Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Chestnut and Silver Birch have had a very quiet first day: they have not moved much beyond their 'dog bed' in the corner of the stall and have done an awful lot of sleeping! Onion has bonded beautifully with them although her stomach ruled her heart this morning when she deserted them in favour of breakfast which she tucked into with huge enjoyment!! Silver Birch proved what a good pair of lungs she had and let us all know that she was not happy that mum had wandered off!!! Bless!!
Elsewhere on the smallholding we now have FOUR broody hens: the White Sussex in the right hand picture, our Silkie, our Red Orpington and one of our three Indian Games. All four are glued to their chosen nesting place and refusing to move. In the case of the Indian Game, her 'nesting' place happens to be inside one of the rabbit hutches: not ideal!! We need to decide what we are going to do with them all and the choices are to either give them some eggs OR try to stop them being broody. Stopping broodiness in poultry can be very hard and some breeds are harder than others. Being broody is after all essential to keeping the species going and on the whole it is the more 'traditional' breeds of poultry that still have this natural behaviour (which includes all of these four).
In many of the more 'modern' breeds, the chickens that have been developed more for egg laying, the natural instinct to go broody has been 'bred out' of the bird because of course, once a bird goes broody, it STOPS laying eggs which makes it useless as far as the commercial farmer is concerned. The big question for us of course is 'do we want to raise any more chicks?'. The decision to bring more livestock into the world should not be taken lightly.
We know from experience however how difficult it can be get these particular chickens out of their broody state. The top tip is to shut the birds out of the place where they became broody in the first place - well we cannot shut up the rabbit hutch and the others are all in various nestboxes which we also cannot close as otherwise the other chickens will have nowhere to lay. Other tips include making the 'nesting' area uncomfortable for the bird by removing bedding or making it very light or draughty or by putting objects in the nestboxes that are uncomfortable to sit on. Broody poultry like dark and warmth so some people put their birds in wire cages for a few days to try to break the broody cycle.
On the whole we prefer to allow our animals to behave as naturally as they can and so we will probably give all four of them half a dozen eggs each and let them raise a brood each. We do tend to sell a few chicks and chickens each year and of course some could be raised for meat. It might be fun to give them all eggs at the same time and then see who turns out to be the best 'mum.' We will have a think. (And no, there is no news from Thyme, although she is getting more starry-eyed so our guess is that something may happen in the next 48 hours!!)