Crew Duck or Crew Hen?

Eager about including a laying flock to your yard, however having hassle deciding between geese and chickens? Agonize no extra.

Geese are straightforward to herd, have routine egg laying hours, and are superior to chickens by way of pest management. Chickens are extra available, normally cheaper to buy, and are a greater confinement animal, which is a vital issue if area is a matter. Now, are you crew duck or crew rooster?

The next is an excerpt from The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. It has been tailored for the net.

Essentially the most ecologically well-adapted livestock for the maritime Northwest is the duck. One of the best-laying duck breeds lay higher than the best-laying rooster breeds. Geese can free-range year-round in our area. Geese forage rather more of their diets than chickens and eat a bigger number of pure meals widespread right here. Geese eat snails and slugs, and are higher for yard and backyard pest management. Geese love our climate. (I ought to maybe point out my biases. I’ve stored 5 breeds of chickens, two breeds of geese, and 7 breeds of geese. The geese are my favorites, particularly Ancona geese, and at this level, I preserve solely a flock of thirty-two Ancona geese. However I like chickens too.)

Eggs

Many people who find themselves allergic to rooster eggs can eat duck eggs. Just a few persons are allergic to each. I’ve additionally run into occasional individuals who declare to have issues consuming duck eggs who can eat rooster eggs, although this sample appears to be uncommon. Geese from the better-laying breeds and strains can lay properly sufficient to earn their preserve for years. Laying chickens are normally not producing economically past the second 12 months.

Geese are a lot simpler to manage than chickens. Geese of laying breeds might be simply confined with a fence solely 2 ft excessive (so long as they’ve meals and water and their buddies with them). Many of the egg breeds of chickens can fly properly sufficient to recover from any fencing. Holding them out of the backyard or the eaves of the porch typically requires wing-clipping each chook.

Geese have a tendency to put eggs which might be greater than rooster eggs from a breed of equal measurement. Some dual-purpose duck breeds (comparable to Anconas) lay eggs which might be very huge for the scale of the chook.

Geese usually lay their eggs between 4:00 a.m. and eight:00 a.m. day by day. This implies they lay their eggs within the nests of their evening pens as an alternative of hiding a nest within the yard. You’ll be able to choose up the duck eggs simply as soon as per day, on the similar time that you just let the geese out to forage. Chickens have a twenty-six-hour laying cycle, that means every hen lays slightly later every day. So a flock of chickens is laying always of the day and evening. When allowed to free-range, they generally come again to put of their nests and typically don’t. So recovering all of the eggs might be problematic.

Pest Management

Chickens may help with pest management in yards, gardens, and pastures underneath sure circumstances. However chickens don’t eat huge slugs or snails, two of an important backyard pests within the Northwest. (Some chickens might eat small slugs or snails.) And the scratching of chickens tears up plantings and scatters manure and grime over the remaining. Geese are thought-about the premier critter for pest management. All of the laying breeds of geese are sufficiently big to eat even 8-inch banana slugs, and achieve this with enthusiasm, swallowing them the way in which a sword swallower does a sword.

Transferring Your Geese and Chickens Round

Geese are straightforward to herd. You need to use one or two herding staffs, or you possibly can simply stroll behind the geese together with your arms prolonged sideways, making scooping motions within the path you need the geese to go and saying, “Let’s go, geese.”

In Asia, the free-range egg business is predicated upon geese which might be stored in safe everlasting quarters at evening and herded to varied separate foraging areas through the day. Since chickens can’t be herded, the evening pen or home normally must be in or adjoining to the foraging space. To rotate rooster forage, you progress their home, which should be moveable. To rotate duck forage, you simply herd the geese to a unique spot through the day, leaving their everlasting pen in its everlasting spot.

The crowing of roosters is way louder than any noise geese make. Neighbors are much less more likely to hear or object to the sounds of geese.

Local weather Concerns

In lots of areas free-range rooster eggs are solely seasonal, however free-range duck eggs are year-round. Right here within the maritime Northwest, the free-range duck is joyful foraging open air your complete 12 months, and geese of applicable breeds are good winter layers. Geese enjoyment of chilly rain. Chickens are so depressing in chilly rain and use a lot power preserving heat that they both don’t lay or their egg manufacturing isn’t economical. The duck is the one strategy to get economical, year-round, free-range egg manufacturing within the maritime Northwest and different areas with chilly, moist winters. (In areas the place the bottom is frozen a lot of the winter, there isn’t a strategy to get winter free-range egg manufacturing from any poultry.)

