When I sent out an email reminding our past chicken waterer customers that our 2010 photo contest deadline is coming up on September 21, the entries came pouring in.  The photos were wonderful, but many of them also came with stories that I can't help sharing with you.  I'll be regaling you with customer images and tales over the next few weeks --- enjoy!

To get you started, here are a couple of the most beautiful photos we've received so far.  The top one is from Stuart Liptay, who wrote:

Meanwhile, Jennifer Wallace sent me several beautiful photos of her son's flock --- polish/americana, barred rock, buff orphingtons and banties.  I believe that both of the photos I loved so much are of the banties, although I'm not positive.
















Keep those images rolling in!

Back in the spring, I asked my father to save me some Rhode Island Red eggs from his flock.  I wanted to try out the breed, and knew that he had both hens and a rooster that would breed true.

Unfortunately, his flock was also full of Golden Comet hens, but Daddy and I were positive that we'd picked out the Rhode Island Red eggs for our brooding experiment.  It turns out we were positively wrong!

Take a look at the result of the experiment --- notice how our young rooster has white mottling on his tail and around his neck?  Clearly, this isn't a pure breed Rhode Island Red.  Instead, the genetics of his White Rock grandmother are showing through.  Nevertheless, I've decided that this cockerel will father next year's broiler experiment...as long as he stops pecking at my sandaled feet.

Everett's free range chickens are Buckeyes, so I felt him out about the breed's potential as foragers.  At first, Everett told me that the chickens were great foragers, but it turned out he meant they were quite predator resistant --- he hasn't lost a chicken to the elements yet, despite allowing them to roam free next door to the woods.

Upon further questioning, I discovered that Everett feeds his chickens about the same amount of laying feed every day that I feed mine, in addition to scraps from the kitchen and all the bugs they can catch.  He said that when he cut back their laying feed, egg production plummeted, which tells me the Buckeyes are getting the majority of their nutrition from the storebought grains.  I was disappointed to have to scratch another breed off my list of potential forest pasture scavengers.

One of my top tips from our Short, Sweet, and Self-Sufficient Guide to the Working Chicken is "Don't name your chickens!"  Chickens are so personable and individualized that I find it hard to follow my own advice, but the truth is that a working chicken flock needs constant management.  And "management" is often a euphemism for slaughtering and eating birds that are no longer pulling their weight --- hard to do if those birds have pet names.

How do you know when it's time for a chicken to go in the stew pot?  In my opinion, aggressiveness is the first and most important factor.  If your rooster scares your three year old out of the coop, that rooster has to go.  But on our farm, chickens also have to pull their own weight, so we try not to let even kind hens linger too far past their sell by date.

We keep our layers in three different tractors, each with a specific age and breed of bird, so it's pretty easy to tell who's falling down on the job when production plummets.  Currently, we have three Golden Comets who are probably pushing their fourth birthdays, a pair of two-year-old Golden Comets, and a trio of two-year-old Barred Plymouth Rocks.  I would expect the farm's eggs to be flowing primarily from the young Golden Comets and Plymouth Rocks, but in fact we get most of our eggs from our oldest biddies.  What's up?

The Plymouth Rocks are supposed to be a good multi-purpose chicken, feeding us both eggs and meat, but my record-book shows that our Rocks have been averaging about an egg per bird per week for months.  If I were more on top of our flock, I probably would have eaten the Plymouth Rocks this spring.  As it is, we butchered the three along with some of our Dark Cornish last week, and will be grinding the meat up for potstickers shortly.

The young Golden Comets didn't get the ax this week, but we're not thrilled with their production --- half an egg each per day.  (In contrast, our three old girls are averaging three quarters of an egg each per day.)  I suspect that one of our young Golden Comets is laying thin-shelled eggs that get crushed in the nest, despite the supplemental calcium I tossed in along with their laying feed this month.  Now that we have a spare tractor, we're going to split up the disappointing duo and figure out who's laying and who's not.

