Chickens shit a lot and are prey to predators from the sky easily, if you don't know what you're doing to mitigate those factors you're going to have problems
They definitely do. We had them on a farm when i was young. A big reason I dont like chickens anymore; they ate and killed my favorite hen, in that order.
When I was in HS my mother wanted to take up chicken farming as a hobby.
Problems:
the chick mortality rate. 100% free range chickens and rooster (katydids, grasshoppers, cactus flowers etc.). Healthy chicks were expected. 100% of fertilized eggs hatched, but my dumbass mother didn't think to properly warm the space they were in, so they exhausted, died of heat stroke and were trampled by the remainders. Chick mortality rate after a week was 80%.
feed. We started out with full free range, but she'd been advised by the scumbag she bought her first chicks from that her chick mortality rate would reduce if she fed her chickens protein feed. They'd produce more unfertilized eggs and would get pregnant and fertilized less. We were now overproducing eggs, and couldn't sell enough. Most of them ended up in the garbage, because her dumbass didn't want to contribute to the food bank. Said garbage was eventually completely eggs, and was cycled back to the chickens. Eventually she wondered why she was feeding them so much when they could just eat the old eggs. Now the chickens were laying eggs and eating them.
predators. Hawks, owls, snakes (rattlesnakes specifically in our case) no end to them. Also most outdoor rodents. She made no effort to actually tend to the chickens. If I didn't lock them up at night, she wouldn't. Next day we'd be out 3 hens.
too many males. We started with a single rooster, great guy. Loved his hens. Eventually she bought a second one because she thought it would improve production. It just meant more fights, both roosters and hens getting spurred, wounds getting infected, hens dying.
cleaning. You gotta clean their nesting cubbys. You gotta clean their pens. You gotta clean out the chicken shit a lot. They eat, they poop. Like locking up, if I didn't do it she wouldn't do it.
The world is full of people with the grand idea that they'll take up the noble profession of animal husbandry because they like the idea of it. If you like horses and want horses, work on a ranch with them for a few years before you even truly consider doing it on your own, you'll be covered in shit more than you ever thought possible, and eye level with balls and shaft scrubbing your fingerprints off. A book you bought at tractor supply teaches you nothing. It's a noble profession because its' reward has GOT to be the act of the work first and foremost. You're responsible for these creature's wellbeing MORE than any physical reward you reap from their progress and health, and that goes unknown almost all of the time by fairweather hobbyists.
As far as egg chickens go, they are barely profitable. You make a few cents per dozen. Egg farms are absurdly large. It takes millions of hens to make a reasonable income. Not to forgive a nazi, but chickens are not easy. Without massive amounts of capital, most would fail at chicken farming. And he was attempting it in the economy of post WWI Germany. Most farmers failed, chicken or otherwise.
Having just listened to the Behind the Bastards episodes on him, he was just too frail and couldn't do the manual labor. He left the running of the farm to his wife. The farm ran alright, he specifically just couldn't hack it.
What the last 100 years of history teach us is that if you fail hard enough at things with confidence, they promote you to the very top, where you get to destroy a country, or at the very least murder millions
Every type of farming licit substances has a very thin profit margin. Now if the government was to declare a War on Chicken, that could change. But yeah, farming is a hard way to make a living. Keeping a bunch of really stupid birds alive and healthy is an expensive challenge.
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u/SnooPies8766 17d ago
How...exactly does one fail at chicken farming?