all the areas that have soil that needs a little loving tilling.

• If you don’t have the space or the materials to provide a moveable pen, you use moveable fencing to direct your flock where it needs to go. For example, at the end of the growing season, you can move the flock into the vegetable garden to scratch up the soil in the beds.

If you put down a layer of compost or mulch on the garden beds before you let them in, the chickens will incorporate that for you with their claws.

Keep Chickens to Eat Bad Bugs

While they’re in the garden scratching and tilling, the chickens will also root out damaging insects from the soil and from plant material on the surface of the soil. 

Chickens are not vegetarians – they love to eat bugs!!

This is especially helpful in the spring before you plant and in the late fall as you’re cleaning up in the veggie garden.

• You can also put your chickens in the orchard or around your fruit trees periodically throughout the year to eat emerging bugs from the soil, as well as larvae that gets laid in the rotting fruit on the orchard floor.

You can also grow bugs like soldier flies to supplement your chicken’s feed and reduce the cost of their feed bill.

Keep Chickens to Reduce Kitchen Waste

Chickens will pretty much eat anything, even chicken. Ew, gross.

When you have even a small flock of chickens, you will never have to throw out kitchen waste again. Here are some examples of common kitchen scraps that chickens will eat:

1. Nearly all veggie scraps. Some exceptions include onion skin, avocado skin and nut, winter squash peels, potato peels (only because they can be toxic when green). However, if your avocado and winter squash skins still have fruit inside, the chickens will clean all that out. The rest can be left to compost in the pasture, or retrieved to feed your compost pile.
2. Leftover carbs like bread, pasta, and crackers. Be judicious with these foods, as you would with yourself. Anything store bought may harbor nasty preservatives, dyes, and additives that you would prefer your chickens don’t eat. Maybe you could switch to homemade versions of those items. For example, make your own easy sourdough bread instead of buying it. Then you need have no fear giving leftover bits and bobs to your flock!
3. Trimmings from fruits. If it’s canning season and you have a huge pile of strawberry tops, feed them to the chickens! 
4. Meat and meat trimmings. If you don’t have dogs and cats that would appreciate this protein punch, you can share meat scraps with your chickens. I do strongly suggest you NOT feed them any form of poultry scrap (chicken, turkey, duck, fowl), however. It would be highly unethical to turn an animal into a cannibal without its consent, which a chicken can’t give because it can’t reason it out with you.

Bottom line, you can avoid all kinds of food waste at home with even a small flock of chickens.

Keep Chickens to Turn the Compost Pile

Whatever the chickens won’t eat can be tossed into your compost pile so that it can decompose and become food for your garden. 

However, the biggest pain in the neck about having a compost pile is that you have to turn it every so often to aerate it, control its temperature, and move new material to the center of the pile to be decomposed.

I’d rather turn that job over to someone else and, on my homestead, turning the compost pile is a job that I give to the chickens and the pigs. You can read more about that in the following article:

——->>>How to Turn Compost Easily

Keep Chickens to Mow Weeds & Grass

Chickens are particularly adept at keep down noxious weeds and even grass, if the grass is young. They are most successful with this is the spring with emerging weeds and grasses that are still tender.

Once the weeds and grasses get tall and thicker, you’ll need to turn the bulk of the weeding over to goats.

However, all throughout the growing season, chickens can be moved around to keep soft-bodied weeds trimmed and tidy. They’ll also eat the flowering and seed heads of the weeds, which comes in handy with controlling reseeding.

What’s the Downside of Having Chickens?

As you can see, there are many advantages to keeping chickens. However, as with all livestock, there are some potential drawbacks to keep in mind.

These aren’t deal breakers that should prevent you from keeping poultry, but they do require some forethought and planning when you’re designing systems to make use of chickens.

Chickens Scratch, So Keep Chickens Moving

Chickens do provide light tilling but if you leave them in one place for very long, they can complete decimate an area of life. All the bugs and all the plants can be wiped out completely.

Then they continue to turn over the soil, taking dust baths in it and digging holes.

To prevent this useful habit from becoming a nuisance, keep your chicken moving from one place to another on the homestead.

• How often you need to move them is determined by how large the flock is and how big an area they’re scratching up. Observe and interact with your chickens often enough that you’re familiar with how long it takes them to scratch up the area to benefit and deficit.

Take notes in your homestead journal and establish a good rotation throughout the year.

Chickens Eat Bugs, So Keep Chickens Moving

Another case can be made for moveable chicken fencing or pens because chickens really will eat up any bug they see. Unfortunately, this will mean they eat their fair share of beneficial insects, too.

• Upwards of 70% of the insect population spends some part of their life cycle in the ground. Learn which bugs you want to eliminate and time your chicken assassins accordingly.

For example, the cherry fruit fly overwinters in the soil as a pupae that looks a little like a fat grain of wheat. It typically begins to emerge from the orchard floor in May, or as soon as spring weather has truly warmed and settled in in your area.