We attribute a large part of our four year old Golden Comets' productivity to our homemade chicken waterer, along with their great ability to forage.  I toss cupsful of Japanese Beetles and June Bugs into their tractor each week because I don't trust our other chickens to catch the beetles before they fly away.  Maybe the insect protein keeps them young.  Or maybe our old biddies just lay so well because of the subtle hint Mark pasted on the inside of their nesting compartment?

We butchered another third of our cockerels last week, and I decided to crunch the numbers on these 16 week old Dark Cornish.  You might remember that at 12 weeks old, our cockerels weighed an average of 2.25 pounds per dressed carcass, which came out to a cost of $2.51 per pound.  Our 16 week old birds weighed 3 pounds apiece, and the new weight cost us $4.33 per pound in feed.  Clearly, letting our cockerels get older makes the feed to meat ratio worse, not better.

The 16 week old birds were also considerably spunkier.  I thought it was cute the first time I saw the cockerels roosting on the coop roof, but now I'm wondering how we're going to capture the last 9 birds before our last butchering day.  Even worse, when Mark went into the coop to catch his first chicken on our kill day, the chickens were so big and vigorous that one accidentally gave him a big scratch across his face.

I had been considering keeping a breeding pair of Dark Cornish to experiment with next year, but I've changed my mind.  I've decided we don't need --- or want --- a predator resistant breed, and would instead prefer something sedate and docile.  So the last 9 broilers are slated for slaughter this week, and next year's experiment is simmering on the back burner.

After less than a month in the larger forest pasture paddock, our cockerels have scratched the place up drastically.  I'm actually a bit shocked, and am revising my opinion of their foraging abilities.  It took our flock (larger then) two months to reach this stage in the much smaller paddock.  What's going on?

I've got a few hypotheses, as always.  Maybe Dark Cornish really come into their own as they reach sexual maturity.  Or could it be they watched the Mama hen and her chick foraging and followed suit?  Or maybe the vastly increased foraging is an optical illusion, brought on by the recent lack of rain, which has slowed down the weed growth and made it easier for the chickens to devastate their pasture.

While I was in the pasture conducting my photo shoot, I also stumbled across this chicken, who looks quite different from the others.  Could she be a pullet rather than a cockerel?  She seems to have nearly no comb and her speckled feathers are quite distinct from her brothers'.  Suddenly I'm caught on the horns of a dilemma.  Should I save a hen and rooster to keep the breed going and give them another try next year, perhaps using the Mama hen as a foraging trainer?  Or stick to my guns and eat the lot?  Decisions, decisions!

With Dark Cornish no longer in the running for a permaculture broiler breed, I'm starting to narrow down our choices for next year's experiment.  Freedom Rangers were near the top of my list, until I did a bit more research.

What are Freedom Rangers?
The term "Freedom Ranger" is merely an American popularization of the hybrid breed developed for use by French companies operating under the Label Rouge program.  Label Rouge is a certification process, a bit like "free range" or "organic" in the U.S.  Their website is difficult to read if you don't understand French, but ATTRA put out a PDF file about Label Rouge which is worth a viewing (and from which I stole this image.)

Freedom Ranger parents come from a few proprietary lines owned by European corporations.  So, don't think you can buy a flock of Freedom Rangers and raise your own, or even start your own breeding flock by growing the two parent breeds.  Freedom Rangers, like Cornish Crosses, are industrial hybrids.

What are their advantages?
Freedom Rangers are relatively fast growing, but they don't grow as quickly as the Cornish Cross.  As a result, they don't tend to have the high mortality rates that break so many backyard broiler-raisers' hearts.  Freedom Rangers are reputed to grow to 5 pounds in 12 weeks, to be tastier than Cornish Crosses, but to have less breast and larger legs.

Based on one backyard experiment, Freedom Rangers seem to have a feed to meat conversion ratio that's almost as good as Cornish Crosses --- 3.4.

