How I hatch & raise our free range chickens

It's lovely to hear from customers how much they enjoy our eggs.  What makes them so different in colour & flavour is the way we manage our hens.  It's far more time-consuming than the way many hens are kept now, but worth it.

Instead of having one large hen house we keep the hens in flocks of up to 12 hens, each flock with a cockerel.  There is one small hen house and one flock per field and the way I raise my own hens, or train bought in hens, means they genuinely are free range.  They only use the hen houses for roosting at night and laying eggs.  The rest of the time, regardless of weather, they are outside and foraged food forms an important part of their diet.

 

The process starts when one of my hens goes broody.  I select the eggs I want to hatch and move the broody to a box where she can incubate in the preferred dark & quiet.  The broody hens get lifted off their eggs and put into an enclosure with food, water, space to stretch & an area where they can enjoy a dust-bath.  Some hens prefer this to be around half an hour once a day, others prefer a shorter period off their eggs twice a day.  A broody hen flattens herself down over her eggs to keep them all warm and right at the end of the 21 days when the hatching chicks start cheeping she will 'talk' to them.

 

 When the chicks hatch then they move with their adoptive mum to a chick run outside on grass.  From their earliest days the chicks learn to enjoy the delights of living outside, but with mum to keep them warm when they need it.

 This broody hen is a Black Rock cross and the chicks are pure Light Sussex.

 

The broody teaches the chicks to eat the special chick 

crumbs but quickly includes her chicks in  foraging 

and finding tasty bugs, insects and plants to enjoy.

The chick runs provide safety for the chicks from

predators such as hooded crows and cats.  We do also have Hen Harriers on our farm so they might also take chicks.

The chick runs get moved onto fresh grass each day and I check several times a day to make sure they have plenty of fresh water & food.  The broody hens always give their excited 'here is food' clucks when I move the run and they spot something tasty in the grass.  The chicks still manage to have fun even though they are in a small, protected area for the first 5 weeks or so.

These Light Sussex chicks with a Light Sussex broody are just about big enough to be able to be let out.  They are fully feathered and if mum spots danger they will quickly run to her and get underneath her if necessary.  Broody hens are very protective of their chicks.

 The side of this run has been fastened open so the broody & chicks have full access to the whole of the field we use for chicks & growing pullets.  As you can see from the breeze blocks, this year a very early day of high winds meant everything had to be fastened down to keep all the broods safe. 

Now the broody hens teach their chicks how to live as free range chickens, showing them where and how to find the tastiest things to eat.
 
They also, as you can see in this photo on the right, teach the chicks about dangers that may be around.  The hen has spotted something she doesn't like and the chicks are also showing the alert upright stance, assessing the situation.

This broody hen has her chicks outside in all weathers, including strong winds as you can see from the feathers blowing.  They learn how to shelter in reeds in the fields or use the chick runs and the wind breaks round the hen houses to escape from wind and driving rain.  It's only the smallest chicks that are taken inside out of the rain or wind by their broody mum.

Windbreaks also provide good places to perch, or in this case to perch on mum for an even better view of what's going on.

At some point after around 10 weeks of age the chicks are well able to look after themselves outside, coping well with weather, possible predators and foraging.  By now they've moved on from chick crumbs to growers pellets to ensure they get all they need to grow into strong, healthy chickens.

Some broody hens prefer to remain with these older chicks, some make it quite clear they'd like to return to their flock.  Even hens that have been away from their flock for 3 or more months are always able to return without the pecking that normally happens when a hen is introduced to an existing flock.

These pullets and young cockerels are from the first two clutches to hatch this year and both broody mums chose to return to their flocks before 3 months.  One sat by the gate waiting for me to let her out of the chick field and back into her field!

Although there is 19 days difference between the ages of the young chickens in these two clutches, once their mums returned to their flocks they joined up into one group and roosted together in the larger house in the field.  I've recently removed the young cockerels, leaving the 9 pullets.  The boys had just started crowing and were starting to be aware of the broody hens in the field with their younger clutches.  The broody hens have a big enough job bringing up their chicks to a free ranging life without having to deal with adolescent cockerels annoying them.

I've found that it's perfectly possible to keep mature cockerels together in a group without fighting as long as there are no female chickens around.  They get moved onto our moorland field where they enjoy a few more months of extreme foraging in the exciting terrain of the moor.  Here are a few of the boys enjoying a last day relaxing in the sunshine with the pullets, spreading their wings in unaccustomed heat from the sun,  before moving to their bachelor pad.

A few of the pullets I keep each year to add to our egg laying flocks, but most I sell to people wanting hens that will take full advantage of the free ranging enjoyed by hens here in Orkney where there are no foxes.  They will adapt well to living in a hen house as long as it has an outside hen enclosure, but for those wanting to have hens in larger areas, they have been brought up to free range fully over the whole space available to them, rather than sitting in a hen house all day.