Neighbor lady said I could raise meat chickens on her property

[Kaleva]

She's a friend of my wife's and her property is 3 blocks away from our place and is zoned agricultural. The town prohibits the raising of chickens in areas zoned as residential.

My father-in-law and son-in-law have talked about raising chickens and my son-in-law has said he'd like to raise broilers. He has 20 acres outside of town on a side road where he and my step- daughter plan to build a house someday and move there. It's 2 miles from where my wife and I live.

That place would work but the issue I see is there's a drive involved for any of us three to go and take care of the chickens. So I thought about it and asked my wife to contact her friend about the possibility of coming to some kind of arrangement and allow us to raise meat birds on her property. The friend herself has had chickens in the past and has some mobile coops and a chicken tractor. My wife texted her and she replied that it would be fine with her.

While we wouldn't do this till next year, I'm going to meet her Tuesday and we'll look over the area we can raise the chickens, look at her chicken tractor and determine what needs to be done to be ready for chickens next spring. We'll also have to figure out how many chicks to get based on how many birds each person involved wants and if we raise just one flock or break it up into 2 or even 3 flocks spread out over spring through early fall.

My long term goal is to have a small chicken coop at my wife's and my place with 3 or maybe 4 layer hens with a bigger base flock of layers, along with raising meat birds, kept down at the property where my step-daughter and son-in-law plan to move to sometime in the future. This project with my wife's friend is a start towards that goal. I may ask her If we could also use one of her chicken coops for keeping a flock of Buckeye dual purpose birds.

An option, at least in the beginning, would be to get Red Ranger meat birds and keep a few as layers. They don't produce a lot of eggs but are docile, cold hardy and have few health issues. Being hybrids, they can't reproduce true. They don't have a long life span either and would most likely have to be replaced yearly or every two years at the most. But it could be a possibility, keep a few for eggs and the following year, butcher them when a few selected replacement Ranger hens begin laying . Then sometime in the future, get Buckeyes to keep as layers