What are their disadvantages?
As I mentioned earlier, we couldn't create our own self-perpetuating Freedom Ranger flock, which is a deal breaker for me.  Having to buy chicks every year makes the meat pricey --- the experiment I linked to above ended up with a cost of $1.73 per pound for Freedom Rangers and $1.47 per pound for Cornish Crosses.

I'm also not sold on Freedom Rangers being good foragers.  If they're so good at catching bugs, why did they eat so much grain?  I think I'll let someone else do that experiment for us and move on to a different breed for our next batch of broilers.

We decided to try out Dark Cornish cockerels for our first broiler experiment since they are supposed to be good foragers and very predator resistant.  It turned out that predator resistance wasn't really necessary in our instance, and our cockerels seemed to be lackadaisical foragers.  The meat will be a bit better for us than storebought since the chickens did consume some greenery and insects, but we clearly spent more than we would have on grocery store meat, or on raising Cornish Crosses.

Here are the stats on the 12 week old birds, which averaged a mere 2.25 pounds dressed weight apiece:

Big producers focus on the feed to meat conversion ratio, which in our case was about 6:1.  This is double the average for Cornish Cross broilers, meaning that our chickens actually consumed twice as much grain as a similarly sized Cornish Cross would have.  That's the precise opposite of the goal of our forest pasture experiment, so we'll be moving on to a different breed next year.

Meanwhile, we still have two thirds of the cockerels bulking up for another month or two.  I'll let you know if their figures are any different, and how the 12 week old birds compare in taste to older birds.  Stay tuned!

Gene Logsdon, author of Small-Scale Grain Raising, posted on his blog last week about a farmer who sold a large crop of grain and used the same money to buy a much smaller amount of processed chicken feed.  Logsdon wrote:

Since this concept is right up my alley, I asked him for more information.  He explained that his current flock of 12 laying hens and a rooster "range over about an acre of woodland and a bit of pasture and some lawn."  He supplements their diet with about four ears of whole corn or a quart of wheat every day, increasing the amount a bit in the winter and providing oyster shell at all times.  Since we feed our chickens about a cup apiece of processed feed per day, he's cutting back his feed by two thirds with his forest pasture.

On the other hand, Logsdon does feed his meat birds commercial feed to "get them fattened in a hurry and out of here."  This bit of data makes me think that my current forest pasture experiment is a bit too ambitious for phase 1.  I think our next incarnation will involve our layers on pasture, and our broilers in tractors on commerical feed.

For those keeping track of good foraging chicken varieties at home, Logsdon and a commenter suggested these breeds --- Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orphingtons, Golden Comets, Australorp, Speckled Sessex, and bantams in general.

The current edition of Mother Earth News has a thought-provoking article about the best chicken breeds for various purposes.  Over 1,000 readers rated chicken breeds on a variety of scales, then the editors compiled the most popular breeds for egg production, meat, and more.

If you've been reading about our forest pasture experiment, you know I flipped straight to the section on free range ability.  Mother Earth News rated Cubalayas and Jungle Fowl as the best foraging breeds, although they also noted that neither chicken variety is particularly good for either eggs or meat.  Other good foragers included Catalana, Old English Game, Hamburg, Minorca, and Malay, but the article didn't note whether these varieties are good for other purposes.  If our Dark Cornish don't live up to expectations, I might have to give some of these a try.

Meanwhile, none of you have given me any data for my chicken foraging poll.  Come on, guys!  I know that at least a few of you must have raised your chickens entirely or primarily on forage.  Don't leave me hanging here!

Over on my homesteading blog, I've been reviewing a fun pamphlet about early New England gardens.  In the process, I started looking through images on Old Sturbridge Village's website, and came across this grouping of chickens from 1866 that I just had to share.  The key lists the varieties as follows:

The artist seemed to like chickens with fuzzy heads --- I have no clue if that was widespread at the time, but it sure looks funny.

