Are you Team Duck or Team Chicken?
Are you considering adding a flock of laying hens to your yard, but having trouble deciding between ducks and chickens? Don’t bother yourself anymore.
Ducks are straightforward to raise, have routine egg-laying times, and are superior to chickens at pest control. Chickens are more readily available, usually cheaper to buy, and are better suited to captive keeping, which is an essential factor if space is an issue. Now, are you team duck or team chicken?
Below is an excerpt A resilient gardener by Carol Deppe. It has been adapted for exploit on the Internet.
The most ecologically adapted animal to live on the north-west coast is the duck. The best laying duck breeds are better than the best laying chicken breeds. In our region, ducks can graze free range all year round. Ducks forage for much more than chickens and eat a greater variety of natural foods commonly found here. Ducks eat snails and snails and are better for pest control in yards and gardens. Ducks love our weather. (Perhaps I should mention my prejudices. I have raised five breeds of chickens, two breeds of geese and seven breeds of ducks. Ducks are my favorite, especially Ancona ducks, and at the moment I only raise a flock of thirty-two Ancona ducks. But I also like chickens. )
Eggs
Many people who are allergic to chicken eggs can eat duck eggs. A few people are allergic to both. From time to time I also meet people who claim to have problems eating duck eggs who can eat chicken eggs, although this pattern seems to be sporadic. Ducks of breeds and varieties that lay better can cope well enough to earn a living for years. Laying chickens usually do not produce economically after the second year.
Ducks are much easier to control than chickens. Ducks of laying breeds can be easily enclosed with a fence as little as 2 feet high (as long as they have food and water with them and their buddies). Most egg breed chickens can fly well enough to get through any fence. Keeping them out of your garden or porch eaves often requires clipping each bird’s wings.
Ducks lay eggs that are larger than those of chickens of the same size. Some dual-purpose duck breeds (such as Anconas) lay eggs that are very immense in relation to the size of the bird.
Ducks lay eggs every day between 4:00 and 8:00. This means they lay their eggs in nests in their nocturnal pens rather than hiding the nest in the yard. You can only collect duck eggs once a day, at the same time you let the ducks out to feed. Chickens have a twenty-six-hour laying cycle, which means each hen lays a little later each day. So a flock of chickens lays eggs at any time of the day or night. When allowed to free range, sometimes they come back to make their nests, sometimes they don’t. Therefore, recovering all the eggs may be problematic.
Pest control
Under certain circumstances, chickens can assist control pests in yards, gardens, and pastures. But chickens don’t eat immense snails or snails, two of the most essential garden pests in the Northwest. (Some chickens can eat diminutive snails.) And chicken scratching destroys the plantings and scatters manure and dirt over the rest. Ducks are considered the most essential pest control creatures. All breeds of laying ducks are immense enough to eat even 8-inch banana snails, and they do so with enthusiasm, swallowing them like a sword swallower swallows a sword.
Moving ducks and chickens
Ducks are straightforward to flock to. You can exploit one or two shepherd’s sticks, or you can just walk behind the ducks with your arms out to the sides, making scooping motions in the direction you want the ducks to go and saying, “Let’s go, ducks.”
In Asia, free-range egg production relies on ducks kept in secure lasting quarters at night and herded to various separate feeding areas during the day. From chickens cannot be raised, the pen or roosting house usually must be located in or adjacent to the feeding area. To change the chickens’ feed, you move their house, which must be portable. To change duck feed, simply herd the ducks to a different place during the day, leaving their pens in a lasting place.
The crowing of roosters is much louder than any noise made by ducks. Neighbors are less likely to hear or object to duck calls.
Climatic considerations
In many areas, free-range chicken eggs are only produced seasonally, but Free-range duck eggs are available year-round. Here on the north-west coast, the free-range duck enjoys feeding outdoors all year round, and ducks of suitable breeds make good winter layers. Ducks enjoy the frigid rain. Chickens are so miserable in frigid rain and exploit so much energy to stay hot that they either do not lay eggs or their egg production is uneconomical. Duck is the only way to economically produce year-round free-range eggs on the North West Coast and other areas where winters are frigid and humid. (In areas where the ground is frozen most of the winter, it is impossible to obtain free-range egg production from any poultry.)
