Winter Chickens to Keep

Chicken culling can involve challenging decisions. These tips will help you develop an ideal flock before cold weather strikes, by holding on to the good eggs and culling the bad ones.

By Bruce Ingram
Updated on September 26, 2022
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by Bruce Ingram

Learn which Winter chickens to keep by examining your flock with an eye for chicken culling to remove the hens and roosters that contribute the least.

A flock’s laying slows naturally as fall approaches, with molting soon to follow, and this is a good time to learn how to cull a chicken, or groups of chickens, in a way that creates the best possible flock. Chicken culling may involve difficult decisions for those of us who raise small flocks, but we should force ourselves to look logically at our birds and decide which to keep and which to cull so we don’t have to feed all of them all winter. I like to refer to the keepers as MVCs (“most valuable chickens”).

Keeper No. 1: Broody Hen

Hen sitting in a nesting box.

The type of chicken you’ll most want to keep through cold weather is the hen that goes broody every year. My wife, Elaine, and I raise heritage chicken breeds, Rhode Island Reds, maintaining two separate runs for nine adult hens. Among them are two proven broodies, 5-year-old Mary and 2-year-old Charlotte. Mary has gone broody a total of five times — twice in one year! — while Charlotte has become broody twice.

As for when to butcher laying hens, we normally cull hens in the fall of their third year. However, Mary and Charlotte excel at rearing young and are persistent when sitting on eggs. Last April, Mary and Charlotte both went broody at the same time with eggs fertilized by our rooster  Don, who was then 5 years old.

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