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.

Giant Eggs and PSB on the menu

Sunday 19th March 2017

Perky Turkeys
A few days ago I found a turkey egg sitting out in the open all on its own. We placed it into one of the houses in the hope that whichever hen had laid it would get the idea and lay any future eggs in the same place.
Since then three eggs a day have appeared buried in the straw. This morning I found two of the girls in the house laying. We want the older hen to incubate the eggs and we don't have plans to keep all three hens. But at this rate there will be a mountain of eggs before anybody decides to sit, so turkey eggs will be on the menu for a while. Once we reach the Easter holidays, one of the turkey hens will probably be on the menu too!




A Pruning Lesson
It was an early start today for we were off to Three Holes for the Fenland Smallholders meeting on pruning fruit trees. A bit late really, as I had already done all mine, but I thought I might learn something and it would be good to meet up with some of the club members.
Fortunately I found out that I did all my pruning correctly. 😁

A Pre-lambing Health Check
The good thing about an early start was that it left a decent portion of the day to get other things done. I wanted to check up on the adult Shetland sheep as the ewes are only a few weeks off lambing now. Main job was to give them a pre-lambing dose of wormer. Each ewe looks about the same size as last year, so I wouldn't be surprised if we get triplets, twins, a single and a zero again.

Rambo and his ladies, tightly penned for worming and inspection.

PSB!
We have a new crop to harvest. My attempts to grow brassicas yield slight improvements year on year. I never quite understood how long Purple Sprouting Broccoli took to give a harvest. It is almost a year since this beauty was sown, yet only now am I harvesting delicious purple sprouts. I missed some of the harvest but this year I shall be growing my PSB plants in a less hidden away location. I plan to plant them out into the broad bean bed once those plants have come out.

Monday 20th March 2017
Giant Eggs Galore!
As if a pile of turkey eggs is not enough, we are getting between one and four goose eggs a day too! That is a lot of egg.
We do our best to keep up, but one goose egg makes a large omelette for lunch.

Planting Potatoes in the Rain
I needed a hearty lunch today for I worked like a trooper in the morning, battling to get as much done as possible before the forecast heavy rain arrived. I didn't fancy another soaking, but more importantly the soil would become unworkable very quickly. I just about managed to get the early potatoes in, but I was drawing the earth up over them in a downpour.
I have planted Arran Pilot, which is my bulk standard early potato. I do find it stands well in the ground though. There's also Red Duke of York, my favourite early as it makes great chips. I've also gone for Duke of York, another variety which can be left to turn into a Main.
The advantage of the Earlies is that if blight comes early again then there should at least be a crop to be had.
No pictures I'm afraid as I had to make a run for the polytunnel and stay there, for the rest of the day was a day for the geese to enjoy.



A Splash of Yellow(hammer)
The afternoon was however brightened up by the sight of eight male yellowhammers feeding on the ground in next door's horse paddock. These birds are becoming scarce in our countryside now but they seem to like the horse paddocks. Their bright yellow plumage is enough to bring a little sunshine to even the rainiest of days.

21st March 2017
Conquering the Grass with Mr Mowtivator
Yesterday's wetness was forgotten today. The sun came out enough to feel on the back of the neck. The grass has been growing at an alarming rate this last week. I have learned from the past to take full advantage of any dry day to tackle the first mow. Miss the chance and a week of rain can leave you with an impenetrable jungle of grass which struggles to ever be dry enough to mow.
It is important to establish who is boss early in the season!
Starting up the lawn mower is always a dread. I do not pretend to be mechanical and if the mower doesn't work there will be no chance of getting it fixed in a hurry. I always do the first couple of mows with the hand mower. It is a more reliable and trustworthy machine than the ride-on. So out came Mr Mowtivator. Mr Mowtivator suffers from the opposite affliction to Mr Rotavator. The latter's engine always starts first time but has been racing apace. The former never wants to start after a winter of rest in the shed. I have to pull and yank the starter cord endlessly, experimenting with choke in, choke out, leaving it for five minutes, trying again... But eventually it splutters and burps into life and all is fine.
I had to wait until late morning for the dew to be driven out of the grass, but by mid afternoon, after four hours pushing the lawnmower, I had tackled the veg plot, the front lawn, the back lawn and the path through the orchard and young woodland. What a relief!
This year I want to treat my grass as a resource for mulching, though I am making the best of a bad job for I consider grass to be a curse. If there was a cheaper way of covering the ground I would. I wouldn't even have a problem with plastic turf, though the voles and moles might not enjoy it quite so much.

