To Save A Chicken

Our newest inhabitants on the smallholding - 'rescue' hens

Read on and you may be surprised I've got these

A vast majority of chickens and eggs in this country are produced in extreme intensive systems. Even those which claim to be free range are usually not much different to the others. Battery hens may have been outlawed, but the replacement systems are not much better. Barn-reared as a description is a vile deception. This is minimum welfare standard. The chickens may not be in actual wire cages but they are caged in by their instincts in highly overcrowded sheds.

Some of the practices which go on sadden me. Overworking of laying hens. Genetic obesity in meat birds. High losses accepted as collateral. Routine drugging. 

Here is an excerpt from an article I found entitled UK Government Rejects 2016 Beak Trimming Ban.

It (BTAG, Beak Trimming Action Group) found that although other countries such as Austria and Sweden have implemented bans on beak trimming, the UK's larger flocks and different breeds mean lessons learned from these countries are not easily transferred over.

BTAG concluded that an imminent ban on beak trimming could result in significant welfare problems through outbreaks of feather pecking and cannibalism.

It goes on to say

The NFU supports and is actively involved in ongoing industry work to better understand what the trigger points are that cause injurious feather pecking.

Those 'trigger points' would not take a genius to work out. What they really mean is:

We are making a fortune from an incredibly inhumane industry which puts zero value on the welfare of birds. We will continue to strongly influence government through lobbying and will make a few right noises about having good intentions.

The chickens which make it out of the system are often in an awful state and need nurturing back to good health. I don't mean that they are hatching and executing elaborate plans of escape.  These are the chickens which well-meaning individuals, often smallholders though more often people with very little experience of keeping any birds, purchase as ex-commercial layers.

At least one of the charities involved in the rescue hen trade really pulls at the heartstrings.

Now the intentions of such charities may be good and I may seem harsh to say that I would rather the chickens' lives were ended at 72 weeks, when their production starts to dip, rather than go on to live a long and happy life in someone's garden.

However, hear me out.

The normal fate of the chickens, whether from caged, barn or free range systems, is for their carcasses to be sold off (presumably very, very cheaply) at the end of the most productive period of their lives. The meat would go for dog food, baby food or cheap processed food.

But now there is an alternative. For around £2.50 you can save one of these chickens. Nice idea.

But here's the rub as I see it.

The chicken-saving charities pay the chicken factory owners for the birds. By doing this you are propping up a cruel and inhumane industry which exists because there is a demand for unethical cheap meat and eggs by a public who prefer to close their eyes to the situation. If you pointed out how the chickens were kept, they would block their ears and go LALALALALA. Or just shrug their shoulders. 

And before you say "That's ok for you. You're not poor and can afford to pay a premium." I get that argument, but cheap meat is not a dietary necessity. In many countries meat is an occasional treat and it is valued. There are plenty of cheap, healthy alternatives, there is a different balance that can be struck.

The 'farmers' must be rubbing their hands in glee. Here are the people who know that their industry is cruel coming along offering to pay them to take the birds away which they would otherwise sell for pennies. They probably wish they themselves had come up with the idea for the scheme in the first place... 

"It's worth it to save a bird", I hear some say. Well, do you really think that no-one is going to step into the breach and provide low grade meat for unidentifiable food? It just means it won't be your particular chicken that won't end up in that part of the food chain.

So there you have it. My probably very controversial view. 

I guess the thing is I get that when the birds' production drops it makes economic sense to replace them and to use the carcasses for something. We cannot expect to have a bounteous supply of eggs available and for the farmers to look after the birds into their unproductive old age. Even I am not that unrealistic.

But there is a point where cost-cutting becomes unacceptable. I would argue it is about how the chicken lives rather than how long it lives. 

Having said all this, yesterday I picked up 8 laying hens from a big poultry shed. Hear me out.

The birds are equally 72 weeks old and I plan to give them one extra year of life, during which they will be productive enough for my needs. Next year I will replace them with birds from the same source and they will make nice chicken soup, pies or treats for the dogs.

But the place I acquired them from, for I did pay £1 each which probably helps out the lady who keeps them, came recommended by others. The chickens were kept in a large shed. I didn't see inside, but what I did see was lots of chickens coming and going freely and wandering over a large area. There were trees for them to gather under, dusty ground (probably moreso than usual with the drought) for them to scratch at and roll around in and space for them to stretch their wings and legs.

