oct 12 2022
problem of the day...... our chickens got old and we had only one left so we gave that to a friend...... there are those who thought finding 3 chickens for shatting would be easy... well it is not.......let me explain the facts of FARM LIFE SOME PEOPLE MAYHAVE MISSED.
say i had 12 chickens laying eggs at the rate of one every 36 hours--- that would be aprox 60 eggs a week..... now at walmart cheapest "i don't care where you got them " eggs are 9 cents------ and happy cage free hens are more like 25 cents an egg... so my chicken earnings would be between $5 and $15.00 per week.. now if i kept a rooster with them ( you know you do not need a rooster to have the hens lay eggs, only if you want to hatch those eggs do you need mr. roo.) and with 12 hens and mr roo... you would be bound to have one or two bunches of chicks. so your 12 would be self fulfilling , barring any complications from mr raccon or mrs coyote.....so you pocket some $10 weekly regularly like clockwork....
now if someone ... like me... comes along and wants to buy 6 chickens-- and they are laying eggs, you will ask what sounds like a heck of a price for those hens, because you will be loosing $5 a week for the next 3 years. like $750 ish..... and half the hens will not be as self fulfilling as 12 hens...
not all hens are "broody hens". .. a broody hen is a motherly sort who will sit on those eggs and carefully turn them over every few hours for the next 21 ish days. motherhood is complicated....some hens don't even start being broody.... roosters are not concerned at all about fatherhood.
you all did not think motherhood involved just sitting on the eggs... ??? no they must be rotated every few hours--- each egg... and the broody hen keeps track without a cell. phone !!
now once the hen is 4 years old and egg laying is a thing of the past... her value has a finite value- usually terminated historically by sunday dinner.
to complicate our quest for hens..... there is a virus.... which in the chicken world is equivalent to ebola. and .. in massachusetts there was one hen in ??? taunton??? who tested positive... which caused the topsfield fair to close it's whole poultry building.. as gatherings of chickens has been banned as far away as wisconsin.
welllll, maybe not wisconsin, but i would not doubt it. at any rate ...i can almost guarentee bringing hens into ipswich would be complicated.. at the moment...
i don't know any more about the virus except it is spread vigorously by paperwork
because it can wipe out thousands of chickens all at once/
just think !!back to the drawing board...
