Fascinated 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 when it comes to pest management. Chickens are extra available, often 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 hen?
The next is an excerpt from The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. It has been tailored for the online.
Essentially the most ecologically well-adapted livestock for the maritime Northwest is the duck. The very best-laying duck breeds lay higher than the best-laying hen breeds. Geese can free-range year-round in our area. Geese forage far more of their diets than chickens and eat a bigger number of pure meals frequent 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 hold solely a flock of thirty-two Ancona geese. However I like chickens too.)
Eggs
Many people who find themselves allergic to hen eggs can eat duck eggs. Just a few individuals are allergic to each. I’ve additionally run into occasional individuals who declare to have issues consuming duck eggs who can eat hen eggs, although this sample appears to be uncommon. Geese from the better-laying breeds and strains can lay properly sufficient to earn their hold for years. Laying chickens are often not producing economically past the second 12 months.
Geese are a lot simpler to regulate 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. Conserving them out of the backyard or the eaves of the porch usually requires wing-clipping each chicken.
Geese have a tendency to put eggs which can be greater than hen eggs from a breed of equal measurement. Some dual-purpose duck breeds (reminiscent of Anconas) lay eggs which can be very huge for the dimensions of the chicken.
Geese usually lay their eggs between 4:00 a.m. and eight:00 a.m. each 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, which means every hen lays just a little later every day. So a flock of chickens is laying always of the day and evening. When allowed to free-range, they often 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 below sure circumstances. However chickens don’t eat huge slugs or snails, two of an important backyard pests within the Northwest. (Some chickens could eat small slugs or snails.) And the scratching of chickens tears up plantings and scatters manure and filth over the remaining. Geese are thought of the premier critter for pest management. All of the laying breeds of geese are large enough to eat even 8-inch banana slugs, and accomplish that with enthusiasm, swallowing them the way in which a sword swallower does a sword.
Shifting Your Geese and Chickens Round
Geese are straightforward to herd. You should utilize one or two herding staffs, or you’ll be able to simply stroll behind the geese together with your arms prolonged sideways, making scooping motions within the route you need the geese to go and saying, “Let’s go, geese.”
In Asia, the free-range egg business is predicated upon geese which can be stored in safe everlasting quarters at evening and herded to numerous separate foraging areas throughout the day. Since chickens can’t be herded, the evening pen or home often must be in or adjoining to the foraging space. To rotate hen forage, you progress their home, which should be transportable. To rotate duck forage, you simply herd the geese to a unique spot throughout 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 hen eggs are solely seasonal, however free-range duck eggs are year-round. Right here within the maritime Northwest, the free-range duck is completely satisfied foraging outside your entire 12 months, and geese of acceptable breeds are good winter layers. Geese enjoyment of chilly rain. Chickens are so depressing in chilly rain and use a lot vitality conserving heat that they both don’t lay or their egg manufacturing isn’t economical. The duck is the one technique 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 is no such thing as a technique to get winter free-range egg manufacturing from any poultry.)
Weight-reduction plan
Geese can forage a bigger a part of their food plan than chickens. Chickens eat largely grain and animal life, with greenery as a salad. Geese eat grain and animal life but in addition significantly extra greenery than chickens, together with grass, so long as it’s succulent and rising.
As well as, geese could make glorious 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 outside 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 far more weak to four-footed predators than chickens, particularly chickens with intact wings. Some folks with marginal fencing or evening housing can hold chickens however not geese.
Chickens are far more available and often cheaper. Day-old chicks of many breeds are sometimes bought sexed, so you may get precisely as many of every intercourse as you need. Most laying breeds of geese are a lot much less out there and are often bought as straight-run solely, which 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 by way of 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 sort. Geese hold 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 bit of pond liner on the hillside so I can open one facet and drain it and hose it down simply. If you’re unwilling to supply bathing water for geese, I recommend you get chickens.
Chickens are a significantly better confinement animal than geese. Geese drink much more water, have a a lot looser, extra liquidy poop, and wish more room when confined than chickens. Some folks have to confine their poultry and convey the backyard produce and meals to the birds. Chickens are often the higher alternative for that scenario.
In areas the place winter is harsh and the bottom is frozen or coated with snow for months, any poultry must be confined. This truth can translate into chickens being essentially the most workable choice. If I lived in Minnesota or Wisconsin, or upstate New York, I feel I might hold chickens as an alternative of geese.
Don’t Put Geese in a “Hen Tractor”
The “hen tractor” is a small transportable home with no ground that’s moved round to contemporary floor day by day or so. There are numerous books and articles about this type of poultry conserving. It’s truly a confinement scenario wherein the birds get just a little greenery however not truly very a lot animal materials. It really works finest for business broiler chickens, which don’t forage very actively or transfer removed from the feeders anyway.
Laying hens in hen tractors produce eggs which can be extra a commercial-diet-based egg than a free-range one. Nevertheless, hen tractors are the one choice many individuals have for his or her laying flock, and the hen tractor, managed optimally, produces eggs which can be higher tasting, in all probability extra nutritious, and positively extra moral than these from business caged layers.
Hen tractors work finest 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 in opposition to the wall. So the chickens use three dimensions of the area in a small movable home. The “hen tractor” often 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 hen tractor for geese is problematic.
Geese use solely ground area, and so want far 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 far more water and larger water containers and bathing water. By the point you could have given the geese a large enough pen to be comfy for them, it received’t have the ability to maintain many birds in it, and it’ll not be very transportable.
In America and Europe, hen 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 type of duck egg cookery. If you happen to promote duck eggs, you will want to do some buyer schooling on how they need to be cooked.
Many individuals will get pleasure from attempting each chickens and geese. Usually, the 2 species shouldn’t be brooded collectively or housed in the identical evening quarters (until they’re in separate pens). They’ve totally different necessities. Nevertheless, chickens and geese can often share their daytime foraging space.