Best Laying Chickens
Are you looking for the best egg laying chicken breed for your backyard chicken flock? All chickens give eggs, of course, but some breeds have much better egg production than others. If you are hoping to have eggs every day from your hens, you’ll want to make sure you have the right type.
White Leghorn
The White Leghorn is the most popular breed around the world, and with good reason. The Leghorn hen can lay about three hundred eggs per year. Leghorns mature early and start laying at 4-5 months of age.
The eggs they lay are slightly off white in color and large. The hens are nervous and will avoid human contact if possible, however, so they are not always good as pets.
White Leghorns, like most good layers, rarely go broody, so if you want to hatch out some eggs to raise chicks, you will need either another breed to set them, or an incubator.
Winter can mean frostbite in a Leghorn’s comb, so they are not good cold-weather hens.
Rhode Island Red
These are an aggressive breed, but Reds are great brown egg layers.
These hens do well in confinement and are a hardy breed, but they are prone to frostbite in their combs.
Producing medium brown eggs, Reds are ready to lay within 5-6 months.
Red Star and Black Star Sex linked
Well-known for their large eggs of brown color and productive egg-laying, this breed is very popular. They are docile and make very good pets that do well with children.
This breed will lay during the winter months and has one of the best feed to egg ratios of all breeds. While these hens will begin laying as early as 4 1/2 months, they usually take 6 months before they are laying daily.
The breed gets its name because of its sex linked gene that causes chicks to have different colors, making it easy to separate females from males. This makes it easy not to buy unwanted roosters.
Most family projects or small business egg sellers like this breed.
Roosters or No Roosters?
For a purely egg-laying production, there is no need to keep roosters. For egg fertility, however, you will obviously need roosters. If you do not plan to increase your flock size or raise broilers, then you will not need a rooster.
{Productivity Limits of Hens}Hens produce eggs for 3-4 years. At about that time, 3 years of age, you will see a decline in the number of eggs produced, and the laying will become erratic. Older hens beyond their egg producing prime can be taken as stew pot or dumpling stock.
Of course, some may prefer to put their best layers who’ve gone beyond their prime out to pasture.
For much more information, please click on Best Laying Chickens. Check out Chicken Coop Designs if you’re thinking about constructing your own chicken coop.
