The Best Backyard Chicken Breeds: A List of Top Birds for Pets, Eggs and Meat

By Jill b.

Have You Decided to Keep Backyard Chickens?

Are you overwhelmed by the number of chicken breeds to choose from?

Whether you are an urban homesteader/smallholder, chicken lover, survivalist, zombie apocalypse prepper or simply someone looking for some pet chickens, this booklet can help!

The American Poultry Association lists over 100 chicken breeds. Do not risk time and money keeping a breed that is unsuitable for you!

Doing your own research can take hours.This book contains not only information from hours of research but information from personal experience with various breeds.
We have kept chickens since 2008. At its height, our flock of almost 90 chickens included about 25 different breeds.

Includes:

• Basic chicken terms
• The pros and cons of Bantams
• and
  What breeds worked and didn't work for us - a total of 19 breeds covered!

  Topics include:

• Chickens that lay colorful eggs - Blues, Greens and Deep Browns!
• Chickens with calm, quiet temperaments
• Chickens that are family or kid-friendly
• Chickens that do well in urban/city backyards or can handle small-space confinement
• For homesteaders or smallholders - Chickens that can free-range and forage
• Chickens that lay a lot of eggs
• Chicken breeds for meat
• Show Chickens
• Save your time and money! Learn from our experience and mistakes. Pick chickens that are suitable for you!
   

  Don't wait any longer! Grab your copy today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abundant Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781507099810

Jill b.

Self-Reliance -- One Step at a Time Get free e-books at http://byjillb.com Reliance on one job. Reliance on the agri-industrial food system. Are you ready to break free, take control and to rely on yourself? With a no-nonsense style,  Jill Bong draws from her own homesteading experiences and mistakes, and writes books focusing on maximizing output with minimal input to save you time and money. Jill was born and raised in a country with one of highest population densities in the world. Dreaming of chickens and fruit trees, she left the trappings of the big city and is setting up her homestead in an American town with a population of less than 300. Jill writes under the pen name Jill b. She is an author, entrepreneur, homesteader and is the co-inventor and co-founder of Chicken Armor (http://chickenarmor.com), an affordable, low maintenance chicken saddle. She has also written over a dozen books on homesteading and self-reliance. Jill has been mentioned/quoted in various publications including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Denver Post and ABC News. She has written for various magazines including Countryside and Small Stock Journal, Molly Green, Farm Show Magazine and Backyard Poultry Magazine. She holds an Engineering degree from an Ivy League from a previous life. At its height, her previous homestead included over 100 chickens, geese and ducks, as well as cats, a dog, bees and a donkey named Elvis. She currently learning permaculture techniques to apply to her homestead in rural Oregon. Learn more by visiting her site http://byjillb.com.

Book preview

How This Guide Can Help You

When I first embarked on my chicken-keeping adventures, I had no idea how many chicken breeds there were! I always thought a chicken was a chicken. There were white, black and brown chickens. That was it! It was only when we started looking to buy our first brood from mail-order catalogs that I discovered the fantastic range of chickens available: fluffy chickens, chickens with showgirl-looking heads of feathers, giant chickens, tiny chickens and even a chicken with a naked neck! This book is written to complement my book: How to Keep Backyard Chickens - A Straightforward Beginner’s Guide (http://byjillb.com).

Wikipedia lists the number of chicken breeds as being in the hundreds. The American Poultry Association shortens the list to over a hundred. Still, a hundred is a lot of chicken breeds to consider when you are just starting out. There is a lot of free information about chicken and chicken breeds. Unfortunately, a lot of published information is may not hold true for chickens that have been bred for showing rather than for their original traits. It takes a lot of time to wade through all that information. I know. We’ve spent countless hours analyzing and weighing each breed’s traits and how each particular breed might fit to our needs.

We have kept chickens since 2008. At its height, we had almost 90 chickens. We have kept about 25 different breeds. We live in a rural area but the traits that we were looking for in our chickens are similar to those who live in a more urban or suburban setting: we were looking for chickens  with good egg production, docility and had the potential for meat production. Our first flock also included chickens that looked unusual.

When we are home, we let our chickens free-range during daylight hours. However, we also live in an area full of predators and the chickens have to be confined if we feel that it is not safe for them to free-range. Almost all the chickens confine themselves by choice during the long, cold Colorado winters.

This guidebook is a compilation of chicken breeds for a beginner chicken-keeping hobbyist to consider. I wrote it with the hope that it will help you save time and the expense of potentially choosing the wrong breed. The compilation is based on our research, our own experiences, as well as the experiences of other chicken keepers.

chickenposesmall.jpg