What should homesteaders look for in a chicken?
Although a homesteader can
certainly choose Cochins as gentle pets for their preschoolers and
Polish to win first prize at the fair, the average farmer will be
more interested in making sure her chicken habit pays for itself.
The best farm breeds should produce lots of eggs and/or meat on little
store-bought food, but homesteaders should also pay attention to some
less obvious chicken traits.
What
are the less-than-obvious traits to be on the
lookout for? Prime homesteading birds will usually be good
foragers and will stand
up well to predators and weather. They will typically lay in the
winter, even when day length drops below the critical 14 hours per day
required for peak production (or the homesteader will commit to
installing supplemental light in the coop or to doing without omelets
during cold weather). In addition, the
best breed for your farm might make good mother hens...or you might
prefer a non-broody breed if you're going to use an incubator and want
to maximize egg production. Even if you don't have nearby
neighbors, I recommend choosing birds that only make a racket when
predators are
sniffing around since you'll soon tune out the cackling of loud breeds
like Anconas, Leghorns,
Old English Game hens, and White Faced Spanish, which means you might
lose some free-rangers to hawks as a result. If you garden (and
what homesteader
doesn't?), you'll also want to select a breed that's less likely to fly
fences and scratch up your lettuce bed—heavier breeds are better in
this respect, and the worst fliers (to be avoided) include Hamburgs, Leghorns, Old
English Game hens, and all types of bantams.
Beginning homesteaders might choose from among the
most productive
egg-layers for their first couple of years, but chances are you'll
slowly gravitate toward dual-purpose birds that also produce a
worthwhile amount of meat (dressing out to at least two pounds at twelve weeks).
From an economic standpoint, it simply doesn't make sense to keep hens
around after they've been laying more than one to three years (depending
on the breed and on your level of sentimentality). So if you
don't want to be feeding unproductive pets, you'll end up butchering your
layers frequently, meaning those stewing hens will need a use in
the kitchen. In addition, once you start hatching your own eggs (a
big savings over buying hatchery chicks every spring), you'll
notice that fifty percent of your flock is male...and most farms only
need one rooster. All of the excess cockerels will join the spent
layers in the self-sufficient homesteader's belly. Since the most
productive egg-laying breeds simply aren't worth your while to butcher
and dress out as meat birds, I focus on dual-purpose breeds through most of Thrifty Chicken Breeds.
What shouldn't
the self-sufficient homesteader care about? Eggshell color only
matters for aesthetic reasons, as does color of a meat bird's
skin. In both cases, the taste and nutritional quality of the eggs
and meat are due to what the chicken in question ate (which generally
equates to how much non-store-bought feed it consumed). In
addition, I recommend that you don't pay too much
attention to the
actual breed name or to whether or not your chickens are listed as
heritage
breeds. While threatened heritage varieties sound good on paper,
it's worth asking yourself—why do so few people raise that type of
chicken any more? Perhaps the breed was particularly suited to
only a
very specific climate or type of homestead, or maybe (as has happened
with many breeds in the last century) breeders began selecting for
exhibition-quality looks rather than for productivity and
efficiency.
While Thrifty Chicken Breeds does list variety names to give you a place to start, I
believe the best chicken for most homesteaders is a mutt specifically
bred to match your farm and needs. So take everything I say with a
grain of salt—if your Australorps don't live up to my high praise,
seek out another dual-purpose variety that is being raised by
homesteaders like you who are interested in productivity over prestige.
I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from Thrifty Chicken Breeds.
If so, why not read the whole thing for only 99 cents? Or stay
tuned for another excerpt here on the blog tomorrow.
| This post is part of our Thrifty Chicken Breeds lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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