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Tomorrow we close on 5.75 rural acres zoned agricultural/unrestricted. By Christmas we plan to be living there fulltime. We are going to set up a larger version of the practice raise bed veggie growing we have been doing in our suburban yard for the past 5 years.

We use heritage seeds and heritage type chickens that do well in our climate. I’ve had great luck with Ameracaunas and Creme Legbars. We have an 8 year old Creme Leg bar hen that still lays an egg every other day and both breeds are good free rangers.

Personally I would not use commercial production chickens. On a small homestead you dont want to breed just hens. You bring the cockrels up to 4 months then harvest all but one or two for the freezer. With a small incubator you can hatch out your own chicks so you only purchase once from the hatchery.

Grow a patch of corn and a patch of sorghum and you could get by without the Tractor supply for feed if you free range the chickens during the day.

I’ve got a four year old hen, the only one of 6 to not get killed by hawks. When the other 5 were gone, I stopped feeding the last one because I figured she wasn’t much longer for this world and she wasn’t laying at the time anyway. Few months later, she started laying again and laid eggs for two years with zero feed and managed to avoid the hawks. I noticed she likes to hang around with the goats/dogs most of the time or around the house and would visit the compost pile daily which is near the house. She would scoot across open areas.

I’ve got her locked in the coup right now because the fence around the garden isn’t very tall. I’m wanting to get some more fertilized eggs from the neighbor and borrow an incubator from another neighbor and hatch some chicks for this hen to raise. Would be nice to have a flock of zero maintenance survivalist chickens. I would need a 5 foot fence around the garden though.

I dragged the fambly from the East coast to rural MO and found 8 acres in the Ozarks with a decent sized level area with 1-2 foot of silty loam top soil with very few rocks. Pretty rare thing for these parts. Took us two years to find a decent small property. Most were North or West facing slopes and/or had rocky soil that dried into a concrete like surface or bad access or utilities a mile away.