This I guess would count as a small scale commercial enterprise and seemed to be a system which I could accept as a means of producing fairly large quantities of eggs without compromising the welfare of the hens too much. I'll be honest, I wouldn't say everything was perfect. The chickens' feathers were not in great condition and they looked like they needed a bit of a rest. They were nowhere near as bad as those which come from more intensive systems.

In the back of the car the chickens clucked to reassure each other and when we introduced them to their new pen they entered confidently. They quickly found their food and water and started scratching around. They clearly knew how to behave naturally.

Departures and Arrivals

Life In The Tropics
We had some rain! About two hours of it on my birthday.
If it did that two or three times a  week we would be on the way to recovery, but since then it's been even hotter and bone dry. School holidays may have started but we are getting little achieved on the smallholding. Anything more than extremely light work is impossible apart from the first and last hour or so of the day. In between it is just too hot to do anything.

Departures and Arrivals
It has been all change on the farm.
Sheep
Three sheep went off on Sunday morning, two of last year's rams which have one ball each(!) and one of last year's ewes. We had a choice between two ewes, a difficult choice which we eventually made based on their fleece for we have plans to get the autumn sheep's fleeces properly tanned.
We are desperately trying to conserve our grass so three sheep less eases the burden somewhat.

Sorry lads!

Turkeys
It's been all change in the turkey pen too. I forgot to mention it, but the second turkey hen had some chicks too. The first three joined the other hen and her two chicks, but the younger hen kept sitting on the remaining eggs. But there was trouble ahead, for as soon as they were born the other hen would kill them before we could save them. In the end I moved her and the older poults into a different pen and the younger hen was left with all six chicks. We decided to sell all six turkey chicks and two of the ten week old turkey poults. They went to local smallholders. We have kept plenty for meat for ourselves and sometimes it is better to cash in by selling them early rather than going to the effort of rearing and fattening them. Again having fewer birds puts less pressure on the land and the money from their sale funds the feed for those we keep.

 

Muscovy Ducklings
We have an extra two Muscovy ducklings too, hatched in the stables under one of our Cream Legbar hens. All I can say is that they are very cute but they don't stay like that for too long.

Laying Hens
There is another addition to the smallholding too. Our flock of old hens are hardly laying at all at the moment. The hot weather is not helping.
So we have brought in 8 ex-laying hens. They come from a free-range flock and should be much more productive than our old chooks. Within an hour they had already produced as many eggs as all the other hens.


We won't be so sentimental about them though. We will keep them until next year when we will replace them with a new group.
More on my opinions about buying in ex-layers in my next post.

There Once (briefly) was an Ugly Duckling

Following on from the previous post about rearing chickens for meat, today I move onto ducks.

We breed our own Muscovy Ducks for meat (which are actually closer to geese than ducks), hatching the eggs under broody hens. It keeps the hens happy. The ducklings grow up with their adoptive mum and live their life in with the chickens, free-ranging over the smallholding. We make no effort to grow them especially fast, but by about four months old they are big enough to eat. A male Muscovy has a deceptively good amount of meat on it, quite easily doing six meals.

One of the Muscovy girls

We occasionally use a couple of 

Muscovy eggs to keep a broody hen happy.

These two were born on 21st July. 

Six Muscovy ducklings under the care of the three Silkie hens

This year we are trying something quite different. We came upon the chance to purchase some meat strain Pekin ducks. This was when we extended the opportunity to the rest of our smallholders club and ended up with 174 ducklings in a stable for a brief time.

We kept twenty of the ducklings for ourselves. Six will be kept as egg layers, the rest are for meat. Their growth rate has been quite astonishing. They came to us at 10-12 days old and we kept them safely in a stable until they were four weeks old. Their first day out saw them diving head first into a rather green pond, but the subsequent preening brought their soft white breast feathers through. Suddenly they started to look like ducks rather than ducklings.

That was only a week ago but the ducks are growing daily. They should taste nice as they have found the raspberries! Luckily there are plenty growing beyond their reach.

Anyhow, the best way to illustrate their rapid growth is to leave you with a series of dated pictures.

