Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

These are four out of our five cockerels and they are from left to right: an Exchequer Leghorn cross, a Gold Laced Orpington cross, a Copper Maran and an Indian Game. We also of course have our fabulous Pekin bantam - affectionately called 'Little Man', more of him another day. These four are all 'Large Fowl' and have been chosen for their great colours as well as behaviour (which basically has to be really good...). We have a difficult relationship with our cockerels in that each year we prefer to have new and younger ones to mate with our girls and so have the problem of what to do with our existing set. Very sadly the fox has had several over the years which has often meant the problem is solved for us. Why do we not keep them?? Well, the fact is that as they get older, cockerels gradually lose their fertility - i.e. their ability to create healthy active sperm to fertilise the eggs - and because we hatch a few of our eggs each year, as well as selling some to schools and other smallholders, we need to make sure as many of our eggs as possible are fertile and using young birds is a good way of doing this. We get very fond of our cockerels: they are always fabulously handsome and quite often real characters too. It would be a mistake to keep them AS WELL as getting in newer birds though, as too many cockerels would fight and/or mate with the girls too much (an issue we first explored on 8th September). These four are a particularly great group. They have their pecking order which is the order they are shown in (left to right) and each day they enjoy some serious crowing (as is being demonstrated beautifully by the Exchequer cross) but we never get any serious fighting and nor do they show any aggression towards us, in fact they are all quite tame. Their fertility at the moment is excellent too: we have six eggs under a broody bantam and they are all fertile. Our Orpington eggs are due to hatch in a week and we have been discussing keeping one of the cockerels and then of course having to think about NOT keeping one or more of these four...
And talking of fertility, we set some of our quail eggs in the incubator a few days ago and tonight we candled them: 25 out of 27 were fertile and 23 looked as though they were still growing (the other two looking as though they had already died): a great fertility rate which we hope will lead to a great hatch rate too.
And we are just two or three days away from our first set of duck eggs hatching: we have NO idea how many to expect, there has been a lot of nest swopping and chickens laying eggs in amongst them, plus today one of our Indian Games started to go broody and began to share the nest of our soon to hatch ducklings. Not sure that is ideal at all???