Ron and Johanna spent about forty years living off-grid, and the book treats the coop, the greenhouse, the root cellar and the rain catchment as one connected system rather than separate hobbies.
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See what’s inside →Raising chickens for eggs is one of the few resilience projects that pays you back every single morning, in something you can actually eat. It is also the one people quit fastest, usually in February, when the birds they bought in April have stopped laying and the feed bill has not stopped arriving. This page is the version nobody sells you: how many hens you need, what the first year really looks like, and where the money and the eggs actually go.
None of it is complicated. It is just seasonal, and the season that matters is the one where you get the least back.
How Many Hens You Actually Need
Start from your egg consumption, not from how many chicks fit in the brooder. University of Minnesota Extension puts a productive hen at roughly six eggs a week, so about 300 a year for a good layer in her first full season. That is an average across the year, and it hides a lot of variation, but it is the right number to plan with.
A household that eats a dozen eggs a week needs two productive hens on paper. In practice, plan for four to six. The extra birds absorb the molt, the winter slowdown, the hen who turns out to be a poor layer, and the one you lose to a hawk. Six hens is the sweet spot for most families: enough eggs to matter, few enough that the coop stays manageable and the chore takes ten minutes.
- 2-3 hens: eggs for one or two people, no surplus, no margin for loss.
- 4-6 hens: a family’s eggs most of the year, with a gap in deep winter.
- 8-12 hens: eggs year round plus a surplus to give away, and a real chore load.
- More than 12: you are running a small operation, and your county may have opinions about it.
Breeds That Keep Laying When It Gets Cold
Breed choice is mostly a trade between raw output and cold hardiness. The commercial hybrids lay the most eggs per pound of feed and burn out fastest. The heavy dual-purpose heritage breeds lay fewer eggs but carry more body mass, tolerate a cold coop better, and keep going for more seasons.
For a house with land in a climate that actually has winter, the heavy breeds with small combs are the safer pick. Large single combs are the first thing to freeze. If you want the full breed-by-breed comparison, it lives in our guide to the best egg laying chickens for a cold backyard.
The First Year, Month by Month
This is the part that surprises people. You do not buy chickens and get eggs. You buy chickens and feed them for five months first.
| Age | What’s happening | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1-3 weeks | Brooder. Chicks need roughly 95°F dropping about 5°F a week. | Heat plate, chick starter, check twice a day. |
| 4-6 weeks | Feathering out, outgrowing the brooder fast. | Move to the coop once fully feathered and nights are mild. |
| 7-16 weeks | Pullets. Eating steadily, laying nothing. | Grower feed. This is the expensive, boring stretch. |
| 18-24 weeks | First eggs. Small, odd-shaped, sometimes shell-less. | Switch to layer feed with calcium. Add oyster shell free choice. |
| 6-14 months | Peak production. Six eggs a week per hen is realistic. | Collect daily, keep water unfrozen. |
| ~18 months | First molt. Feathers everywhere, laying stops. | Nothing. Feed them and wait 6-12 weeks. |
The Winter Drop, and Whether to Fight It
Laying is triggered by day length, not by temperature. Extension guidance is consistent on this: hens need somewhere around 12 to 14 hours of light a day to keep cycling. North of about the 40th parallel you fall under that from roughly November through January, and production drops hard. Add the annual molt, which usually lands in early fall, and you can go six weeks with almost nothing.
You can override it with a low-wattage bulb on a timer, adding light in the early morning so the birds are not plunged into sudden darkness at roost time. A single 9 W LED on a timer costs pennies a month to run. Two honest objections: it uses grid power you may not have in an outage, and pushing hens through the winter without a rest is generally thought to shorten their productive life. Plenty of experienced keepers skip the light on purpose and accept a lean January.
The other winter problem is water, not light. A hen that cannot drink stops laying within a day. Frozen waterers are the single most common reason a healthy flock goes off the lay in January, and heated waterers are exactly the load that disappears in an outage. That is worth thinking about before you size anything, and our home energy audit walk-through is the place to put a number on it.
What Feed Really Costs
A standard six-pound laying hen eats roughly three pounds of feed a week, per the Minnesota figures. Six hens is about 18 pounds a week, so a 50 lb bag lasts a little under three weeks. At layer feed prices that have run somewhere around $20-$25 a bag at the time of writing, that is on the order of $30-$40 a month for six birds, before bedding, grit and oyster shell.
Against that, six good hens in peak season give you roughly three dozen eggs a week. Whether that is a saving depends entirely on what eggs cost where you live, and the answer is often “close to break-even, sometimes worse.” We ran the arithmetic properly in backyard chicken cost: do eggs pay for themselves? Do not build the plan on the assumption that they will.
Space, Coop, and the Ten Minutes a Day
Extension recommendations land at 3 to 5 square feet of indoor coop floor per bird, plus 8 to 10 square feet of run, plus one nest box per four or five hens. Crowded birds pick at each other and at their own eggs, and once egg-eating starts it is genuinely hard to stop.
The daily chore is small: open the pop door, check food and water, collect eggs, close up at dusk. The weekly chore is bedding. The seasonal chore is a deep clean. The one that catches people out is that somebody has to do it every single day, in the rain, at dusk, forever. Sort out coop layout before you buy birds, not after, using our backyard chicken coop guide and the numbers in how much space chickens need.
Two Things That Will Go Wrong
Predators. Not “might.” Raccoons open simple latches, and a raccoon that finds the coop comes back. Use two-step latches, hardware cloth rather than chicken wire on every opening, and an apron of wire laid flat on the ground around the perimeter to stop diggers. Chicken wire keeps chickens in; it does not keep anything out.
The straggler cockerel. Sexing day-old chicks is good but not perfect, and hatcheries quote around 90% accuracy on standard breeds. Order six pullets and there is a real chance one crows in four months. Know now what you will do about it, especially if your ordinance bans roosters.
Where I’d Start
Six pullets of a heavy, cold-tolerant breed, bought as started birds at 16 to 18 weeks if you can find them locally. You skip the brooder entirely, you skip five months of feeding for nothing, and you get eggs inside a month or two. It costs more per bird up front and it is the cheapest way to find out whether you actually enjoy the chore before you commit to a decade of it. Buy the coop capacity you want in three years, not the capacity you need in March.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long before new chickens start laying eggs?
Most laying breeds start between 18 and 24 weeks, so roughly five to six months from day-old chick. Heavy heritage breeds often run later than the hybrids, and a pullet that reaches point of lay in November may wait until the days lengthen.
Do you need a rooster to get eggs?
No. Hens lay without a rooster. A rooster only makes the eggs fertile, and adds noise plus a possible ordinance problem. Some keepers want one for flock protection; nobody needs one for eggs.
How many eggs will six hens lay in winter?
Without supplemental light, expect anywhere from a handful a week down to none at all through the darkest six to eight weeks, then a steady climb back from late January. With a timer light restoring 14 hours, you can hold most of summer’s rate.
How long do hens keep laying?
Peak is the first two years. After that output typically falls by roughly 15-20% per year, though hens can live five to ten years. A three-year-old hen is still laying, just not enough to pay her own feed bill, which is the decision every keeper eventually faces.
What to Read Next
- Best Egg Laying Chickens for a Cold Backyard
- Backyard Chicken Cost: Do Eggs Pay for Themselves?
- Keeping Chickens Warm Without a Heat Lamp
- All of our Grow Your Own guides
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