Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

There are certain times of day on the smallholding when you really can observe the mums and their young all curled up together and keeping safe. From left to right we have Banana and her ducklings, Katherine with two of her poults (proper name for young turkeys) and Iroko snuggled up with mum Thyme!! Shortly after the frenzy of 'letting out' and morning feeding a lot of the animals have a quiet time. Mid-afternoon is another one. The weather of course makes a difference and today, as our long awaited rain arrived in the form of horrendously heavy showers and thunderstorms, things got a bit confusing for a while as some of the young poultry in particular became somewhat disorientated and not sure where to go to keep dry. It was interesting to observe which of our 'mums' managed to keep their youngsters together and which did not. Our Light Sussex with the Legbar chicks ran under one of our feeding covers, called her seven chicks over, and then kept them dry for over an hour before venturing back into the fresh air. The Light Sussex with the Orpington chicks won't however be winning any 'mum of the year' awards: she took herself back inside the barn at the first sign of the wet stuff and left the bantam with all TWELVE chicks to deal with!!
We have been trying to decide if any one species on the smallholding makes better 'parents' than others. In the world of wild animals, the elephant is often credited with being the best 'mum' as she is pregnant for a whopping 22 months and then spends several years bringing up her youngster, usually with the help of other females in the herd, interestingly called 'allmothers'.
On our holding we would have to say that the sheep and goats ALL make pretty good mums. Sage (pygmy goat) is one of our most anxious mums, Pickle (dairy goat) our most laid back! Amongst the poultry we have some stunning mums amongst our current batch of broodies, but also some terrible ones. Katherine has amazed us at how brilliant a mum she has been whilst Pear was disappointing in that she left her ducklings before they were even four weeks old. One important job we always do is record how well our 'mums' all do in order to help us plan our breeding programme for the following year. There is no point in using a broody for example who the previous year abandoned her eggs or stood on her chicks.
And tomorrow we are due more rain and a possible result on Onion's 'lump'!!!!