Chooks are the ideal animal for the suburbanite looking for a more sustainable, more self-sufficient lifestyle. They are easy to get and easy to feed and look after and produce lots of things. There can be surprising psychological benefits as well. Just sitting in the back yard on a summers evening in amongst the fruit trees with the vegie patch on one side and a few chooks pecking about the yard on the other can be very relaxing and a wonderfully satisfying experience.
What Chooks do for you -
1. Eggs - They will produce eggs. How many will depend on the breed, how old they are, the time of year, etc but they will produce eggs. With luck they will produce lots of them so if you are going to keep chooks make sure you keep a list of your favourite egg recipes handy.
Your eggs will also be free of any adulterants. Back in the day, I was at a paper conference in Melbourne and became friends with a gentleman from BASF (they make dyes among other things). In a conversation I had with him he explained that the commercial process of egg production is so rough on the chooks, the egg yolks come out white. His job was to go around to the egg producers and help them work out how much dye needed to be added to the chook feed to get the desired yolk colour. He even showed me the colour card they used. Shortly after that we got our own chooks.
2. Cultivate the soil – chooks love to scratch and to dig the soil, this can be a good thing if it is done in an authorised manner by keeping them in a chook tractor as we do. It can be a neutral thing if the chooks stay in the run or area you have prepared for them, or it can be a bad thing if they cultivate in an ‘unauthorised manner’ ie they escape and buzz cut your veggie patch down to ground level in an amazingly short amount of time. Whatever you do, chooks will dig and scratch and you need to be aware of that and be prepared to use it or at least contain it to areas where they won’t do any damage.
3. Produce manure – Again this can be a blessing or a curse but if you grow your own veg it will be a blessing. If you use a chook tractor the chooks will, for the most part, distribute and dig it in by themselves, one of the attractions of the chook tractor idea. If you use the standard chook shed and run, you will need to collect and distribute it yourself, whether to you own plants or by passing it on to gardening friends.
4. Entertainment and companionship – as mentioned above, it is great to just sit and share your backyard with your chooks, or to watch their antics as they go about their day doing ‘chooky’ things. Also, while chooks may not be scintillating conversationalists, they are great listeners. They also add a sort of ‘aliveness’ to your place. Back in the day I was going to Europe with my family for Christmas but they had left three days before me, we were going to be gone for over a month so the chooks were being sat by some friends, and it was an interesting feeling to be in the backyard without the chooks. Amazingly enough it felt dead without their presence. Just sayin’.
5. Meat – you can produce your own meat if you have a mind to, whether by raising a breed or crossbred chook specifically designed as a meat chook or by raising a ‘dual purpose’ breed and then eating them at the end of their laying lives. I have despatched and prepared chooks for eating but I can’t say that I am particularly comfortable with it, but on the other hand you can give them a good life, with one bad day at the end. Either way it is personal choice.
6. Feathers – every year in autumn all of your chooks are going to change their feathers, it may quickly or slowly, but each bird will totally replace their entire covering of feathers. So do you want to fool around with quill pens, or perhaps stuff a pillow or comforter (depending on how many chooks you have)? In any case, feathers are a great slow release, high nitrogen fertiliser for use in the garden.
7. Carbon dioxide – OK, this one may seem a little bit ‘out there’, and while I have read about it I have not tried it myself. If you grow food, or anything else for that matter, in a greenhouse, by allowing your chooks to spend some time in there the CO2 they respire can build up and encourage faster plant growth rates.
8. Ethical actions – If you have ever seen how chooks are factory farmed (for meat or eggs) you will be aware of just how nasty, brutal and short their lives are. Raising and keeping your own chooks ethically in your own back yard means they will have a better life and you will not be supporting a cruel system.
Keeping chooks is a wonderfully productive and fun enterprise. Check with your local council to see what sort of restrictions they have in place because it is important to know what is required for the legal license. It is more important, however, to maintain the social license ie not to crap off your neighbours. We have never had a problem but a few eggs here and there can smooth the way.
As a sample, these are the sorts of restriction you will likely to see put in place by your local council, but they could vary so you still need to check –
- No roosters (this is common in most urban and suburban council areas)
- Maximum 6 to 10 chooks
- You must manage odour, noise & pests, this will also assist with you maintaining the social license.
- The poultry shed must be paved and/or 15.2m from your dwelling
- The poultry yard must be enclosed & cleaned regularly
If you have been thinking about it, give it a go! A friend of mine considered getting chooks for years and recently he decided to give it a go, and loves it. You can too!
