10 New Year’s Resolutions for the Backyard Chicken Owner

Each year, people around the world decide on New Year’s Resolutions for themselves.  Whether it’s going to the gym, reading more books, saving money etc. 

Here are some ideas (I’m not expecting anyone to do all of these at once) for New Year’s Resolutions for those of us who love and raise chickens. 

01 Spend More Time with your Chickens

Spending time with pets is good for us in general and the same goes for spending time with our chickens.  It helps keep us more active, reduces cortisol (stress hormone), relieves anxiety, encourages routines, and provides a fantastic form of entertainment. 

Perhaps this year you can make a resolution to spend more time with your chickens for your chickens sake as well as yours.

02 Keep Chickens Safer

There tend to be two different lines of thought when it comes to keeping our chickens safe. 

There are those that go out of their way to do everything possible to build an impenetrable fortress with multiple defenses against predators for their chickens. 

While others, more of less put their chickens out to pasture free ranging and whatever will be will be.

Whichever of these two you are, if you’ve had issues with predators in the past, then you might want to set your chickens safety as one of your resolutions for the year.  Invest a little time and money and fortify your chickens areas to ensure their safety. 

03 Try Fermenting Feed

If you’ve never heard of fermenting feed before, it’s a great way to bulk up your feed while enhancing the nutritional value of what your chickens eat. 

04 Build Your Own Chicken Feeder

There are all kinds of chicken feeders on the market and many of them have their pros and cons, one of the biggest cons, however, can be the price tag on them.  If you’re needing a new feeder for your chickens but want to unleash your creative side then you can definitely DIY your chickens a new feeder. 

05 Grow a Chicken Garden

Chickens love to eat and home-grown fruit or veggies can make a wonderful snack to supplement their diet with. Whether you’re an avid gardener or not, creating a garden space for your chickens will help keep them fed as well as provide entertainment for them. 

06 Try Some New Egg Recipes

Even keeping a couple chickens might eventually lead you to have an over abundance of eggs.  You may find yourself wondering what to do with so many as they gradually fill all of your baskets and take over your kitchen counters! 

While you can start giving them out to friends and family or even selling them (to help pay for that chicken feed), you can also experiment with some new recipes that will incorporate more eggs. 

07 Make a Flock First Aid Kit

It’s definitely preferable if nothing ever happens to our flock, but no matter how good we are at keeping out chickens safe, inevitably there will come a day when one gets sick or injured. 

For those cases, it’s a great idea to have a first aid kit on hand to tend to a variety of common health issues.  If you don’t already have one, then this might be a New Year’s Resolution you may want to consider. 

08 Spend Less Money (so you can buy more chickens)

People will often joke how the eggs they get from their chickens are the most expensive eggs they’ve ever bought due to the expense of keeping chickens.  The initial costs of buying or building coops and runs can definitely be pricey, but there are ways to mitigate these costs and make chicken raising affordable. 

Perhaps this can be the year where you find different ways to feed your chickens for less or make a coop out of cheap reclaimed material.  The less you spend on these initial costs, the more money you have to afford more chickens, right?

Speaking of buying more chickens….

09 Expand Your Flock

If you’ve been thinking about expanding your flock (since chicken math is a very real thing), then you might want to set that as one of your goals to accomplish this year. 

There are many different ways to enlarge your flock.  You can buy chicks from stores, online hatcheries, local farms and more.  Or, if you have a rooster in with your flock, you could try hatching your own with a broody hen or an incubator.

Just make sure you don’t expand your flock past your coops capacity. 

10 Try Raising a Different Kind of Poultry

Chickens are often thought of as a gateway animal into homesteading or farming.  They’re typically very easy to take care of and bring with them benefits such as a sources of eggs and unending entertainment.  If you’ve been raising chickens for while and have been thinking about adding a different type of fowl to your flock, then this may be the year! 

Ducks, geese, quail, guineafowl, and turkeys are all excellent choices for adding to your collection.  All come with some unique benefits and may just be worth being raised by you.