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Getting Started with Chickens

By Johnny Taylor

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Hi, I’m Farmer Johnny.

I want to talk to you today a little bit about some chickens.

Chickens are one of the easiest things to do if you want to get into the farming thing a little bit. I just want to tell you a few ways that you can get started.

First thing you can do is you can buy some grown chickens already and that gets you started real quick.

Second thing you can do is you can go to just your local farm supply place, like a Tractor Supply or Co-op and buy baby chicks. They usually get these in the springtime and you can usually just buy one or two or ten, however many you want. That’s one of the easiest ways to do it.

The other thing that you can do is you can buy some chicks from a local farmer, somebody that’s raising chicks already, and you can get started that way.

I would recommend if you have a place to do it, would be to start out and just buying some baby chicks from your local Farm Supply place and getting your feet wet, so to speak.

There’s a few things you need to do to get ready for that. The first thing you need to do is get a place ready for your chicks before you bring them home. You need a little brooder place. Usually if you just have 10 chicks or less you can start them out in a cardboard box with a heat lamp. It’s very easy to do. If you grownups have never done it, you’d enjoy it; but your kids will really enjoy it. You can just start out with a box and a lamp and you can buy your feed from your local Farm Supply place and start out with just raising a few baby chicks and enjoy that. And if you do everything right, if you’re raising chicks for eggs, in about 5-6 months you can start getting your eggs. If you are raising some birds for meat, usually in about 2-3 months you can have some that are ready to eat. So that’s an easy way to get started.

If you want to take a little bit route that’s a little bit harder, you can actually buy an incubator and buy some eggs and incubate those for 21 days and start out in that way.

So there are several different ways that you can get started in the chicken business, and it’s a fun thing and it’s not very hard. Anybody can do it. As you can see behind me here this is just a little, small flock of Debi Pearl’s; and they are just something she started with last year and she’s had a lot of fun with. It doesn’t take much time or effort to do it, so anybody can do it. So just get out there and get started.

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