The past is fun, but don't forget those modern conveniences.  Our automatic chicken water ensures that your flock has clean water, even if you go out of town for the weekend.

If our forest pasture experiment works out well this year, we may try to convert our egg-laying flock to a more sustainable breed next year.  I'm very much in the research stages at the moment, and would love your feedback.  I'm looking for a variety that breeds true (so Golden Comets are out), forages well, and lays plenty of eggs (although I don't require the massive number that we get from our Golden Comets.)

Since foraging is at the top of my list, I wandered around the internet to see which breeds were popular during the Great Depression.  Dominiques seemed to roll off everyone's tongues, along with Rhode Island Reds.  Other interesting egg-layers include Hamburgs, Egyptian Fayounis, and Buckeyes.  Have you raised chickens that you think would fit the bill?  Please leave a comment and let me know!  Meanwhile, check out our automatic chicken waterers, perfect in all types of coops and tractors.

White Cochins, Golden Comets, and Barred Plymouth Rocks are the only varieties I've had sufficient experience with to really rate.  But I've stumbled across some other chickens that deserve a mention, especially in the broiler world.  The term "broiler" refers to any chicken that is eaten at a relatively young age.  While you can raise a dual purpose breed like the Barred Rock to the broiler stage, most people who want to raise meat chickens go for a special variety, the most common of which is the Cornish Cross.

The Cornish Cross is a hybrid between a White Plymouth Rock and a Dark Cornish.  Like Golden Comets, the resulting hybrid vigor is a bit astounding.  While the parent breeds take 12 to 20 weeks to reach slaughtering weight, Cornish Crosses may get there in as little as 8 weeks.  People also love the big breast on Cornish Crosses, very different from the slenderer breasts on more traditional broiler breeds.

However, Cornish Crosses have some major issues.  They grow so fast that they often overload their hearts and legs and die before getting old enough to slaughter.  If I thought our White Cochin was a lazy hen, I'd be shocked by the lack of foraging ability among Cornish Crosses --- I've been to visit operations where the pastured birds spend all day sitting in the shade, panting.  Connoisseurs of chicken meat also note that Cornish Crosses lack the subtle flavor of old-fashioned birds (although I've also heard pastured poultry farmers who raise traditional breeds lament the way that their customers turn up their noses at the more flavorful meat --- it is probably an acquired taste.)

This year, we're going to be experimenting with one of the parents of the Cornish Cross --- the Dark Cornish.  This traditional broiler breed is reputed to take up to twenty weeks to reach slaughter weight, but they are excellent foragers and are nearly feral in their ability to fend for themselves.  I'll be sure to let you know whether the Dark Cornish are worth the extra time.

While you're waiting on our results, check out our homemade chicken waterer.  We use them in our chicken tractors and plan to add them to our forest pasture as well.

Barred Plymouth Rocks are another popular breed, although I've been less thrilled with them than I thought I'd be.  These birds are billed as dual-purpose egg and meat birds, but I've found that our two year old birds lay only as well as our four year old Golden Comets in the winter (which is to say, not much.)  They also seem to be pretty shoddy in the foraging department, spending sunny afternoons drowsing on their perches while the Golden Comets are busy scratching in the dirt.  (Can you tell that I really value productivity?)

On the other hand, we might be more pleased with this variety if we used them the way they were intended.  Until World War II, Barred Plymouth Rocks were probably the most popular birds in the entire United States and they were usually kept in mixed farmyard flocks.  Each year, farmers would let the hens set and produce chicks, then eat the males as they reached full size.  If that sounds like your chicken flock, Barred Plymouth Rocks might be worth a shot.

Please leave a comment if you disagree and think your Barred Plymouth Rocks are the cat's meow.  (Many people on the internet do seem to think so.)  Meanwhile, check out our homemade chicken waterer, providing clean water to the whole flock.

