The Icelandic Chicken: A Heritage Chicken Breed for Modern Homesteads

Is this breed a good match for your homestead?

By Harvey Ussery
Updated on April 18, 2023
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by Lisa Richards
Norse settlers brought their home flocks to Iceland in the ninth century. For more than a thousand years, the only chickens in the country were of this robust landrace.

The Icelandic chicken is a heritage landrace breed from Iceland known as the chicken of the settlers. These beautifully hued, self-reliant heritage chickens will furnish flavorful meat and a steady supply of eggs.

In addition to being fun, keeping a home flock of chickens makes us less dependent on purchased food. But how much does our flock contribute to food independence if it is itself dependent on purchased feed — and on purchases of replacement chicks? Manufactured feeds and mail-order chicks scarcely fit earlier models for sustainable home flocks, which were historically managed as scavengers of free natural feeds, and in which replacement birds were the spontaneous gift of “broodiness,” or a mother hen’s instinct to hatch eggs — a trait that has been deliberately bred out of modern breeds.

I’m fortunate to have had a living example of a traditional model: My grandmother’s rugged flock fed themselves almost entirely by ranging over her 50-acre farm. From time to time a hen would disappear, only to show up three weeks later with a clutch of chicks in tow. Granny kept that self-feeding, self-replicating flock going for decades. Every egg, every piece of fried chicken, and every serving of chicken and dumplings came to her table without cost.

I strive to emulate my grandmother’s flock management: I give my chickens as much range to forage as possible while getting their help with homestead chores — cover-crop tilling, making compost and controlling insects — as benefits incidental to their quest for live, wild foods. I also prefer hatching chicks under my own mother hens, rather than purchasing them from elsewhere or using an incubator. When I learned the fascinating history of Icelandic chickens, I wondered whether they might be the best choice for my ideal flock.

The History of the Icelandic Chicken

The Icelandic chicken (or “Icies”) originated with the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century by the Norse, who brought their farmstead chickens with them. In Iceland, these birds are known as Íslenska landnámshænan, or “Icelandic chicken of the settlers.” Over the centuries, farmers selected birds capable of feeding themselves, and hens with reliable mothering skills. The result was a landrace of active, naturally healthy fowl adapted to harsh conditions. (A landrace is a group of domesticated stock adapted to local conditions and selected for useful traits rather than for conformation to specific breed standards, such as color, pattern or comb style.) Icelandics are on the small side (mature cocks weigh 4-1/2 to 5-1/2 pounds; hens, 3 to 3-1/2 pounds) but have good egg production, especially in winter.

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