23rd June 10-12 days old

23rd June 10-12 days old

5th July 22-24 days old

9th July 4 weeks old

13th July 4 weeks 4 days

16th July 5 weeks old

20th July 5 weeks 4 days

22nd July 6 weeks old

It's a short life for a meat chicken

This seems a long time ago now

Six months does not seem a long time for a table bird to live before it makes the journey into the freezer. Before I became a smallholder I definitely would have questioned why a bird couldn't enjoy a longer life before that life was taken for our culinary pleasure.
That was until I finally plucked up the courage to dispatch some of our older cockerels. They were tough as boot leather!
Add to that the fact that cockerels if let grow too long will become aggressive to each other and ungentlemanly to the hens.

Suddenly a touch of reality strikes home. These birds are not pets. They will live for six months and that's it. So the best I can do is give them a good life.

Three Ixworths and a Muscovy duck

Until this year our meat birds have been Ixworth chickens, a traditional breed, and Muscovy ducks. We didn't feed them any different to the other birds, for they all lived together. The Muscovies grew to a good size but the Ixworths were mostly leg with slithers for breasts.

The Ixworth trio when we had them.

Smart birds, but not a lot of breast.

But it gets more complicated. Six month old birds would be considered slow-grown. Commercial hens will be ready in 6 weeks. Over the years this age has come down dramatically. At the same time slaughter weight has risen equally dramatically. Since the 1940s, slaughter weight has doubled while slaughter age has halved.

Graph taken from Compassion in World Farming document

Now there is so much that I find abhorrent about intensive poultry farming. But the age of the birds is, as I have discovered, not quite so straightforward. The birds probably have no expectations of how long they will live, but would certainly prefer to have space and freedom while they are alive.

We recently reared some chicks taken out of a highly intensive system. Their rate of growth was astonishing, as was their ability to eat and drink vast quantities. But at least these birds were able to live the life of a truly free range chicken until they reached slaughter weight. I would genuinely say that it wasn't overly cruel, though they were abnormally big-breasted and by ten weeks old some were quite waddly. None went off their legs, though they would have if left to grow even heavier. A couple spent some time apparently gasping as they got older. Maybe this was indicative of heart problems or being just too big and misshapen.

Anyway, my conclusion was that provided they were slaughtered before they got too heavy, although their life would be short we could offer them a reasonable life. But I did feel that genetic 'improvement' had gone a little too far.

Our next meat birds, the ones we have just slaughtered, came to us as one day old commercial broiler chicks. They come through a friend and don't even have a breed name. In fact they are a bit of a mish-mash. Most pure white with thick yellow legs and bright red combs, but some clearly mixed with traditional brown hens and a couple specked with rogue black feathers.
They grew much quicker than I had anticipated and took me unawares as they suddenly reached a good weight. I had to hurriedly take them off growers pellets and put them onto finishers (for growers pellets contain medication so require a withdrawal period). They were ready for slaughter at 12 weeks or 84 days. I was very happy with these birds. They did not seem out of proportion. They were healthy birds, it's just that they grew much more quickly than the traditional breeds we had previously tried to rear for meat.

And so I feel we have found our meat chickens. Their short life is nevertheless a good one, far removed from most of their cousins in intensive systems (and I include minimum standard so-called free-range in that).
There are some big benefits to them having a short life too. Feed costs are lower, there is less demand on housing and the ground can be rested more. But there are limits.
The European organic standard gives a minimum slaughter age of 81 days, which I would say is about right for today's fast growing birds. Anything which reaches table weight considerably before that is probably too genetically manipulated to have a comfortable life, not to mention the conditions it is kept in to maximise profit and the expense of welfare and taste.

Turkey Surprise

Another catch-up post which should bring us to mid July.
The drought continues... enough said about that. It is becoming a real problem.

Linseed field casts a blue shimmer as if reflecting the constant blue skies

The field next to us is almost always wheat. When it's not it's rape. The field behind us is almost always sugar beet. But this year we have something different, presumably because of the poor sowing conditions early in the year. Instead we have maize in the back field, as opposed to sweetcorn. This is a biofuel crop - astonishing that some of Britain's most fertile land is used to feed our energy consumption rather than our bellies. This change of land use did mean that we had two pairs of lapwings which I presume attempted to nest. I think the crows got them though.
And in the field next to us we have a delightful blue see of linseed. It is certainly attracting the cabbage whites at the moment.