If you want lots of huge, brown eggs and are willing to buy chicks every few years to renovate your flock, the Golden Comet should be your top choice.  This variety is a hybrid between a White Rock female and a New Hampshire male and is one of the hybrid varieties in which the males are very easy to tell from the females as soon as they hatch.  As a result, if you order all female Golden Comet chicks, you're nearly guaranteed to receive all females (as opposed to many other chicken varieties where sexing is a chancy business and you'll often end up with a rooster amid your hens.)

 Scientists use the term "hybrid vigor" to explain the way an offspring of two different varieties (or even species) may be bigger or stronger than either parent.  For example, mules are often stronger and larger than both their horse or donkey parents.  Similarly, Golden Comets seem to show true hybrid vigor in the egg-laying department.  The internet notes that Golden Comet hens lay around 300 eggs per year, and I would add that while most chicken varieties slack off or stop laying completely in the winter, our girls lay straight through.  We even have some hens who are starting their fifth year of life and who are still laying (though at a lower rate than their younger friends.)

On the other hand, the one major disadvantage of Golden Comets also stems from their hybrid nature.  Gardeners among you are probably aware that there's no point in saving seeds from hybrid vegetables since the seeds will sprout into dozens of different kinds of plants.  Golden Comets are the same way --- you're not going to get Golden Comet chicks if you breed a Golden Comet hen with a Golden Comet rooster.  Instead, you just have to buy new chicks every time you want to expand your flock.

We've found our Golden Comets to be good foragers, adept at scratching in the dirt and very alert to the grubs I toss their way while weeding the garden.  They're friendly too, and lie down in a submissive crouch when I get too close, making them easy to catch if they end up somewhere they shouldn't be.  They enjoy scraps and quickly wolf down any compost we drop into their tractors.  All in all, unless you want to be completely self sufficient, Golden Comets are hard to beat as a backyard egg-layer.  Small surprise that they're the most commonly pictured breed in chicken-related articles and blogs.

When you put in your chick order this spring, don't forget to order our automatic chicken waterers to get your birds off to a healthy start.

There are hundreds of different varieties of chickens out there to choose from, so figuring out the right one for your needs can be a bit daunting.  This week, I'm going to highlight the pros and cons of the chicken breeds I've had personal contact with.  I hope you'll chime in and let me know your favorite breed(s) and why you love them.  Are they good pets, wonderful mothers, prolific egg-layers, great meat birds, or something else entirely?

I'm going to start off the week with a bit of a dud.  Two years ago, we went in on a somewhat random assortment of chickens with a friend.  We brought home Golden Comets, Barred Rocks, and a White Cochin, the last of which was our least favorite by far.

First, I should mention her good point --- she's very, very broody.  At one year of age, our White Cochin decided it was time to become a mother and she started sitting on the nest.  Since we don't have a rooster in our flock, this broodiness went for naught.  All summer, we pushed her out of the way to take out the eggs, but she just kept sitting.  Finally, we gave in and got some fertilized eggs from another friend for her to sit on.

Here's where the White Cochin showed her mettle --- even after trying to brood for months on end, she sat on that nest all day and all night.  Finally, the chicks started hatching...and our broody hen pecked them to death.  Apparently, our White Cochin was smart enough to realize that the black chicks coming out of those eggs couldn't possibly be her offspring, but that intelligence made her pretty worthless to us since we couldn't even use her as a brood hen.

Except for her tendency to go broody, our White Cochin seems to have no clue how to live on a farm.  While her tractor-mates are busily scratching in the weeds to find bugs, she usually hops up on a perch and takes a nap.  Her eggs are a slightly different color than everyone else's, so we can tell that she rarely lays.  Actually, as I write this, I can't quite realize why we haven't eaten her yet.  I would recommend a White Cochin only to someone who wants a gentle pet with no redeeming livestock features.

Have you had experience with a cochin and disagree?  Leave a comment and let me know!  Meanwhile, check out our homemade chicken waterer, enjoyed just as much by a broody cochin as a hard-working egg-layer.