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factsheet
keeping
poultry |
what
is it?
Most
people equate the word poultry with chickens, but it also covers
ducks, geese, turkeys, guinea-fowl, quail, and arguably even pheasants
and pigeons (dictionary definition = the keeping of domestic fowl).
All have their particular quirks: chickens are easy to keep, ducks
need access to water, and geese are hardy, tough and self-reliant
but need a bit more space. Chickens of course are the most common;
there are many breeds and varieties available with different characters,
some are for show and have incredible ‘hairstyles’,
others are renowned for their consistent supply and quantity of
eggs, and others make excellent table birds. You don’t need
much experience or capital to keep a few chickens in the garden
and there are many benefits other than fresh, free-range eggs and
meat.
what are the benefits?
There
are three main areas in which keeping poultry can benefit the environment.
The first is helping to keep food production local; chickens, for
example, don’t have to be reared along with thousands of others
in huge battery sheds using large-scale machinery to be fed chemically-produced
feedstuffs, and then the eggs transported across the country to
supermarkets where you have to drive to get them. All this entails
unnecessary habitat destruction, pollution and carbon emissions;
keep them yourself and you just have to walk outside to feed them
and collect the eggs.
Secondly, you know what they’ve been fed and treated with,
and you can ensure that the whole enterprise is kept organic and
free-range. And thirdly, you can ensure that your poultry become
part of a natural cycle – you can feed them your food scraps
instead of sending it to landfill (it’s not a good idea to
put cooked food on the compost heap unless it’s enclosed,
as it could attract rats), and then put their waste on the compost
heap, and also let them roam on the garden in the winter, to enrich
the soil with their droppings. Garden pests like slugs and snails
are a particular favourite of ducks.
Free-range poultry are happy, healthy birds, it is a pleasure to
watch them scratching around or having a good dust bath. They suffer
fewer diseases than commercial chickens and can follow their normal
behaviour patterns with plenty of space to roam.
what
can I do?
Chickens are gregarious, so you will need to keep a small flock.
Start small and increase numbers as you gain experience and confidence.
Just 4-6 hens will keep a family well stocked with eggs with some
left over for barter. You can buy ‘point of lay’ hens
(about 20 weeks old) for about £5 each, or day-old chicks
for £1.50 (but you won’t know what sex they are). Check
your local paper, or Country
Smallholding; you’ll probably have to collect, so take
along a large cardboard box with holes in. Some breeds are better
layers than others. We’ve found Black Rock and Warrens (a
hybrid bred originally for battery farms) to be excellent.
Healthy chickens need an outdoor run and a weatherproof hen-house
of roughly 30cmx30cm per hen. You can buy a hen-house (see Country
Smallholding) or if you’re the least bit handy, you can
make one. The house will need dark, private nest boxes (4 birds
to one nest box), perches to roost on, a door for the hens, and
a larger door for cleaning out. It must be secure from predators
and shut up overnight. They can have the run of the garden, as long
as they can’t get at your vegetable plot in the growing season.
You need to put hay in the nest boxes, and hay, straw or sawdust
as bedding in the house. This should be changed every week, with
the old bedding added to the compost heap.
You can feed them your food scraps, along with a couple of handfuls
of grain and layers’ mash or pellets (special feed with the
minerals and protein chickens need to produce eggs) per day. They
need a constant supply of water – from a ‘drinker’,
which gravity-feeds water as they use it; they need small amounts
of grit (to help grind their food) and oyster shells (to provide
calcium for the egg shells). All this can be purchased from agricultural
suppliers, or ordered online and delivered; it doesn’t cost
much compared to the value of the organic free-range eggs –
chicken feed, you might say.
Ducks love water and they are better off with a pond rather than
just a bucket; in a pond they keep the weeds down, add fertiliser
and keep the edges sealed by their paddling. They don’t need
a nest box or perch, but do need a fox-proof shelter: 1m² is
adequate for 5 birds.
Geese get 80% of their food from grazing, so they’re cheaper,
but require more land (5 birds per 1/8 hectare). They don’t
produce many eggs but provide delicious meat are hardy and live
longer than ducks or chickens; they also make good guard dogs.
If you’re vegetarian, skip this paragraph: you can kill, pluck
and gut birds for the table, but if you’ve never done it before,
you should get someone with experience to show you how. After chickens
have finished laying (1 or 2 years) they won’t have much meat,
and it will be a bit tough, but they’ll make a good curry.
You can breed chicks if you have a cockerel, but chickens will lay
well without one, which is just as well if you have close neighbours,
as cockerels can be noisy.
resources
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more
- info, books, courses, forum, links etc. |
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printable version
of this factsheet (pdf)
Black Rock
hens scratching around outside their home-made hen-house
nesting box
with a liftable lid for collecting eggs; the hen-house needs one
nesting box for every four chickens
Warren hens,
originally bred for battery farms, seen here with a gravity-fed
drinker; check it every day to make sure it’s not empty
you don't
need a huge amount of land to keep chickens (here are 3 Marans in
a small back yard) - they will love your food scraps, and provide
you with delicious free-range eggs every morning; chickens and cats
get on fine too
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