In the veg plot, I have harvested the garlic and should really do the same with the shallots and onions. All these crops tried to bolt this year, unsurprisingly.

The broad beans are processed, mostly blanched and frozen and their place will be taken by Purple Sprouting Broccoli plants just as soon as it rains and I can dig even the tiniest holes in the soil. I almost missed the calabrese but caught it just before the buds opened. This freezes really well so I grow the crop to mature in two groups rather than over a long period.

Blanching Calabrese

Raspberries and Blackcurrants went mad this year. We are picking bags and bags of them. Every available space has now gone in the freezers.
When this happens Sue hunts through for last year's produce and digs it from the bottom of the freezers for wine and jam making.
She has just set a blackcurrant wine going and we were excited to be informed that raspberries make just about the best country wine going.



I always reserve one or two veg beds for bee crops as well as letting some parsnips go over to flower in their second year. These are a wonderful magnet for hoverflies.
This year I planted a cornfield mix with added barley and wheat. It hasn't quite turned out as I expected, for the whole patch filled with phacelia and borage. I am not sure whether this was residual seed in the soil or whether it was in the cornfield mix.
Anyhow the proper cornfield flowers are coming through underneath now and the whole is a blaze of colour and buzzing with bees.


The Pekin ducks we bought as 10 day olds are growing at stratospheric rates. Now big enough to be safe from crows, we let them out a couple of days back and herded them into the veg plot. The pond in there has dropped right down and is rather green, so I put the hose on to top it up. I didn't expect them all to just go diving right on in, but by the time I returned from the tap they were having a whale of a time. They were looking a bit green though!
We put some tyres and old planks in, for ducks are quite capable of getting waterlogged and drowning if there is no easy way out.
Amazingly having a proper bath and a thorough preen instantly changed the ducklings into ducks. There yellow down was superseded by creamy white and they suddenly look all grown up.

The meat chickens we had are now gone - don't ask if you don't want to know! They reached their weight in a much shorter time than we had anticipated. They only got a stay of execution as we did not have finishers ration in. This is the non-medicated pellets they are fed for the last week or two as the growers pellets need to be withdrawn.

Chickens just hanging around waiting to be plucked.
(they are not alive).

'Processing' the chickens was a big job, spread over two mornings. Let's just say that Friday 13th was an ominous date for the last seven. It is made much quicker by wet-plucking. We dip the carcass into a giant pot of water at 160F for 45 seconds. This loosens the feathers just enough without meaning that the skin rips easily. It reduces plucking time from over 20 minutes to under 5. You don't get a perfectly neat finish, but nearly all of our chicken is joined anyway so that it more easily fits in the small spaces in the freezer.
This time I boiled up the chicken feet and made a jelly stock which I divided up to go in the freezer. A good stock makes all the difference to so many recipes and I begrudge paying for those little foil packs.

The other chickens, the ragtag bunch of old ladies which we sentimentally let live on to old age, they are laying no more than two eggs a day between them. It is always a lean time and the drought isn't helping. Here are two of them and a Muscovy duck sat tight in the nest boxes. Between these three they were sitting on a grand total of one egg!


Last weekend we went along to our Country Winemaking group, again part of the Smallholders Club. Tonight we were doing blind wine tasiting. Sue's contribution was some elderflower champagne.
Fortunately we still had some left, for earlier in the week one of the bottles had exploded with such ferocity that it smashed a hole in the side of the plastic bin we were keeping it in.


We returned from Wine group to a big surprise. Four baby turkeys wandering around with the others. I didn't think they were due for another week yet. We had planned on removing the older poults before this happened, but all seemed to be getting along ok so we left them.
The next morning, quite by chance, I got a message from somebody in need of two newborn turkeys as her hen had accidentally destroyed all the eggs she had been sitting on. This was fine by me, for we are going to have excess turkeys this year and some need to be sold anyway.
Getting them out from under mum was a bit of a challenge but the mission was successfully achieved late evening so that the chicks could be put under their new mum in the dark. I have just received news that mum has accepted them and both are doing well.

So that brings us up to mid July. Just a week to go until schools break up for the summer. I'd like to think that will be the cue for endless downpours, but I somehow doubt it. This drought feels like it's in for the long haul.