Into The Kitchen
That was enough of the great outdoors for the day. Time to hit the kitchen. This afternoon's delights were Portuguese Corn Bread (which did its rising while I was mowing), Spicy Vegetable Pasties, Walnut Cookies and Jerk Chicken - it was going to be Jerky Turkey, but we have run out of turkey breasts for the moment.

So there ends another three days of our smallholding adventure. No day the same. Always learning.

Living Willow 2 - A New Benchmark

Saturday 25th February 2017

The Good Samaritan
The day began with clearing the fallen trees without bringing down the telephone wires. It really was like tree surgery and my super-long-handled loppers were invaluable. The problem was that without them the only way to reach the branches I needed to cut first was to lean a ladder against those very same branches. I've tried that sort of thing before and ended up with my hand half-chewed by a bow saw!
Today's operation was successful, if a little tricky. With the telephone wire no longer under threat, there was just the small matter of a couple of rather large trunks leaning at an alarming angle. I couldn't even access the base where the tree had grown through the stock fence. There is only so much headway you can make with a bowsaw and a pair of loppers.
It was at this point that a passing Good Samaritan pulled up and produced a chainsaw out of his van. In a matter of a minute he had saved me at least an hour's hard work. It was nice to know that there are still people around willing to lend a hand.
I do actually possess a chainsaw, but I have not yet studied the instructions or been shown how to use it safely. I didn't think that using it at short notice and in a tricky situation would be a wise move. Better to learn when I have more time and in a more controlled task.
Goose eggs for sale
On a different note, the goose eggs are coming thick and fast now. We will have to start selling them as each one goes a long way! The duck and chicken eggs are coming thick and fast too at the moment.

Fried goose egg (L)   Eggs piling up (R)

Fougasse Fougone!
Fed up with clearing up after the storm, I decided to spend the rest of the day baking. I knocked out a multi-seed loaf, a couple of muesli breads, a rhubarb brown betty ( rhubarb from the freezer, but this year's will be ready in about a week) and three fougasses. Here they are pictured, except the three fougasses, which lasted less than an hour after coming out of the oven!!!

Sunday 26th February 2017
In between some frankly foul weather, there have been some fairly strong hints of Spring this February. Under one of the Ash trees, the border is subtly brightened up by the hellebores which are flowering beautifully.

I set about today's task, sorting the left over cut willow for my project.
Can you tell what it is going to be?


A couple of showers had me taking refuge in the polytunnel, where I have moved some of the hardier seedlings which I germinated indoors. It won't be long before the whole tunnel is jam-packed with young plants.



When the rain stopped I got back to the task in hand.
Can you tell what it is yet?

A Mystery Clutch
Along the way, I was distracted by a little weeding in the herb border. There I came across a clutch of mystery eggs. They are not guinea fowl eggs or duck eggs. If they are chicken eggs, they must have been there quite some time.
But there is another possibility, for Lady Penelope Peacock and her chick (now looking very much like Lady P) were hanging around the area. The eggs looked a little small, but just maybe they are the first eggs from a young female?



I got back to the project.
Can you tell what it is now?



Monday 27th February 2017

Elvis is broody again! If she stays broody, I will try to discover where the Muscovy Ducks are laying their eggs and sneak a few underneath her.

It was not a day for working outside. In fact, the dogs declared it an official laze indoors day.

Anyway, there was time enough to almost get the willow project finished. It just needs the seat rungs and the back woven and the bench will be ready, grandly overlooking what will be the new pond. If all goes to plan, the legs, the arms and the back are all planted willow which should root itself and spring into growth.

Tuesday 28th February 2017
A Few More Days of Incarceration
Today was the day when our poultry could, in theory, go back outside under some very strict rules. However, we have more gales forecast so I thought it wise to take down the netting rather than fix it in place. Without the netting, the turkeys would be sure to go a-wandering further than is permitted. Besides, I want to let the birds out over a weekend so I have time to keep an eye on things. They will just have to wait another few days.

I didn't mention it the other day, but I managed to jam a cut end of stock fence straight into my hand a couple of days ago. It hurt when I did it and bled quite a bit, but I thought it would heal fairly quickly. However, it must have hit straight against the knuckle, for it swelled a little overnight and was quite painful when I was working yesterday.
But last night it really swelled up (the picture does not show it at its worst), enough to force me into resting up for the day today.








Instead, I took the dogs out for a nice long walk.

And that, apparently, is the end of winter 2016/17.
Tomorrow, allegedly, is Spring.

Poultry imprisoned for another 8 weeks.

Monday 2nd January

Difficult to capture with just the phone, but the thin crescent moon and Venus put on a great show in the early night sky over the house.

