Backyard chickens are the chickens that are kept or reared in the backyard of a home. Chicken in your backyard can be raised with natural feed or diet and supplements with natural herbs or drugs. However, your chicken can be raised comfortably inside coops, cages, or free-range in your backyard.
Without exaggerating, raising chickens can be very rewarding, therapeutic, fun, and easy to rear, though maybe a bit nerve-wracking for beginners.
Some people may be wondering how chickens can be therapeutic or medicinal. Chickens are an essential part of the agricultural economy, such as food and medicine. The medicinal value of rearing chickens and other domestic stocks like dogs are well known because they can boost people’s mood and combat loneliness, especially among the elderly.
Also, they have a remarkable effect of lifting people’s spirits and staving off depression in a wide range of situations. Hence, they are a powerful medicinal tool for those suffering from loneliness, depression, anxiety, and isolation.
However, the benefits of backyard chicken and other relevant questions like do backyard chickens attract flies? And How to get rid of flies attracted by chicken in my yard will be discussed in this article.
Benefit Of Backyard Chickens
1. Source of income
No doubt about it, Backyard poultry farming is a very significant source of income to many. No amount of money spent in setting up a good backyard poultry farm is waste; you will surely, without doubt, make gain from your investment. Take, for instance, for just $130; you will successfully raise 100 broilers for just 8 to 10 weeks before you start selling them.
When your broilers are eight weeks old, you can start selling them by selling them for $2 to $2.25 per one; at the end, you will be getting about $200 and $225, respectively. By my calculation, you will be having between $70 and $95 respectively at the end. I tell you, therefore, no amount of money you invest that you will not get from it, so give it a try, and I assure you huge profit.
2. Eggs
Poultry offers what we can consume as we derived protein from the product we get from the farm. Generally, an average layer produces at least one egg in the space of two days; once they start laying, you will be making money on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis from the sale of eggs, depending on how you want to be selling your eggs.
Just imagine you have about 1200 matured layers to produce eggs; then, you should be getting at least 1000 to 1200 eggs every two days. This means you will continually generate a lot of income daily, weekly, or monthly, other than selling broilers or cockerels.
3. Fertilizer
Fertilizer or manure is another point I want us to talk about; Chicken defecates a lot. That’s just a fact about Chickens you can cash in on. Believe me, you can still make money from the poops of chicken. Yes, you can because vegetable farmers require this product you call waste to improve their products significantly; I know you will agree that this type of fertilizer or manure is far better than inorganic fertilizer. You may also use this on your vegetable farm so that you will save a certain amount of money from it, which is incredible.
Also, chicken fertilizer is full of nutrients that your garden plants will delight in, especially if your soil is nitrogen insufficient. Great care is taken while handling chicken manure because it can get hot and cause some kinds of garden plants to dry up. So, it is an excellent idea to let your chicken manure compost for about 4-6 months.
4. It Does Not Require a License To Get Started
Most of the chickens you will think of raising in your backyard as a poultry farmer are domestically-based, which means there is no demand for a special import and export license before you can get started with your work. Most families can actually select a space in their backyard as a farm or poultry catalog, select the type they want to raise, and then take up their chicks at the neighborhood post office when they arrive.
You can then buy an incubator to start hatching your eggs at home to keep building chains of food items available to be purchased. But that does not mean you can be utterly license-free as a backyard poultry farmer because most authorities may require that you hold a business license to sell your products. A health inspection of your property may be necessary; If you want your poultry items to be certified as organic farm produce, additional regulations will necessitate.
5. It Creates Employment Opportunities on Multiple Levels
However, a poultry farm is more or less a family business, which you can easily teach your children the advantages of keeping down a good job from an early age. They can be actively involved in poultry management, help make the chickens coop, collect the eggs, or even catch the animals as they get conveyed to the local processor.
It can also provide income as a minor activity while you work a full-time job, or it can be a wide-reaching commercial business if you have sufficient finance and land to get your farm started. If your farm grows big, you can also employ people from your community to earn extra salaries. The demand for a poultry farm worker is very little.
Do Backyard Chickens Attract Flies
Backyard chickens do not attract flies themselves, but a dirty chicken coop can. However, it is paramount that you learn how to keep your chicken coops neat regularly. Though chickens do eat flies, that does not mean they attract flies themselves, and there is little risk in them doing so. So, you’ll need to take action yourself to get rid of flies in their coop.
As said earlier, chickens poop a lot, and that is the main reason you will certainly have flies hanging around your chickens. The smell of their food and decomposing matters around them will also undoubtedly attract flies. The most important things are how to get rid of them if you see any around you chicken because flies in general carries some kinds of bacteria or parasite like roundworms and tapeworms that they may transmit to your flocks.
Why It Is Important To Control Flies In Your Chicken Coop
Flies, as early stated, transmit diseases in many different ways. Some bite their victims and transmit diseases through their fluid. Flies feed on decayed matter, whether it is feces, cadaver, vomit, or rotting food. These decomposed matters are the primary source of disease-causing bacteria.
