• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Growing Organic Food in Your Backyard

Grow Better Food!
  • Home
  • Start Here
  • Seed Starting
  • Hoop House
    • Grow Tomatoes in a Hoop House
    • Grow Cucumbers in a Hoop House
    • How to Grow Carrots in Winter
    • Winter Sowing Made Better
  • Sponsor
  • Search
  • Subscribe

How Many Chickens Do You Need?

by Bill Brikiatis

Updated: April 14, 2020

So you’ve decided to keep chickens in the backyard. Congratulations! Keeping chickens is one of the best ways of growing great tasting food.

But one of the first questions you face is how many chickens do you need? Here’s some things to think about to help you decide.

How many chickens do you need for your garden?

One of the most difficult challenges I face is providing enough soil amendments for my garden. I can’t make nearly enough compost, and I would rather make my own than buy it. You never really know what you’re going to get when you buy composted manure at the store.

Farmers have solved the soil amendment dilemma with livestock since the beginning of time. And chickens are probably the most common animal kept for this purpose.

Vegetable gardeners like chickens as much for the nitrogen-rich manure as for their high-omega-3 eggs. Far fewer people keep chickens in their backyard for meat.

Let’s take a sec to get the legal words out of the way. This article may contain affiliate links. That means if you click and buy from my partners, I will make a tiny amount of money. This in no way affects my recommendations.

An Easy Formula

The formula I used for determining the number of chickens is from the chicken raising guide called The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, by Harvey Ussery. Here’s how it goes:

How Many Chickens
Ussery suggests that you start with the average number of eggs that your family eats.

You start with the average number of eggs your family consumes per day.

Let’s say, for example, you have a family of four that consumes on average one egg per day or seven eggs per week.

For every three laying hens, you get an average of two eggs per day. So three hens would be enough for 14 eggs per week.

But there are a couple of other important points to keep in mind:

  1. You will have more eggs in the spring and summer and fewer eggs during the rest of the year.
  2. Once you start eating great tasting, fresh eggs, your family will likely want more.

So it’s better to estimate for the minimum rather than the average. That way you’ll probably have enough.

Other factors

Besides eggs, there are also other factors to consider.

It’s important to keep in mind that chickens are social animals and they do better in a flock than solitary. So one or two chicken is probably not enough if you want happy chickens.

Chickens produce about 130 pounds of manure a year.

The other point that Ussery makes is it’s always better to start small and work your way up than to start big and maybe get overwhelmed.

For me, the most important factor is how much compost can I get? There never seems to be enough.

A hen produces about 130 pounds of manure a year. That may seem like a lot, but remember that it will shrink to one tenth of its weight when fully composted.

Even if you take bedding into account, a small garden could easily accommodate the compost from six hens. So from a soil amendment standpoint, the more the merrier.

Are you raising chickens in the suburbs? How many do you keep and why? Let us know by commenting below.

Related Articles:

  1. What is “Deep Litter” in a Chicken Coop? Does it smell?
  2. Can Chickens Eat Weeds?
  3. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work

Suburban Hobby Farmer is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Pin
Share
Tweet

Filed Under: 2. Intermediate -- A Little Difficult to Complete, Compost Tagged With: Chickens

Primary Sidebar

Meet the Blogger

Bill Brikiatis

Hello! I’m Bill Brikiatis. I started this website in 2010 to help you get better at growing organic food in your backyard.

I’ve been growing fruits and vegetables for nearly all my life. And I'm over 60.

That’s not to say that I don’t make mistakes. I make plenty, then I write about them so both you and I get better at growing great things to eat.

You can read more about me and Suburban Hobby Farmer on my about page.

Most Popular on SHF

  1. How to Get Free Seeds from the U.S. Government. It's Easy If You Know How
  2. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets in the Vegetable Garden
  3. Which Seed Starting Mix is Best? I Tested Them
  4. What Are the Benefits of Pruning Tomato Plants?
  5. I've Used a Rain Barrel Downspout Diverter for 10 years. Here's What I Know.
  6. Grow Millions of Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  7. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the One I Bought.
  8. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  9. Can you plant potatoes in the fall? Absolutely!
  10. What are the Best Potting Benches for Vegetable Growers?

Search This Site for Articles

Growing Tomatoes

Growing Tomatoes

Learn Everything I Know About Growing Tomatoes

Extending the Growing Season

  1. A Hoop House is a Tomato Growing Machine
  2. Coldframe Kits Make It Easy to Extend the Growing Season
  3. Grow a Million Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  4. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the Three I Considered
  5. Growing Salad Greens in Winter. Here's How to Do It
  6. Better Tomatoes with Walls O Water
  7. How to Grow Carrots in Winter
  8. Winter Sowing Made Better

Improving Soil

  1. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets
  2. Three Important Soil Building Techniques
  3. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  4. What is "Deep Litter" in a Chicken Coop?
  5. Why Grow Cover Crop and Which Ones?
  6. Mulching Raised Garden Beds
  7. Five Gardening Ideas from Building Soils Naturally
  8. Should You Use Neptune's Harvest Liquid Fertilizer?
  9. How to Use Aquarium Fish Water to Fertilize Plants
  10. Using Chop & Drop to Improve Your Soil
  11. How to Improve Your Soil
  12. What is OMRI? Why Should Organic Gardners Care?
  13. Winter Ground Covers for Vegetable Gardens

Collecting Water with Rain Barrels & Downspout Diverters

  1. My Automatic Downspout Diverter
  2. Rain Barrel Downspout Diverters
  3. Fixing an Overflowing Rain Barrel
  4. Oatey Mystic Rainwater Collection System / Downspout Diverter

Composting Articles

  1. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  2. How to Compost Faster
  3. Worm Composting Not So Easy
  4. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  5. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  6. Free, 77-page Worm Composting Guide
  7. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  8. The Best Worm Food
  9. Making Compost in a Chicken Coop

Footer

My Recommendations

  • Start Here
  • Subscribe
  • Things I Like

SHF Info

  • Advertising Info
  • Affiliate Policy
  • Article Sponsorship
  • Privacy

Blogger

  • About
  • Contact

© Suburban Hobby Farmer 2020