by J.S., Survival Blog:
A few years ago, we moved out of the suburbs and onto a farm/homestead with plans to start raising every farm animal imaginable. Lots of friends and family thought we were crazy, but we had spent years researching animal husbandry and couldn’t wait to put our book knowledge to work. We moved in around Christmas and by mid-January we had baby chicks in the brooder and some donated hatching eggs in an incubator.
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While our farm is not our main source of income, we do run it like a business and each spring we raise a few hundred pullets (young laying hens) to be sold to the backyard poultry crowd who don’t want the hassle (and smell) of staring chicks in their homes. While we do hatch some eggs on the farm, most of our day-old chicks are mailed to us from the hatchery (yes, that’s how it works) and then we raise them in the brooder with the proper light, heat, food, and water.
There are a few obvious problems with the mail-order hatchery approach if your goal is long-term survival and self-sufficiency. It relies on an operational postal system, operational hatcheries, cheap consistent electricity, and running water. If any one of these systems fails to operate, all of a sudden you can’t have chickens. Last spring, we lost power for just a few hours and lost quite a few fragile baby chicks. Anyone looking for birds this year knows that they are quite hard to come by; hatcheries are sold out over six months in advance in most cases today due to high egg prices!
A lot of homesteaders, preppers, and backyard chicken hobbyists buy their chickens this same way (or at the farm store which are still just mail-order chicks). Even backyard breeders that do hatch their own eggs generally do so with electric brooders just like the large hatcheries use.
So how can we prepare to raise chickens in times when these easy inputs like unlimited electricity are no longer available? The answer is a little more complicated than just going back to how things worked 100 years ago before electric brooders. We must rethink the breeds we raise and the way we raise them to stop our reliance on outside inputs.
Believe it or not, the most popular breeds today are hybrids and therefore don’t breed true, which means their offspring will not necessarily have all the same traits that they have. Not only that, but we now raise separate breeds for meat and for eggs. All of this is done to maximize efficiency for our current system but is not sustainable outside of that system. For example, the most popular laying hen is the ISA Brown which is a 4-way hybrid (cross of 4 breeds in a very specific manner) that will lay eggs like a machine for about two years. The cockerels (males) of the breed don’t make it past their first day and most females are culled after 2 or 3 years and discarded because they contain no substantial meat. If a prepper had a flock of hybrids, they might have eggs for a short time, but they would have no way to regenerate the flock.
Chickens have been bred with certain traits for thousands of years, but it is only recently that ‘chicken science’ has created these single-purpose breeds that lack the traits necessary to reproduce on their own.
So, if you are building a backyard or homestead flock and want to be prepared to continue that flock with fewer external inputs, then the breeds you choose truly matter. At our farm, we do have a lot of hybrids that we rely on for eggs and meat, but we always have some older, more sustainable breeds around just in case. That way we can take advantage of the efficiencies of modern breeds but be ready for a worst-case scenario.
THE BEST TRAITS
The more sustainable breeds, in my opinion, would have the following traits:
Reproduction: I know this sounds funny to think that a domesticated animal that has been prolific for thousands of years might not be able to reproduce; however, if left to their own devices these factory egg machines would probably quickly die off without ever hatching a single egg that they work so hard to lay. That’s because they never get Broody, that is, the trait to set on their own eggs has been bred out of them. It makes sense in a world with cheap electricity, but our ancestors would have probably been horrified. If you want a self-sustaining flock, you must have chickens that get broody and have the urge to nest and set on their eggs. Some heritage breeds are more likely than others to do this. Also note, that multiple chickens will lay in the same nest, so not all your chickens need to be broody or be broody at the same time as they will hatch and raise other hens’ eggs. Many folks that raise chickens will try to break a chicken of this habit, but at our farm we like to let some go and see what happens. Let them hatch out some chicks and see how many can make it. The mother hen works hard to hatch the eggs and raise them but inevitably they won’t all make it.
Good Foragers: This too is very important. If there is ever a time that you can’t run down to the farm store and buy a bag of chicken feed, it will be vital that your chickens can find most of their own food. They can eat almost any food scraps, but I can imagine a world where much less food is wasted. You will want chickens that can go eat bugs and other small particles and not compete with your family for food.
Dual Purpose, a good egg/meat ratio: By this I mean that it is important to have chickens where the females are good layers, and the cockerels make good table fare. In desperate times you don’t want to be raising two separate lines of chickens, one for meat and one for eggs. This will mean you will end up with smaller breasted chickens than what we are used to eating today. In fact, I know many Americans that only eat boneless skinless chicken breast and have never even cooked a whole chicken or made chicken stock. We sell broilers on the farm (whole meat chickens) and it always amazes me when potential customers look me dead in the eye and admit that they don’t know how to cook a whole chicken and have never even tried.
If you have ever done an Internet search for chicken breeds or been on a hatchery website, you will note that they do list the traits of various chicken breeds. So, when you are searching for your doomsday chickens, I would recommend using the three traits I listed above to find birds that will also suit your geography and climate. Specifically, look for breeds marketed as Dual Purpose or Heritage. The dual-purpose breeds will help you with the meat supply and not just eggs. The heritage breeds tend to have more of the broody and foraging traits that have been bred out of more modern birds.
