Farming For Self-Sufficiency
(Page 3 of 7)
November/December 1974
Copyright © 1973 by John and Sally Seymour. Introduction copyright © 1973 by Schocken Books. Inc.
Sally has bought hens from the Belsen houses sometimes. Hens in batteries will only live about a year (we have had a hen laying at ten years old and laying really well). But before their first year is out battery hens are sick, like to die, and cannot be kept alive in the wire cages any longer. They are therefore sold for 'scrap', at prices often as low as ten new pennies. Sally has bought them thus for half a crown, brought them home in the van, and turned them loose. Always some fail to survive the journey. It takes them two or three days to learn to walk —at first you have to carry them about. Within a week they have learned to do something they have never done before: that is, scrap or scratch about for food. Within a month they are new hens. The feathers grow back on their chafed and naked necks (they had worn the old feathers off on the wire), the sores and callouses on their breasts have healed, they learn to flap their wings, run, chase earwigs, and it does the heart good to see them. They will live and lay well for a couple of years sometimes, but they never really recover the vigour and health of free-range-reared hens.
RELATED CONTENT
The trouble with the modern industrial hen (the 'hybrid') is that she does not go broody. Broodiness has been bred out of her, not being required by the agri-businessman. So if you wish to rear your own chicks naturally you will have to get some old-fashioned hens from somewhere. Light Sussex are a very good breed, for eggs, meat and rearing chicks, but they lay white eggs. The eggs are none the worse for being white but don't look so nice. Rhode Island Red is another fine breed, and lays brown eggs. The best thing you can get is the good-old backyard mongrel, result of a varied ancestry. If you want very brown eggs shove in a Cuckoo-Marran cockerel. He will father a brown-egg-laying brood, but they are not very prolific. My advice is to stay away from the flighty, highly specialized egg-laying breeds like the modern hybrids and even the old White Leghorns. They will lay more eggs per year if highly fed and highly looked after, but they won't convert natural food so well, are no good for meat, and are not so hardy. Also, they're rotten mothers.
GEESE
'The full grown goose,' Cobbett tells us, 'has solidity in it.' A pen of geese, say three geese and a gander, or two geese and a gander, or for that matter a gander and a goose, will run happily about the fields and live on grass, with just a handful of grain thrown to them every night to lure them home to shut them in from the foxes. They don't need any grain. When they begin to lay, say in February or March, if you are lucky enough to have broody hens then, or can beg, borrow or steal broody hens from a neighbour, you can steal the goose eggs from the geese and put them under the broody hens. You will have to splash the eggs with water every day, because a hen does not know about this part of a goose mother's duties. The hens will bring the young geese into the world, and look after them when they get there as well as the geese will. Also, by taking the eggs away from the geese you encourage your geese to lay more eggs. When you think that you are unlikely to get more than one more clutch of eggs out of your goose anyway—let her sit on a clutch (maybe fourteen, a hen will sit on six). But you must protect them from rats and foxes. Rats will pull goose eggs, or young geese, right out from under the feathers of the goose mother. A fox will go miles to get a sitting goose.
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