More so, most flies are plentiful, troublesome, and headstrong. After they invade your chicken coop, they speedily establish their colony there and become almost very impossible to control. Specifically, outdoor flies are attracted to domestic animals, particularly chickens. They discover your chickens to be a beneficial host for a good reason because their droppings and leftover foods provide them with a safe environment to multiply. They may get out of control and render the chicken coop inhabitable if you don’t get rid of them at the right time.
Life Cycle of A Fly
However, it’s essential to understand how these pests reproduce and survive before you can get rid of them in your chicken coop. Fortunately, the lifespan of a fly is just around half a month (2 or 3 weeks) which can be as lengthy as 90 days depending on the conditions.
A fly will begin its life as an egg, which takes no longer than sixteen hours to hatch. After a couple of days, it hatches into a larva, which is the point it starts to eat and develop. Next, it turns into pupae before its final development as an adult fly. As an adult, a female fly can lay up to 500 eggs. That is all within half a month, which means one single short-lived fly can unleash some serious long-term damage.
How Do You Get Rid of Flies Around Chicken Coop?
Though it may call for trying a few different things, you can get rid of flies around your chickens and their coop if you apply the following procedures:
1. Keep Their Coops Clean Regularly
This is the number one concern. A clean coop will vigorously reduce the number of flies frequenting their coop. Pay great mindfulness to any moist areas in their coop, nesting boxes, and areas they poop a lot, such as under their roosting perch. If you haven’t yet started using diatomaceous earth, I greatly recommend it to you. Sprinkling some in their coop will help dry out droppings and moist areas, kill other parasites, lice, fly lava if present, and more.
Dispose of that poop! Nothing draws in flies like new poultry droppings. Keep your coop free from manure. You might want to put dropping sheets under the roost bars, which will make it easier to clean that area. At the minimum, even if you aren’t cleaning your coop once a week or even once a month which may be guilty of you, you ought to be adding clean bedding material regularly at least once a week. This method, known as the deep litter technique for bedding your coop, is a great way to eliminate smells and keep flies under control.
2. Make Sure Your Chicken Coop Has Good Ventilation
Consistent airflow is one way to lessen the fly population in your chicken coop. Although it’s simple, it’s pretty effective. If there are open windows on either side of your coop or your chicken coop has a fan, then a strong cross breeze will keep flies away.
If using a fan, make sure you use a gentle circulating fan rather than a large industrial one to ensure your chickens don’t accidentally get injured. You will also want to keep an eye out on your chickens to ensure they don’t interfere with the fan and hurt themselves.
A fan that has a safety grate can usually do the trick. Just be careful where you position this and make sure you clean it every day, as box fans have been known to cause fires as they build up dust from inside the coop.
3. Provide Fly Strips
Another easy method to control flies in your chicken coop is the use of fly strips. Fly strips are commonly used in different households to trap flies within minutes. Instead of putting them in your house, you can place them inside the coop to catch flies.
More so, this method comes with one major limitation; it only works best when you have few chickens. If you have many chickens, the fly strips will not control the number of flies. Even though they are effective in trapping flies, fly strips cannot take the place of your clean, dry chicken coop. Therefore, you can only use them as part of your overall pest control strategy.
4. Upgrading Your Coop Can Be Helpful
No, that doesn’t mean it’s time to add a hot tub or new siding. It just means it’s time to rethink the way your coop is designed. One of the most common reasons flies are attracted to chicken coops is because there is no ventilation or cross breeze to blow them all over the place. They have plenty of food and water to munch on and no gusty wind to push them around while they’re doing it.
A coop with poor ventilation creates the potential for all sorts of problems, from frostbite to odors and everything in between. While you’re in the process of remodeling your coop, add some window screens. More than likely, you already have chicken wire on them to protect against predators, but make sure the holes in this screen are small enough to keep out flies, too.
5. Make Sure Your Beddings Is Dry
While removing dirty bedding is a great way to cut down on flies, an even easier way to reduce your chores and your fly population is to use a dry bedding source. While straw, hay, and shredded paper are excellent bedding materials for chicken coops, they hold a bit more water than other types of bedding like sand. If you use sand as your litter of choice, it will coat the droppings as they fall and dry them almost immediately – this can reduce odors and prevent flies from being drawn to your chicken coop.
6. Make Sure Feed Are Locked
This is an essential routine for some good reasons, like avoiding attracting other scavengers and potential pests. Keeping feeds locked up will help protect them from flies as well. But, if you practice a free feeding system, this method can be a bit challenging. However, using a hanging feeder gets it up off the ground where the chickens will be less likely to spill it and make it harder to clean. It would be best to store your feed in sealed drums or air-tight containers instead of leaving open bags in the coop. This will make the feeding more manageable and reduce feed spoilage.
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Do Backyard Chickens Attract Flies