# How Many Chickens for meat?



## Kye022984 (Apr 23, 2010)

I am a newbie to chickens and am wondering how many chickens we would need to serve our meat purposes as well as our egg purposes? We also have two dairy goats and will in the future have a boer doe to also provide some meat kids. There are five of us. My husband and myself and three small children ages 1-5. Just want to also factor in that we will also have some goat meat through out parts of the year as well. Thanks.


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## Pony (Jan 6, 2003)

First lesson of chickens.

Q: How many do you need?

A: Just a few more. 

LOL!

Srsly, how much chicken do you folks eat per week? How many eggs? 

For the goats, how much meat do you generally eat? Will you keep the does for breeding, or butcher all kids born for meat?

Breeds like Nubian are considered good multi-purpose goats: Good for milk and meat production. Now, if you come and join us on the goat forum, you'll get ALL sorts of answers because we all love our individual breeds best.


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## BlackWillowFarm (Mar 24, 2008)

I just figured how many chickens we eat per week and bought enough to last a year. I figured 1 bird week x 52 weeks in a year = 52 birds. I did them in two batches of 26 each. We have a vacuum packer and a deep freeze. Has worked out really well.


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## Wisconsin Ann (Feb 27, 2007)

One thing to remember..the meat you get from a home raised bird will be more firm, and more filling, than the meat from a store bought bird. The first time I roasted one of our own, Artificer took his normal leg/thigh quarter...and barely finished the thigh. He was simply FULL.

If you're going to do the cornish cross bird, figure you'll get a 4 to 6lb dressed weight in app. 8 weeks. A 4lb bird SHOULD feed a family of 5 for a meal (depending on how many of you are teenage boys  ) Then you have the carcass for soup for another meal. 

Like Carla suggested...how many birds do you eat now? Around here, it's probably 2 chickens a month.

Eggs...figure out how many eggs per day you want...baking, hard cooked, omelets in the morning, etc....and then figure 3 hens for 2 eggs per day. (provided you use a GOOD layer for the egg production)


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## Kye022984 (Apr 23, 2010)

Thats funny. I had a friend who was doing a beef co-op here and she swore the meat was more filling than the beef bought in the store. That's awesome. Now I can take her word for it  We usually eat just 8 eggs max every morning. I haven't done a lot of baking lately and we usually don't eat hard boiled eggs. We usually eat chicken for most of our dinner here and there we will eat red meat but not a lot. So, I just bought about 4lbs of chicken (drumsticks and thighs) from the market and it will feed us for a couple days. But that's giving the carcass/bones and skin to the dogs. I could use those for another meal as the above poster mentioned. I always forget about the awesome chicken stock!


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## fishhead (Jul 19, 2006)

I'm single and I raised 50 chickens once. 1/2 dressed out at 7-8 lbs. The other 1/2 dressed out around 4 lbs. It took me 18 months to eat them all and I don't buy much meat at the store.


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