Ducks may work better than chickens for your farm. Here is my quick summary of the pluses and minuses of each one. We have raised several hundred chickens and ducks over the last 5 years on our little 5 acre homestead. They are both wonderful farm animals!
Spoiler: Our poultry free range over the entire 5 acres (other than our fenced garden area). That’s the critical factor in my preference for ducks — they are gentle on the land and gardens.
Traits of Both Chickens and Ducks
- They both lay eggs and certain breeds of duck are as prolific as chickens
- They both make wonderful manure/fertilizer for the compost pile
- They are both fairly easy to maintain and feed
- Both can be excellent foragers
- Both have certain varieties that are good flyers and can perch
- Both are good with children and easily tamed (Roosters being the exception. Some are just mean.)
- Both have breeds that go broody and are excellent mothers
- Both are incredibly fun to watch! Both can be lovely trainable pets when given plenty of attention.
Uniquely Chicken Traits
- Chickens scratch and till the ground; this can be fantastic when put to use in preparing ground for planting. (We overwintered a flock in our new high tunnel to till and fertilize the soil and they did a wonderful job.) On the other hand, free ranging chickens are hard on any new plantings and will decimate seedlings or newly planted rows of seed corn or peas.
- Chickens are excellent composters. Chickens excel at turning table scraps into eggs. They peck apart food much more efficiently than ducks. Ducks mostly only scoop up pieces of food that are soft or the right size. We grew a lot of extra winter squash this year – WAAAY more than we needed. Every day I chopped one into quarters with my axe and fed it to the chickens. They pecked it all the way down to the rind.
- Chickens are much easier to process for meat than ducks.
- Chickens are better at eating bugs, in my opinion. Ducks seem much more focused on soft bodied insects while chickens eat them all.
- Chickens are usually louder than ducks. Even minus the crowing rooster, hens’ egg songs can be very loud.
Uniquely Duck Traits
- Ducks are generally sturdier and more disease resistant than chickens
- Ducks do NOT scratch or dig and cause very little damage to my many small gardens outside of our fenced garden
- They stay together and are so easy to herd into their pen at night!
- They lay ALL their eggs before 8am when they are let out for the day. It makes gathering the day’s eggs a cinch.
- They eat slugs and snails.
- We do not have a pond and they do not require one. They have a few grain tubs that they can climb into and get wet in when they feel inclined.
- Ducks can be more difficult to butcher (pluck cleanly), but they do provide feather down as well as meat. For old layers we’ve sometimes opted to just harvest the breast meat. That wastes a lot of nice down and duck fat/broth, but saves time.
- Male and female ducks are equally friendly. I’ve never met an aggressive drake (male duck), but we’ve had several roosters over the years that attacked us.
This was so interesting! We currently have six chickens (down two this year after one got sick and one fell prey…?)… you’re making me think seriously about ducks now though. You’ll have to tell me which needs you love best ❤️.
Hi Karlie! Thanks for your feedback! Sorry to hear about your chickies. I’m working on a post about this duck breed topic, but here’s some quick feedback because I am such a slow poster of things during garden season.
We have had a lot of different breeds of ducks over the last 5 years, but I’m still far from being any kind of an expert. I think it depends on what you’d like the ducks to do for your farm. We currently just have the ducks, so I wanted them primarily for eggs. Duck eggs are delicious and fabulous for baking. But I know from experience that after 3 years they stop laying as much. They are farm animals, not pets, and eventually they will go to their happy hunting ground. So we are currently raising a dual purpose breed (heavy weight and also good egg layer) — The Silver Appleyards. They are my favorite of all the breeds that we’ve raised — calm, fairly quiet, good layers, and will go broody if you let them. Khaki Campbells, Cayuga, Welsh Harlequin, and Swedish are all nice egg layers, but not much meat. Pekins are great for meat, but SO loud, and not good layers. The other breed that we currently raise is the Muscovy, which is actually a separate species, not descended from mallards. That allows us to sell ducklings of both breeds and know that their is no crossing. The Muscovies have a lot of positive traits, but I don’t really think of them as a duck. They are more like geese in my mind. They can FLY and that allows them to get into trouble. They are not an egg laying breed either, only laying in the summer and VERY likely to go broody. A lot of folks keep them specifically for incubating eggs of other breeds. Muscovies are also not very good in the garden, they eat more greens (like geese) and can do some damage. Their meat is delicious though. They are very self sufficient and multiply well without much intervention on my part. They are also very quiet, and do not quack.