After deciding to raise chickens, the first major decision you will need to make is which breed or breeds you will raise. There are over 100 breeds of chickens that have been identified, which means you could spend days researching each breed and making your selection.

Before getting too caught up in the details, we recommend first thinking broadly about how you plan to use your flock. From our perspective, there are five primary reasons people raise chickens, and hence we use five primary groupings of breeds:

• Egg Layers: Hens produce more frequent, better quality and larger sized eggs
• Meat Birds: Develop muscle tissue faster and are efficient with feed consumption
• Dual Purpose: Decent egg layers than can also be butchered for meat
• Ornamental: Raised for their beauty and stature more so than their eggs or meat
• Bantams: Cute miniature chickens that are fun, but don’t produce much to eat

In addition to thinking about egg production versus meat production, there are other breed attributes that you need to think about before making your selections. Here are a few additional things to consider:

• Climate: Some birds are more suited for cold climates, others for hot climates
• Purebred: Purebred chicks grow up like their parents and are easiest to breed
• Aggression: Many chickens make great pets, but some may be too aggressive
• Foraging: All chickens forage for food, but some are much better at it than others
• Brooding: Only some breeds will successfully sit on and hatch eggs into chicks
• Flying: Some chickens actually fly quite well, and that makes them harder to contain

The bottom line is that no single breed “has it all”. In other words, you will have to choose which attributes are important to you, and which are not. The following tables highlight major breeds and the characteristics that differentiate them.

Egg Layers:

More info available in Article on Egg Layers

Meat Birds:

More info available in Article on Meat Birds

Dual Purpose:

More info available in Article on Dual Purpose Birds

Bantams:

More info available in Article on Bantams

Ornamental:

More info available in Article on Ornamental Birds