This is a great time to move the flock into the orchard to severely reduce their damaging numbers. Keep the chickens in the orchard as long as you can and move them when the orchard grass and turf has been cleaned up a bit.

Bring the chickens back once or twice in the summer, as well as in the fall to eat up any larvae that fall from the cherries to work their way into the soil to pupate overwinter. When they’re done, move them out so they don’t tear up the turf.

Chicken Don’t Eat Everything, So Keep Chicken Garbage Cleaned Up

Those leftover skins, rinds, and onion skins that make their way into the chicken yard but which don’t get eaten by the chickens can simply be raked up and put in the compost bin.

They can also be layered in raised beds where you’re growing new dirt. To learn more about that process, please visit our article:

——->>>How to Amend Soil with Permaculture

Chickens Eat Grass, So Keep Chicken Moving – Again!

Have we mentioned it’s a good idea to keep your chickens on the move so they don’t decimate any given area with their scratching, bug eating, and plant consuming? Yep!

Chickens really are so useful to weed and keep the grass under control, but they need good management to prevent their helpful instincts from becoming liabilities.

To help with this, we recommend these resources:

How to Build an A-Frame Moveable Chicken Tractor from Whole Made Homestead

Build a ChickShaw Mobile Chicken Coop from Abundant Permaculture

Electric Moveable Poultry Fencing from No More Stomach Acres Homestead

Pallet Chicken Run Extension from Attainable Sustainable

Is it Financially Worth it to Raise Chickens?

This is an intelligent question and one you’ll have to work out on your own, because it depends on a lot of variables.

If you currently buy eggs and you make sure to buy local or commercial pasture raised eggs that may even be labeled organic, then you may find that you can save some money raising your own.

You’ll need to find ways to make their feed cheaper and healthier so your hens lay well and you don’t lose your shirt buying rations.

However, it’s important to try to quantify the cost of all the other functions the chickens perform on your homestead.

To help you reduce feed costs, try these:

13 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Save Money on Chicken Feed from Backyard Chicken Project

How to Make Homemade Chicken Feed from Amy Fewell

41 Cheap Chicken Feed Ideas that Will Save You Money from Homesteading Hippy

Is it cheaper to have chickens or buy eggs?

More variables to think about:

• How much did you spend on the coop and run?
• Are their city licensing fees you have to pay to keep chickens legally?
• Do you have a local source for buying chickens or do you have to order your stock from far away, which includes shipping fees?

Another cost savings to consider is that consuming homegrown eggs and meat is simply healthier, so you could potentially spend less money on doctor bills and medications. 

How Messy are Backyard Chickens?

Here’s a liability that you can look at as an asset! Yes, backyard chickens do poop wherever they go, including your deck and your garden, if you let them free range.

However, that means that you have useful poultry manure being spread all over your homestead. Be sure that you don’t range your chickens anywhere with super sensitive plants.

Chicken manure is considered hot, which means it’s full of useful nitrogen but that it needs to mellow a bit before it’s safe to put around baby plants. If the chickens are pooping in your lawn and moving frequently, it shouldn’t be a problem.

However, if you have garden soil that they’re tamping through, give the manure a few weeks and some steady rains to mellow out before you plant inside of it.

One last note: Chickens do poop quite a bit, but when compared to other homestead poultry like ducks and geese, the volume is reasonable.

I sometimes wonder how ducks and geese produce SO MUCH POOP for their size. Seriously.

However, like I said, it’s free fertilizer and you can’t get much more economical than free!

What are the Benefits of Laying Chickens?

If you do want to keep laying hens, you’ll need female chickens. The good news is, you don’t need a rooster to get eggs!

A laying hen will perform all of the functions already outlined above, as well as lay between 200 and 300 eggs a year. Here are 8 of the Best Egg Laying Chicken Breeds. 

if you don’t eat eggs, you can donate, barter or sell them or feed them to your dogs or pigs.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Raising Chickens?

So, to summarize, here’s a quick list of the potential challenges with raising chickens:

• You need to move them a lot so that they don’t decimate turf, plants, and beneficial insects.
• Chickens require feeding and watering like all other livestock, 365 days a year.
• They also require housing and fencing.
• You will have to manage loss, injury, and sickness in your flock.

For more answers to common livestock questions, please visit our article:

——->>>10 FAQs of Homestead Livestock

Here’s a quick list of the potential benefits of raising chickens:

• insect control
• weed control
• free fertilizer
• elimination of food waste
• compost turning
• tilling

And there’s one more benefit that it worthy of mentioning: chickens can make great pets and friends.

Each chicken has a unique personality and some prove to be great friends for children and adults alike. Silkie chickens, especially, can be quite sweet and personable.

To learn more about this special breed of chicken, please visit our post: Why Keep Silkie Chickens?

 

---

–>>Pin This Article for Later<<–