The past two weeks my columns in the Tyler Morning Telegraph have focused on raising your own eggs at home. There seems to be a renewed interest in this topic and it might have something to do with the increasing food costs at the grocery store, a desire to know how your food was raised, or a little bit of both.
Before you start out, make sure your city or subdivision does not have any regulations keeping you from raising chickens. Also know that you might want to only raise hens in order to reduce stress on your layers and to keep the noise level down. Roosters are only needed if you are wanting to produce fertile eggs to raise your own chicks. So keeping them out of the henhouse will lower feed costs a little and keep the neighbors happy.Under normal conditions, you can plan for at least 3 to 6 eggs per hen per week, so plan your final number of hens based on your family's normal egg consumption or if you plan to sell some to the neighbors.
The following links are useful to search when planning to raise your own eggs at home:
Oklahoma State University has a web site that describes most of the major, and some of the more unusual breeds of chickens in the US and world that includes information on mature size and often egg color. As a rule of thumb, chickens with white ear lobes lay white eggs and those with red ear lobes lay colored eggs.
Mississippi State University has a web site that contains information on starting a laying flock, youth poultry projects, and has great information on poultry diseases.
Texas A&M University has a web site with a lot of information on poultry related topics, including how to process poultry at home.
For those interested in Pasture Poultry, here is a good publication on that topic from ATTRA (National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service).
