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[Oaktree]

Hmm, one of the pet cave crocs in the fortress just hit breeding age.  Looks like more chicken biscuits on the menu from now on.

[ZawB]

None of the domestic birds have the [GRAZER] tag. They may or may not need to eat the edible ground bugs to survive, but these seem to spawn naturally around them wherever they are. You don't even need to pasture them, but they will otherwise just congregate in any meeting room areas you have, and will search out any constructed nest boxes when they need them. You only need a few nest boxes if they are built close to the birds and are easy to collect from. I sometimes embark with like 50 turkeys and manage with four nest boxes, and by autumn I can have like 1500-2000 eggs. Then I start slaughtering them for meat and leather, keeping only a few for breeding purposes.

[Replica]

Chicken don't need anything to eat or drink to survive.

[Togre]

As a matter of efficiency (Note: I have never gotten around to setting this up), you could build hallway with 1x1 rooms branching off.  Each room should have a door, a nest box and be a pasture zone.  Each poultry gets assigned to an individual room.  One male of each species is given a similar room without the nest box.  Why is this efficient?  the 1x1 zone prevents pathing which helps keep FPS up.  The door allows you to pick a female of a species, lock the door and wait for her to lay eggs and raise a clutch.  Much easier than trying to forbid the eggs after they are laid and before they are gathered.  I always raise young to adulthood because of the increase of meat.  I would also strive for a larger flock than necessary so if you have an emergency you can butcher some without damaging your egg production.

[ZawB]

I did try this, and with bigger rooms than 1x1, like 1x5. I thought I would have a space efficient battery farm. Bless Toady's malevolent heart, but he foresaw everything: the chicks fight each other constantly in such a tiny space, as they do in real battery farms. Not a big problem, but it fills up your combat report log with spam ("The turkey poult is fighting!"x1000) and seems to give a hit to FPS anyway. I even did some science, taking both turkeys (the biggest bird) and ducks (the smallest), and increasing the size of the rooms to 1x10. They all still fought, because the chicks cluster around their parents as tightly as possible and don't seem to modify their dispersion rate along the x if the y is lacking, if you see what I mean. Better to go with a bigger room. Pathing only seems to hit FPS if it involves a lot of long distances and multiple routes.

I did this once also with snakes that I'd modded to be domestic animals and to lay eggs, and I got a constant supply of teeth dropping off from the fighting, which I decorated all my tables with. Nice, but sadly can't work in vanilla.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a 50-animal per-species cap? I usually take turkeys and used to breed three all the time, and keep the door locked until the poults grow up, but when the number hits the cap they just stop hatching. Now I just breed one. Turkeys take two years to grow up, and turkey clutches are pretty large, so that one turkey produces enough for my needs.

[Togre]

Yeah, once they hatch they will need their own rooms.  I intended to say each individual has a room(I may not have been very clear).  I'm remodeling my current fort to try this.

I don't know but that 50 per species cap sounds accurate.

[ZawB]

Oh God, see the problem I have is that chicks are always in such great numbers that dealing with them takes too much time and effort. I used to sort things into rooms, then I started caging them, and both tasks took so bloody long to finish (during which time the things would run all over the place, eating FPS like crazy and causing dwarfs to run in circles after them) that I just decided to lock them up until I was ready to kill 'em. It's just easier, and I play DF essentially as an exercise in reducing effort. So your plan involves taking 10 or so baby birds from their mother and stuffing them into 10 new 1x1 rooms, and doing this pretty much constantly as they are born? It makes my head hurt

I think there's a bug at work. If you pasture anything else -- dogs, sheep, pigs, whatever -- any young born are automagically pastured with them. This isn't true of the birds (or any of the hatching animals), so chicks are free to escape if given the chance. So I don't give them the chance. I put nest boxes and breeding rooms right next to my food stockpiles, which are also where my primary meeting area is, which is also right next to the butcher's shop. If a turkey escapes while its pals are being chopped up, it will just go to either the nest boxes or the meeting room, and then the dwarfs don't have to go too far for the next one to kill.

