Breeding chicken on your farm is not an easy job, but it is a fun thing to do. Do you agree? Who doesn’t love to get your own chicken meat and eggs in your hand? As a beginner in breeding chicken, there might be some difficulties and challenges you will face.
However, don’t worry too much because everything can be learned thoroughly. If you are a beginner, you can read some tips on breeding chicken for beginners. They will surely give you some ideas on how to develop the chicken breeding.
In breeding chicken, you might face some challenges, especially how to be constant in raising the healthy and happy chickens on your farm. Understanding the challenges and how to cope with them will surely help you to achieve success in breeding the chicken.
Let’s have a look at these 6 main challenges of breeding chicken.
- Zoning
Breeding chickens on your own farm needs a specific-sized of area. Before you start building your own chicken farm, make sure the area where you build it allows you to do so.
Check the regulations on the zoning area before building your own flock. If your area is agriculture or industrial area, then it won’t create any problem. However, if you plan to build a flock in residential or urban area, it might be banned.
- Choosing the right breed
There are a lot of chicken breeds and they have their own strength and weaknesses. Make sure you have done research on the chicken breeds and find the most suitable for you. If you are a beginner, find the breed that is easy to be taken care.
See the chicken breeds you can raise at home. If you are looking for chicken breeds that produce best meat for your business, you can find them in 3 best meat chicken breeds. Or if you plan to have lots of eggs from your chicken, you can raise these 5 most productive chicken breeds.
- Disease outbreak
Disease cannot be avoided, especially when you are raising some animals at home or in the farm. You should think of the worst case, all your chickens die because of disease outbreak, like bird flu diseases that spread all over the world. You need to think of the prevention ways of disease outbreak, such as regular cleaning of the flock or vaccines.
Lice, fleas and diseases are most health problems faced by chickens. You can see the ways on how to identify that your chickens getting attacked by poultry lice. Those small creatures can cause really big problems!
- Decide your chicken’s lifestyle
Different breed of chicken will have different lifestyle and different lifestyle has its own risk. If you raise your chicken in free-range area, you will probably get most of your chickens attacked by predator.
However, if you keep your chickens in the fenced-area, there is a possibility that your chickens get limited activities that might lead to boredom and stress. Think the best lifestyle that you can handle.
You can do some modifications, such as mixture of free-range and fenced-area style. For ideas on building cage, you can see how to build your own chicken cages for your farm.
- Comfort
Comfort determines your chicken production, on both eggs and meat. Thermal comfort is essential as too cold and too hot condition may lead to chickens’ health and welfare impairment.
Make sure the design of your flock is suitable enough for your chickens so they will feel comfortable and produce healthy eggs and meat for you.
- Money and time investment
Raising chickens might be easy as it needs low maintenance. However, it does not mean that your chickens need low monitoring and care. Your chickens still need to be monitored and taken care.
You have to make sure that they are well-fed by providing full water and food. You also need to collect their eggs, secure them at night and maintain the cleanliness of the coop. Besides, you need money to build the coop, waterer and everything needed for their comfort.
If you plan to have a chicken farm, make sure you get help from someone else to maintain everything so your chickens will be well maintained and healthy.
If you plan to have layer chickens at your farm, you need to get the knowledge of these 9 facts of layer chickens that you must know.
Raising chicken can bring lot of success and money if you do it well and properly. Make sure you can handle these 6 challenges and the success in breeding chicken is in your hand. Good luck!