Wednesday 4th January 2017
 

Not unexpected, but today the Prevention Order was extended until the end of February. This is an attempt to prevent Bird Flu crossing from wild migrant birds into the domestic poultry flock.

Unfortunately it means that the poor ducks, chickens, turkeys and geese have to stay locked up for another two months.

They have actually settled down into their temporary accommodation now. The chickens are quite happen in the warmth and shelter. In grotty weather they don't do much when they are outside anyway, though I would like them to be scratching about in the veg plot unearthing all the bugs.
The turkeys have finally started coming down to ground level and the Muscovy ducks have started laying again. We are finding the odd chicken egg too, usually up on the hay bales.

Eggs again!

Now that the lock down is extended, I needed to move the three ducks out of the polytunnel and in with the chickens. They enjoyed their walk outside for all of about two minutes!
I had a big swap around in the stables too, moving straw to where hay was and hay to where straw was. In the process I found one dead rat, two young voles and a whole pack of mice.
Rodents are a bit of a problem when the birds are kept inside and I will have to spend a little time laying traps and bait in the stables to make sure it doesn't get out of control.

One of the older hens has something wrong with her foot, so it is probably time for her to be made into a broth! The meat birds have finally began to fatten up - moving them indoors set them back for  a couple of weeks - so we'll 'process' a few of those this weekend. The more we can thin down the numbers, the more straightforward it will be keeping them indoors.


Thursday 5th January 2017
Back at work today after Christmas. A bit of a shock to the system but I quite enjoy my job when the government is not telling us all that we're useless as a way of covering for its own ineptitude! The only trouble with working at this time of year is that there's so little time to get anything done on the smallholding.
This evening we were heading for the Cambridgeshire Self-Sufficiency Group's January meeting which turned out to be a very informative and entertaining talk on growing wood for fuel and coppice products. It was a chance to pick up some more Dexter beef from Paul (who played Santa in a previous post) too.

Saturday 7th January 2017
Hopefully the two lambs have come through. They are being nurtured in the stables, which is a bit of a squeeze what with all the chickens, ducks and turkeys in there too. Not only that, but today the geese were moving in, for with the lock-in extended their temporary accommodation thus far just won't do the job, especially once they start laying eggs and becoming more territorial. The mucky straw from the old shed went under the blackcurrants as a nitrogen-rich mulch.

And so today the stables underwent their third reorganisation. The lambs now have their own 'room' with one wall made of hay - an edible wall!

Seven of the chickens met their maker today. This should ease the overcrowding slightly. The old hen will hang for a few days before being turned into chicken soup. As for the others, we will take off the breasts, wings and legs. As they are not for roasting whole, they don't need to look perfect, so we dunked them in hot water for 40 seconds before plucking. This makes the job so much quicker, but you don't get quite such a clean finished product.

Great egg-spectations

When chickens moult they stop laying eggs, for they need to put their energies into regrowing feathers. The moult coincides with rapidly shortening daylight hours and so often decidedly grubby weather. The hens look a mess, though this state of affairs is quite natural.
When you think about it, as distanced from their natural cousins as they are, why would a bird be laying eggs when it can't fly and any chicks born would have zero chance of survival?

So when you buy eggs from the supermarket, however they are labelled, you should think about what they have done to ensure this steady supply of eggs. Maybe they control the lights to trick the hens. They don't need a period of rest as they are disposable at the end of their short lives. Odds are that the eggs you buy are quite a bit older than you'd imagine anyway.

But here in the world of the smallholder, eggs remain a seasonal product. We get loads of them in the spring and hardly any in the first half of winter. This varies from year to year, but at the moment we are getting about two eggs a week from 25 hens! That's not the best return in the world! Of course the hens still need feeding. If profits were the only motivation, you'd get rid of them all and get new ones in at the right age to begin laying. That's what mass production is about. Even some smallholders fall into the trap of adopting such practices, but it's a slippery slope. I don't want to be overly sentimental about my birds - they're not pets. But at what stage of considering costs does it become pointless trekking down to the chickens at least three times a day, whatever the weather, in the mud, in the rain, in the sun, in the wind, in the icy mornings? How far down the costing slope do we slide before we might as well buy our eggs from Tesco?

So I feed the chickens, take the dogs for a little walk to 'help' me several times every day, and return eggless. I do this in the knowledge that it will change soon. It won't be too long before I need to take a large basket with me to collect the eggs. At least the ducks have started laying again, but they are quite old now, so an egg every other day is the most I can expect.

