What are the best egg laying chickens?

Question

I have two silkie chickens, but I am not happy with them. They take a long time to mature and the rooster is very, very aggressive.

What is the best breed to get if I want eggs all year long and want to sell some of the chicks and eggs?

Answer 1

Silkies are bad bad laying hens.

I would get:
Buff Orpingtons
The blue egg layes- Araucanas (spelling?)

Stay away from the real fancey ones, cochins, silkies, any kind of top hat bird. They are typicaly seasonal layers.

I have found my araucanas/americanas are very friendly extremely hardy and lay at around 5 months of age. Their eggs get really big too and mine have been laying for 4 years now. And yes their eggs are blue/green.

I like the buff orpington the lay well.

Bard rocks and RI reds just arent hardy enough for me. White leg horns eat tooo much.

Answer 2

The best I've seen are Plymouth Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and Auracanas. Silkies aren't the best for laying eggs, but they are the best for hatching eggs if you want to hatch eggs by a chicken sitting on them. Buff Orpingtons aren't too bad at laying either.

For meat, the best are Cornish. But Cornish are not very fertile and don't lay the best.

One thing that tends to affect how they lay is their age and what you feed them. You need to make sure they get enough protein and calcium. An egg layer chicken feed with some crushed up sea shells in it normally does pretty good. After they get about 2 years old the amount they lay starts going down fairly fast. Especially after 3-4 years old although Standard chickens tend to last longer than Bantam chickens. Also chickens seem to do better and lay better when you let them outside to eat grass and bugs. I don't know why, but they do.

Answer 3

I had some Barred Rock and Rhode Island Reds. The Barred Rock roosters were extremely aggressive. Both of the hens were good layers. They lay for about 4 or 5 years until they get spent (run out of ovaries). Just make sure that you have a 1 to 7-8 rooster/hen ratio. If not the rooster will over mate and the hens will end up with big nasty wounds on their backs and their backs will be pretty much completely bald. We ended up getting rid of the roosters because I felt it was unfair to the hens to have to live like that.

Answer 4

Barred Rock and Rhode Island reds . They are good red layers.

They start laying when there about 6 months old and lay good for about 2-4 years. As they get older there egg production will go down. http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/poultry/chickens/
Go to this website and you will be able to read about different breeds of chickens. I don't think silkies are good layers there more of a show bird.

Answer 5

Leghorns are laying machines but not very broody.
Domineckers and Buff orpingtons also lay very well and tend to be more broody. I had a mixture of chickens that included the ones listed and i averaged 4-5 dozen eggs a week out of 20 chickens.

Answer 6

for egg layers i like sex links or yellow buffs.there's no chicken that will lay everyday of the year.these two sell good for egg layers.

Answer 7

the best egg laying chickens are the ones that lay eggs lol

Answer 8

the ones that taste the best at KfC

Answer 9

the female kind