The beginning of our homestead - chickens, ducks

Chickens

Like most people, our first livestock animal was the chicken. We bought 6 chicks from a local farm. They were 2 Easter eggers, 2 Rhode Island red, a buff orpington and a barred rock. A few months later, we wanted to start raising some chickens for meat and get some breeding stock. So we order 40 more chickens. These were a mix of buff orpington, black Australorp, Rhode Island red, speckled Sussex and white giant. We have decided to keep the black Australorps as our breeders and raise them in the future.

Ducks

Around the same time we get the second batch of chickens, we also get 15 ducks. They were 8 Rouen and 7 Cayuga. We kept a drake and 3 hens from each for breeding this year. We really like duck so a few months later we ordered 25 Pekin ducks to raise for meat. We had some of the Pekin ducks much longer than we planned but finally finished butchering them. We both like the Rouen and Cayuga ducks better and won't be raising Pekin again.

The coop

We have a mobile coop so we can move the chickens around the property. Our coop was built using Justin Rhodes chicksaw plan(http://abundantpermaculture.com/mobile-chicken-coop/). We use portable electric netting around the coop to keep the chickens where we want them and provide protection from predators. The combination of electric netting and mobile coop has worked well for us. Most of the chickens stay in the fence, there are a few that will not be contained and escape most days. It has worked well at predator protection. We have only lost 1 bird to predators.