But this week I had a couple of surprises.
I was wondering when the Ixworth hens would start laying, for these young hens don't need to moult yet so the time of year should have no effect. They are at what is known as 'point of lay' (POL).

The Ixworth trio. Growing up.

So it wasn't too much of a surprise a few days ago  to find a broken egg in their house. The frst eggs are always soft shelled and small. But for the last two days I have collected one small egg from their house. Come spring, these eggs will be hatched under a broody hen and the chicks will be raised as meat birds. For now they are a valued source of eggage.

One of our Crested Cream Legbars (the ones that lay blue eggs) has been spending all her time in the stables. I think she may even be roosting in a livestock trailer. I had a sneaky feeling that she may be building a secret stash of eggs somewhere. The Legbars moulted before the other hens and are now back in their finery again.

Last week Sue spied our girl sneaking out of the turkeys' stable, where we have a small store of straw bales.

I went to investigate and wasn't too surprised to find a clutch of  eggs. This is as many as the rest of the hens have laid in total in the last month! It is an easy place to collect from though, so I have stolen the cleanest of the eggs and left four, marked with big black crosses, so that she keeps laying there.

Those eggs will be savoured when we eat them, for at this time of year eating eggs is a treat, even for us folk who keep chickens.

Reclaiming the egg.

It's been a good year for eggs so far. It's not yet the end of March and we're getting about 15 chicken eggs a day. That's over 60% production, if you want to see it in those terms.

Now there is a huge difference between the eggs that properly free range hens produce and anything you can buy in a supermarket, even so called 'free range'.
Firstly, commercial chickens are bred specifically for maximum egg production. Presumably there is a size, shape and colour which it has been calculated that the public prefers. But the prime consideration, I'm sure, is egg production, even if that is at the expense of variety, quality or, most importantly, the chickens themselves.
I'm not saying that the producers have to be overly sentimental. I don't really expect them to keep all their old broilers into old age, but some degree of balance would be nice. But then eggs would cost more, wouldn't they, and not many people care to look past the headline price.

But what I really don't get is that the public are not actually getting proper eggs. They don't even know what an egg is supposed to look like or taste like. I get the price thing, these are hard times for many. But at what expense?

Nobody would buy an insipid, pale, runny, tasteless orange. So when did we come to think that this is how an egg should be.

So this post is just to reclaim the egg! And not just the chicken egg. No more words are necessary.

Here's one that went a bit wrong!
I posted this on Facebook as
"giant steals blue egg".

A duck egg omelette and a giant fried goose egg. All our eggs are this colour, or even oranger.

One day's chicken eggs.
The beautiful feather is a guinea fowl's.
Their eggs come later and are delicious.

 

Ducks demand recount

Can you spot the odd one out?

Think you've spotted it?
I'm afraid I'm not sure if I can help you. I think it's the bottom middle but, on closer inspection, there may even be two odd ones out! I couldn't even tell in the flesh, let alone from a photo.

So you'll imagine my surprise when the penny finally dropped. Eight of these are not what I thought they were.

Let's take a step back a week:
January's nearing its end and the chickens are laying more and more eggs every day. The Crested Cream Legbars, which lay beautiful blue eggs, have been laying very well of late. That's to put it mildly, for I am beginning to suspect that two hens are somehow conspiring to lay more than two eggs per day! I'm not quite sure, for I collect eggs several times a day and don't always remember what I've collected. Furthermore the morning eggs could, in theory, have been laid late the previous day. All other possibilities seem impossible though. The other hens do not lay blue eggs. The young Cream Legbar hen is still a chick and could not feasibly be laying eggs yet. And it is pretty unlikely that Spike the Cockerel has started to lay!

Now fast forward to yesterday:
This morning I found a blue egg lying all on its own in the mud. This is very unusual behaviour from one of the Cream Legbar hens.

Yesterday afternoon:
I collected another three blue eggs. Something is clearly up.

Then I realised. I can't believe I have been so short-sighted. Ducks! Not the three white ducks, who lay white eggs, but the black Cayugas... who lay blue eggs. Or, more precisely, the young Cayugas, the ones who are due to be going off to the poultry house in the sky round about February half term.

Once I'd realised, it all fell into place. For Cayuga eggs have a strange, dark film on them, a bit like dirtied eggs but it won't quite wash off. They're a subtly different shape to hen eggs and usually much larger. I guess it was because they are being laid by ducks just coming into lay that had me fooled, for the size difference is not yet marked.

So it appears that Chickens 8, Ducks 1 may well have been wrong. It was probably Chickens 6, Ducks 3. That's actually more eggs per duck than per hen.