[wuphonsreach]

I do it in a few steps:

1. When chicks are born, they get shoved into a 5x11 room.  That's big enough to handle a full screen of hatchlings.  All the newborns are going to be at the end of the list to start.  Fast and easy and then I don't have to deal with them for 6-12 months.

2. When they mature, I pause the game and destroy the pasture.  Now they'll show up in the list as no-pasture.  I try to keep a meeting area near the growth areas so the birds don't wander too far.

3. Assign the males to replace dead males in the tiny rooms in various corners of the fort where I keep 2-4 of each male bird.  The rest of the unassigned males get assigned to the "butcher" pasture(s).  Which are rooms near the butcher shop where birds await their fate.

Male peacocks get shunted off to another pasture, because I use them to replace watchtower birds when they die.

4. Assign the females, one by one, to 1x1 pastures on top of nest boxes.  This is tedious, but I work either top down (using the asterisk to page down, or the slash to page up from the bottom).  I count how many pages down the list I had to go before I found an unassigned female egg layer, which makes getting back to that point rather easy. 

So, create 1x1 pasture, 'n', then 'N', then asterisk/slash a bunch of times to find an unassigned female.  Rinse-repeat until you run out of unassigned females in the list.

If you want less work here, limit the number of alcoves and nest boxes that you're using for kitchen egg production.  In which case you should do step #4 first (replace any dead egg layers), then just assign all the remaining birds to the butcher pasture.  You probably only need 60-100 nest boxes to feed a large fortress, plus have plenty of lavish meals for export.

5. Wait a bit, then go to the butcher pasture, arrow over birds with the 'v' key and start marking them to be butchered (s).  Repeat at the start of every season or whenever the room looks crowded.

All in all, not terribly difficult and you end up with thousands of eggs, plus a good bit of meat and leather.  When the nest boxes start looking empty because birds are dying, then I lock a female into a 3x3 room with 3 nest boxes and wait for hatching.

[ZawB]

This is tedious, but...

No kidding. I say this with total respect, since you've clearly put a lot of thought into this system, but it's the maddest thing I've ever heard of. I thought squad management was hard, but you've topped it. If I wanted to play a poultry management game, I'd've plaaaaaayed... no, I guess Dwarf Fortress is pretty much it 

[wuphonsreach]

Well, the other part of FUN with a massive egg industry to be used by the cook:  When my cook threw a temper tantrum, he was throwing eggs at the walls.

And yes, I could probably get by with only (12) or (24) turkeys and (12) or (24) chickens.  But the peacocks have a 15-year minimum lifespan compared to 10 for the turkeys, which makes them better suited for animal-powered watch towers.

[Hyndis]

Egg farming is super easy.

1) Dig a large room. I'd say 30x30 room. Fill it with a large number of nest boxes. It doesn't matter where they are located, but I like to spread them out to avoid potential infighting due to localized overcrowding.
2) Zone the entire room as a pen/pasture zone. Assign all of your egg laying creatures to the zone. This means chickens, turkeys, cave crocodiles, and yes even dragons.
3) Build a door that leads to the room. Outside the room, make an egg stockpile.

Done!

If you are running low on birds simply lock the door for a year. Because the door is locked no eggs will be harvested, allowing the eggs to hatch. Do this every few years whenever your bird population gets low. If you have plenty of birds, unlock the door and allow eggs to be harvested.

While you can cull the males, its really not needed. Its a lot of tedious work without much benefit. The key is to have as many species of birds as possible. Each species has a popcap of 50, so if there are less than 50 creatures on the map, they can get pregnant or hatch eggs. If there are more than 50 creatures on the map, they're all sterile until there are 50 or fewer. If you have chickens, peafowl, turkeys, and ducks you will have a total of ~200 birds. Assuming no selective culling, that means ~100 females laying eggs.

I don't know how frequently birds will lay eggs, but if you do this you will be absolutely rolling in eggs.

Bonus points if you have crocodiles. A crocodile can lay up to 70 eggs per clutch, and they live for a very, very long time.