History of the BackYard Chickens website

Back in 1999 a few baby chicks were brought home from a kindergarten class. Similar to the experience of hundreds of thousands of other children and their families, what started out as a fun project turned into a hobby and then into an obsession!  BackYardChickens is the result of years of collective learning and fun rolled up into the best resource for raising your own backyard flock.

The site was originally just a simple chicken coop design . Over time more useful information was added.  With more chicken information came more site visitors, some of which submitted their own coop designs. 

As the content grew so did visits to the site and with visitors came questions... lots of questions.   Everything from hatching eggs to how to raise chickens.  We tried to answer as many questions as we could by adding information to the site but we realized there were too many different variables to create content for every situation.  So, back in 2000 we started the first BYC Chicken Message Board.   Over the years this forum has grown, moved, changed and moved again.   Fortunately even when the forum had some very significant changes and moves (servers, software, etc.) the community has remained strong.  At the time of updating this page, July 2008, we've got a vibrant community of almost 14,000 chicken owners who add about 4,000 new posts per DAY (on average 3 new posts every minute of every day)!

This great site and community have grown far beyond anyone's original idea, and it's great to see this site become something really useful for anyone interested in raising, breeding and caring for their backyard chickens.

Enjoy! If you have comments or questions, turn to the Message Forum - it's one of the friendliest boards around and you will get a LOT of great answers to any questions you may have.

You can read a more detailed journal of events regarding to the history of BYC by clicking: History Of BackYardChickens