We do not raise chickens on our homestead.
We have a chicken coop, built and used by the originating family. It serves mostly as a garden shed right now.
We talk about raising chickens or ducks, but a few key obstacles keep us from taking any action yet. First and foremost, I want to find an alternative to hauling feed over the ridge. Also, we have a really good relationship with our neighborhood predators: mink, ermine, and marten, (okay, maybe not so much the martens—see “Wait Til ‘Marten’ Comes!”) that keep our rodent pest populations in check. I don’t want to change that dynamic by offering them poultry to raid. Finally, there’s the issue of working out an off-grid method for keeping them warm in the winter. I know several ways to do that, it’s just a matter of setting it up.
So, for now, we raise no chickens of our own, but we buy almost all of our eggs from Hainesites who do.
A couple of dozen local chicken eggs (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
