RichZ,
Congratulations on your chicken venture. I have raised chickens "on the side" since I was a teenager. You'll learn a lot in a short time.
Chickens do not range too far from the hen house, so 10 acres is more than sufficient for two dozen chickens! Actually, they probably won't go more than a fifty or a hundred yards away from the coop.
Natural predators are not much of a problem for free ranging chickens during daylight hours. Dogs could be though. I've lost quite a few at night, however, to all kinds of critters, including hawks and skunks.
To get 24 hens you will likely have to buy about 40 or 50 general run chicks, since it is almost impossible to tell the sex of chickens at birth. I never figured out how to anyway. Even when I order chicks as females, they seem split half and half. Once the combs appear, you can separate out the hens.
When the hens start laying, letting them run the range will be a problem, because they will lay their eggs all over the place. They don't take orders or instructions of when and where to lay very well. We'd find eggs just about everywhere, in every nook and cranny in the barn, along the outside irrigation channels of the fields, just everywhere. Of course the hens are purposefully trying to put their eggs in a safe place, so you can't always find the eggs at all. Sometimes we come across eggs that had been laid months before.
As to making a commercial go of selling eggs, I am not too sure. Two dozen hens will lay a lot more than probably just your own family will be able to eat. After you give the surplus eggs away to all your friends and neighbors, there isn't much to do with eggs.
There is a market for organic eggs. You might locate the local farmer's market, or connect with a local restaurant that is interested in local range fed organic chickens. Or a local health food store. You can command premium prices from these kinds of vendors. I'd say sell them on the Internet, but eggs are the worst item to ship there is. While the output of 24 hens is more than you'll personally use, it will not supply a large enough quantity in commercial terms. A couple of dozen eggs a day won't make you rich (unless they lay gold eggs, of course).
Be aware that chickens are really, really "dirty." They crap all over the place and will make a mess of your barn, deck, yard and anywhere else in a big hurry. But that manure they drop in the hen house will be about the best fertilizer you can find. Just make sure you let it "cool" for a couple of months, before you apply it to any garden crops.
Chickens will also attack each other rather visciously, especially when in the coop.
All that said, I personally love to have laying hens around, plus a rooster or two. To me a farm ain't a farm without a few chickens. Chickens are very easy to raise. My personal favorite is Rhode Island Reds. Range fed Reds at about 5 weeks are about as meaty and juicy as a turkey. And they lay those "natural" looking brown eggs!
I am sure just about everybody on this forum has some advice about raising chickens.
Good luck!
BobT.
A Indiana Boy
