FREE-RANGE CHICKENS
(Page 3 of 9)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
I advise then that you get day-old chicks from a well-established hatchery. Especially if these are your first farm livestock, you'll really enjoy brooding them up, and you'll learn a lot. You'll find brooding directions in most any homesteading or poultry book. If you don't know of a nearby hatchery, order from Sears, Roebuck & Co. You can get the "Farm & Ranch" catalog from any Sears catalog store or for a dollar by mail from: Sears, Roebuck & Co., Dept. 139K "SPECIALOGS," 925 S. Homan Ave., Chicago, IL 60607. They don't raise the birds right there at 60607, Inc., but they buy from the best hatcheries near you ... and deliver small quantities more cheaply than you can get them by buying direct. Although the hatcheries produce most of their chicks for spring sale, you can get them through the mail from Sears almost any week of the year.
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I suggest that you'd do best starting a home field-run flock in midsummer. That way, there's no worry about the chicks freezing in the back room of the post office. Most of the brooding can be done outside. Also, the birds will fuel a lot of early growth on free food and, most important, will mature as field-wise range animals, not a bunch of dumb yard birds. They will have six months' age on them and be producing the first small "pullet"sized eggs in midwinter. By the time they are laying flat-out and full-size, it will be spring, when birds reproduce in nature. Hens will feel like laying then, and you may find you have an appetite for a lot of egg energy. (I theorize that pre-A&P Homo sapiens must have evolved acceptable cholesterol levels by gorging on eggs only when nature provided them, just in time to fuel the spring-season burst of energy.)
Don't order leghorns (often pronounced "leggerns"), the prolific white-egg-laying breed, or any of the small-boned, white-feathered "superlayers" hybridized from them. These are all neurotic, inbred little critters suitable for heated and air-conditioned commercial egg factories, but they aren't worth eating and don't have enough to them to survive on their own over a hard winter. I've always run one or a mix of the old-time, all-purpose pure breeds: Rhode Island or New Hampshire Reds, Barred or White Rocks. They are big and hardy, produce eggs for years, and fill a stewpot nicely. Their eggs are brown, of course ... the only proper color for an egg, as any New Englander will tell you. Purebred chickens also reproduce true to breed, as you'd expect. The crosses and hybrids tend to produce "throwbacks" that often show the less desirable traits of each parent.
For a self-perpetuating flock, you'll need a pair of roosters: the extra for insurance in case the first one runs out of steam on you. Hatcheries sell young hens (pullets), roosters (cockerels), or as-hatched (50:50). You can buy 25 as-hatched chicks to start a flock, and caponize the excess males. (Caponizing is major surgery and a separate topic.) Or, as we did it most recently, you can drive to the hatchery on a spring afternoon and pick out an assortment of hens. You can later swap for a pair of young roosters from a healthy local flock.
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