Weight loss plan

Geese can forage a bigger a part of their weight loss program than chickens. Chickens eat largely grain and animal life, with greenery as a salad. Geese eat grain and animal life but additionally significantly extra greenery than chickens, together with grass, so long as it’s succulent and rising.

As well as, geese could make wonderful use of wetlands, waterways, lakes, and ponds.

Geese are extra proof against illness than chickens. Ducklings are hardier than chicks. Ducklings are extra closely feathered and have a layer of subcutaneous fats. They’re designed for chilly, moist climate. Ducklings might be open air earlier in spring than chicks. If allowed to waterproof themselves correctly, ducklings might be out foraging of their third week. Chicks are usually stored indoors the primary six to eight weeks.

Geese, nevertheless, are rather more susceptible to four-footed predators than chickens, particularly chickens with intact wings. Some folks with marginal fencing or evening housing can preserve chickens however not geese.

Chickens are rather more available and normally cheaper. Day-old chicks of many breeds are sometimes offered sexed, so you will get precisely as many of every intercourse as you need. Most laying breeds of geese are a lot much less out there and are normally offered as straight-run solely, that means you don’t know what number of of what intercourse you’re getting.

Water

Geese want bathing water. Chickens keep their pores and skin and feather situation through mud bathing. Some folks discover it a lot simpler to supply a dry mud bathtub than a showering pool. Books typically say geese might be raised with out bathing water. Though that is technically true, elevating geese that method isn’t form. Geese preserve their pores and skin and feathers in situation by bathing in water and preening and coating their feathers with wax. All you want for a handful of geese is a kiddy pool of water modified a few instances per week. My geese have a small pond I made by propping up a chunk of pond liner on the hillside so I can open one facet and drain it and hose it down simply. In case you are unwilling to supply bathing water for geese, I counsel you get chickens.

Chickens are a significantly better confinement animal than geese. Geese drink way more water, have a a lot looser, extra liquidy poop, and want extra space when confined than chickens. Some folks must confine their poultry and produce the backyard produce and meals to the birds. Chickens are normally the higher selection for that scenario.

In areas the place winter is harsh and the bottom is frozen or lined with snow for months, any poultry must be confined. This reality can translate into chickens being essentially the most workable possibility. If I lived in Minnesota or Wisconsin, or upstate New York, I believe I might preserve chickens as an alternative of geese.

Don’t Put Geese in a “Hen Tractor”

The “rooster tractor” is a small moveable home with no ground that’s moved round to contemporary floor every single day or so. There are a lot of books and articles about this fashion of poultry preserving. It’s really a confinement scenario by which the birds get slightly greenery however not really very a lot animal materials. It really works greatest for industrial broiler chickens, which don’t forage very actively or transfer removed from the feeders anyway.

Laying hens in rooster tractors produce eggs which might be extra a commercial-diet-based egg than a free-range one. Nonetheless, rooster tractors are the one possibility many individuals have for his or her laying flock, and the rooster tractor, managed optimally, produces eggs which might be higher tasting, in all probability extra nutritious, and positively extra moral than these from industrial caged layers.

Hen tractors work greatest with chickens. You’ll be able to’t simply substitute geese. Laying chickens roost on raised perches at evening and can use nests stacked in a financial institution towards the wall. So the chickens use three dimensions of the area in a small movable home. The “rooster tractor” normally has one wall of nests that may be accessed from the facet with out getting into the pen and a built-in roost on one facet or finish. A rooster tractor for geese is problematic.

Geese use solely ground area, and so want rather more ground area than chickens, even earlier than bearing in mind that their manure is way wetter. They want additional ground area for nests and resting. They want rather more water and greater water containers and bathing water. By the point you will have given the geese a sufficiently big pen to be comfy for them, it received’t be capable of maintain many birds in it, and it’ll not be very moveable.

In America and Europe, rooster eggs are the usual. Most individuals don’t know learn how to prepare dinner duck eggs. Over the last twenty years, I’ve developed cooking strategies and recipes for an American fashion of duck egg cookery. Should you promote duck eggs, you will have to do some buyer schooling on how they need to be cooked.

Many individuals will take pleasure in making an attempt each chickens and geese. Typically, the 2 species shouldn’t be brooded collectively or housed in the identical evening quarters (until they’re in separate pens). They’ve completely different necessities. Nonetheless, chickens and geese can normally share their daytime foraging space.

Beneficial Reads

The Significance of Nutrient Biking

A Cluckin’ Good Time: Why Chickens Rule the Roost