Laying Hens
All our hens are heritage breeds, with the exception of the Marsbars, which are a hybrid to produce green eggs. We also have two ex-commercial hens, given to us by one of our daughters friends when her family were moving house and they no longer had room for them.
We don't usually completely free range our hens, as we have a resident fox and we have also seen a badger. We protect our hens from predators with electric poultry netting and we regularly rotate them onto fresh grass. However, this year we have started allowing them to explore beyond their electric fence during the day. It's a beautiful sight to see them free ranging.
By rotating them onto fresh grass, this enables our hens to forage for fresh tasty morsels (aparently bugs and worms are quite delectable, as well as scratching through manure for dung beetles). It also allows the grass to recover, instead of being scratched down to bare earth.
Rotating the hens, also helps to spread their manure around the pasture, fertilising the soil and helping to naturally manage worm burden.
We are obviously biased, but just like our own lamb, pork and chicken, our eggs are the best we have ever tasted. You simply cannot beat eggs from hens which live on grass, with room to move, forage, sunbathe, have the occasional cuddle and enjoy good quality feed.
Table Birds
We choose to rear our own chicken for the table. However, as we prefer our animals to live as natural life as possible, we have chosen Hubbard’s instead of Ross Cobb’s, which is the usual fast-growing bird found in supermarkets.
Most supermarket chicken is ready at 5 – 6 weeks old. These birds permanently live in cramped, dirty barns for their whole lives and never see daylight. They grow so quickly, their bodies cannot support their own body weight, resulting in the birds lying down all the time, in turn causing black hock burns from the ammonia in the manure. Birds often die due to the cramped, dirty conditions. Commercial chicken food is often medicated to prevent illnesses such as Coccidiosis.
As our birds live in a clean environment, medicated feed is not necessary. None of the Allen & Page Smallholder feeds are medicated.
One day, when we have more land, we will have a much larger dedicated space for our meat birds, so they have more room to roam and forage but for now, this is the compromise we are happy with. It’s a considerable step up from most commercial chicken.
We chose Hubbard’s as they are a slower growing breed, more suited to a free-range lifestyle. Admittedly, they are more docile and do lie down more than laying breeds. However, they do still actively forage and show normal chicken behaviour, scratching the earth for tasty treats and creating dust baths. They are very social creatures and will often cuddle up together.
Once they no longer need heat, our meat birds live out on grass for the rest of their lives, with ad-lib water, growers’ pellets and occasional treats from the veg garden. We move their coop onto fresh grass twice per day. Meat birds/broilers eat and poop more than laying breeds, after all they have been hybridised to produce a bigger breast and carcass than laying breeds. By moving them twice per day, not only does it give them a clean area to live, it also fertilises our land. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Hubbard’s are usually ready for the freezer between 10 – 15 weeks. We usually start picking off the larger cockerels and give the others extra time to reach a good weight. By the time they are ready for the freezer, they are more like small turkeys, averaging 2.5kg – 3kg per bird.
Chickens are ominvores, they need a good source of protein. It's not uncommon for chickens to be cannibals, they will eat their own eggs and will sometimes kill and eat other chickens. Chickens can be complete savages, which isn't surprising given that they are distant relatives of velociraptors! When they were youner, our children thought it was highly amusing that they had their own mini dinosaurs.
We prefer to feed soy free, non GMO feeds. We use the Allen & Page Smallholder Range of layers pellets, chick crumb and growers pellets for all our birds.
