Yeh, I got burned out on it... we got rid of ours... still gotta nice coop though! My grandfather is going to move it to his house and have chickens when he moves back up here and retires.
@ PT.....We have a chicken farm, 4 large chicken houses....a total of around 65,000-80,000 chickens. We raise them from 1 day old to 6lbs. About a 45 day process.
LOL If I had one tenth of that many I would probably hate chickens. I bet you know about chicken poop.
It is a pretty interesting process, I should post up some pics....but you know PETA ppl might be lurking.
I suppose you could. The eggs would be ok and if they had enough food and water which would probably be easy enough to rig. I would probably still try and have someone come and just check on them. You just really want to be sure they don't run out of water on the warm/hot days.
Right now I have around 80 laying hens. I can easily give them enough food and water to last two or three days, but the eggs need to be gathered. For you folks with the 'nice' yards, I recommend a stationary coop over a tractor. If you don't drag the tractor around often enough, you're going to get spots in your yard. Chickens poop, dig and eat grass. Left for too long you'll have little dug out patches, poopy spots and bare patches. This isn't a problem in our yard because it's really just a farm yard but it may not go over so well in a subdivision. In my big hoop coop I put sand down. If you don't have many chickens, you can rake out the poop easy enough. The sand dries up turds nicely too. I highly recommend it for a stationary coop floor and run. I wouldn't get a rooster if I lived in a subdivision either. To get my chickens back into the coop, I lead most of them back in with treats. (bread, scrambled eggs, fried rice.. etc.) Then I'll pick up the others and put them in. My chickens are really tame and usually don't try to run from me. In fact, some of them I can't get to leave me alone.
I grew up across the road from a dairy farm. I moved back across from the same farm 50 years later in 2007. LOL One year the farmer decided he wanted to raise chickens. So he sold the cows, built a bunch of chicken coops, some small, some large 2 story thingys. He had thousands of birds. We used to work there for pennies gathering and grading eggs into large, Xtra large etc. You walk into one of the houses and start gathering eggs. Some of the damn hens were violent and would bite. We'd grab them buy the neck and give it a whirl. The rest of the hens in the house would devour that dead hen in no time. Pure canibles. LOL I got tired of chicken poop. Back in that day... part of our job was to set leg hold traps on elevated post to catch hawks and owls that tried to kill the birds when they were young. Then when winter was coming on we had to capture all the chickens for transport to where ever they killed them for meat. Farmers didn't keep chicken through the winter months then because of the short daylight hours and reduced egg laying. When we couldn't catch one... we just flung the damn leg grabber at her and killed her. The others would destroy the evidence in no time. What a different world we live in now. One of the super neat side benefits was... we got to set aside(hide) eggs to ferment so we would have rotten eggs for Holloween. LOL What a life. LOL I only worked a couple years on the chicken farm and went back to working local dairy farms milking, riding combines and shovelling ****.
Some of mine and a couple ducks that didn't fly south like they were supposed to. There's 2 domestic ducks as well that I couldn't bring myself to butcher after I did the first 2 as they get scared and shiver/shake -not like the chickens that don't seem to have a clue or care. I let them all free range till below 30 deg. and snow covered. I will not do ducks again(at least not the domestics) because they are the messiest pooping birds and get the water all over the coop too. btw - got the pics with an old WGI S2 game cam just testing it out for use as security/decoy at the deer camp.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=4615+...t+Aurora,+New+York+14052&gl=us&sqi=2&t=h&z=18 the above is where we live (A) ... not thinking a rooster will be a problem here :D That's how my brother's (Slabcrappy) chickens are ... they follow him around like the Pide Piper .. lol