Diet
Ducks can make up a larger part of their diet than chickens. Chickens mainly eat grains and animals, with greens as a salad. Ducks eat grain and animals, but also much more greenery than chickens, including grass, as long as it is lush and growing.
Additionally, ducks make excellent exploit of wetlands, waterways, lakes and ponds.
Ducks are more resistant to diseases than chickens. Ducklings are tougher than chicks. Ducklings are more feathered and have a layer of subcutaneous fat. They are designed for frigid and humid weather. In spring, ducklings can spend time outdoors earlier than chicks. If they are properly waterproofed, the ducklings can go out to feed in the third week. Chicks are usually kept indoors for the first six to eight weeks.
However, ducks are much more susceptible to attacks by four-legged predators than chickens, especially chickens with intact wings. Some people with marginal fencing or roosts can raise chickens but not ducks.
Chickens are much more readily available and usually cheaper. Day-old chicks of many breeds are often sold without sex, so you can buy exactly as many chicks of each sex as you want. Most laying duck breeds are much less available and are usually only sold free-range, meaning you don’t know how many of which sex you will get.
Water
Ducks need water for bathing. Chickens maintain their skin and feathers by taking sand baths. Some people find it much easier to provide a desiccated sand bath than a swimming pool. Books sometimes say that ducks can be raised without bathing. While this is technically true, raising ducks this way is not nice. Ducks keep their skin and feathers in good condition by bathing in water and grooming and coating their feathers with wax. For a handful of ducks, all you need is a children’s pool filled with water, replaced several times a week. My ducks have a diminutive pond that I made by propping up a piece of pond liner on the hillside so I could open one side, drain it, and easily drain it with water. If you don’t want to provide water for your ducks to bathe in, I suggest getting chickens.
Chickens make much better captive animals than ducks. Ducks drink much more water, have much looser, more fluid poop, and need more space when confined than chickens. Some people need to keep their poultry indoors and provide the birds with garden produce and food. Chickens are usually a better choice in this situation.
In areas where the winter is harsh and the ground is frozen or covered with snow for many months, all poultry must be kept indoors. This fact may translate into chickens being the most feasible option. If I lived in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or upstate Fresh York, I think I would keep chickens instead of ducks.
Don’t put ducks in the ‘chicken tractor’
The “chicken tractor” is a diminutive portable house without a floor that is transported to fresh land approximately every day. There are many books and articles about this style of poultry farming. This is effectively a confinement situation where the birds are given some greenery but not much animal material. It works best with commercial broilers, which aren’t very busy feeders anyway and don’t wander away from feeders.
Laying hens in chicken tractors produce eggs that are more commercial diet eggs than free range eggs. However, chicken tractors are the only option many people have for their laying flocks, and chicken tractors, when managed optimally, produce eggs that are better tasting, probably more nutritious, and certainly more ethical than those from commercial cage farms.
Chicken tractors work best for chickens. You can’t just replace ducks. Chickens placed on roosts at night exploit nests placed on the slope near the wall. The chickens therefore take advantage of the three-dimensional space in the diminutive mobile house. A “chicken tractor” typically has one nest wall that can be reached from the side without having to step into the pen, and a built-in perch on one side or end. A chicken tractor for ducks is problematic.
Ducks only take up floor space and therefore need much more space than chickens, even if you don’t take into account that their droppings are much wetter. They need extra space on the floor to nest and rest. They need much more water and larger containers for water and bathing water. Until you provide ducks with a pen immense enough that is comfortable for them, it will not be able to hold many birds and will not be very portable.
In America and Europe, chicken eggs are standard. Most people don’t know how to cook duck eggs. Over the past two decades, I have developed cooking methods and recipes for American style duck egg cooking. If you sell duck eggs you will need to do this customer education about how to cook them.
Many people will enjoy trying both chicken and duck. In general, the two species should not be brooded together or kept in the same roosting enclosure (unless they are in separate pens). They have different requirements. However, chickens and ducks can usually share their daily feeding areas.