Avian Flu Prevention Zone 2018 - Our Action Plan

Yesterday, as soon as we heard about the Avian Influenza Prevention Zone being implemented in England, I started to put into place the processes that we have planned for since the end of the last 'lockdown'.

I grabbed my camera and made a video of our action plan and what we are doing on our little smallholding because although we live in Wales, we are close to the border and I expect the Welsh government to follow suit before too long (as they did last year).

I made a couple of errors in my video and the guidance is that poultry keepers that have over 500 birds have to take additional measures, NOT the much higher figure that I give in the video. Our action plan we hope complies to the rules for those with less than 500 birds.

Last year there seemed to be a great deal of confusion about whether the Prevention Zone applied to backyard poultry keepers or those with just a few pets. This year DEFRA have been much clearer in their instructions and state that it applies to all poultry owners whether kept as pets or livestock.

So far, (as at midday 19th January 2018) there is not a complete lockdown, there are increased biosecurity measures needed, but as I read the guidance of what we need to do, all areas to which birds have access must be enclosed by netting to prevent contact with wild birds - so this surely must include netting overhead or the wild birds could just fly into the poultry areas.

We have spent the year with the chicken pens looking increasingly like a scene from Glastonbury festival, with tented covers billowing around in the wind, but I am comfortable that their areas will be secure enough for them to be able to have some access to outside even should a total lockdown be announced. The pens have been covered from above for a while now.

For full information about the AI Prevention Zone and the latest situation, see DEFRA Prevention Zone information https://www.gov.uk/guidance/avian-influenza-bird-flu#prevention-zone

The Welsh Government have just posted this statement to their site - no prevention zone at the moment. http://gov.wales/topics/environmentcountryside/ahw/disease/avianflu/?lang=en

But as we live so close to England I'm going to work on the basis that wild birds don't actually know about the border between the two countries and continue to get everything covered up.

I'm rather sad to see us have to use the covered runs and all the other biosecurity measures, I had hoped that this year we would get to spring and think 'well all of that hard work was a waste of time', as it turns out it wasn't wasted time, it was work well done. As Christmas came and went and there was no sign of bird flu in Britain I became increasingly cheerful that our bird population were not going to be hit by it.

Anyway, I think it's time for a cuppa!

Homestead Tour July Part 2

If you can't view the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

July Homestead Tour Part 1

As it's the first day of August, it's time to look at the progress made by the crops and animals during July. To stop this being a very long vlog, I have split it into two, so the second part will be published tomorrow.


If you can't see the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Why there are fewer blog posts

I love blogging, but I've realised that I prefer moving images a little bit more. so for now I will still blog but on a less regular basis. I will share my thoughts and ideas and day to day life on our smallholding via videos.

I plan to write additional information, more in depth thoughts and expand upon subjects that I've raised in my vlogs, that way I can share what is going on with you on two levels, the lighter on my vlogs and the more informative on my blogs.

Yesterday I started to feel a little ropey and so spent a quiet day inside, I suspect I have inhaled too much dust from the woodshavings when I mucked out the chicken shed. But I did spend a little time watching the chickens and ducks enjoying the very welcome sunshine.

Here's the video of my time with the birds.

Now of course, a time may come when I am unable to vlog on a regular basis and, should that happen, I will continue sharing life on our homestead on my blog. Please feel free to let me know if you prefer the written word or videos, I'm interested to know which you prefer.

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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How many baby chickens?

It was Mr J's birthday this weekend and I had set some eggs in the incubator with the hope that they would hatch on his birthday. Well, nature has a mind of its own and from late in the afternoon of day 19 in the incubator, we could clearly hear cheeping and peeping of little chicks.

On day 20 I got up to be greeted by two little chicks and throughout the day they seemed to arrive in a gentle but steady stream. As we went to bed there were eleven little fluffy chicks stumbling their way around the incubator.

As so often happens during hatching, I was unable to sleep very much as I get so excited about the new little lives that are presenting themselves in the incubator and so, at 3am or thereabouts, I was sitting in the kitchen blearily staring into the incubator and fifteen little pairs of eyes looked back at me!

On the day of Mr J's birthday, we moved eight of the chicks to the nursery run to snuggle under the brooder (the electric mummy) so that there was more space in the incubator for the more recently hatched birds. By the end of his birthday, there were twenty baby chickens. I had put twenty-seven eggs into the incubator, three were not fertile so were removed at day five, which left us with twenty-four fertile eggs. Twenty hatched chicks from twenty-four eggs is a very good hatch rate and I was delighted.

The day after Mr J's birthday yet another little chick hatched, giving us a total of twenty-one!
I think that we have two hybrids that are Big Red crossed with Diesel, they are very black with a smidgen of brown on their necks, seven Australorp, four Cream Legbars and eight Jersey Giants.

All these eggs were laid here on the smallholding, they are all the off-spring of birds we have here (or have had here as Squeaky and Big Red are no longer with us).

To make space for these little newly hatched chickens, the four week olds (all eighteen of them) have been moved into nursery houses in the chicken field, actually they are just outside the chicken field where I have easy access to them and can attend to them regularly throughout the day without disturbing the other chickens.

Split between two nursery houses, the eighteen chicks are now in groups of nine Jersey Giants and a mixed group of Australorps, Silver Laced Wyandottes and a couple of Jersery Giants (that we know we won't be breeding from as they have the wrong colour legs to be true to the breed standard). They are all doing well, they are feathered and off heat and seem very pleased to have grass to run around on and eat. 

The seven chicks that were in one of the nursery houses have also moved. They have graduated to the shed with the mixed flock and after just two nights in with the older girls, they seem settled and are running around the field very happily. They have learnt that their food and water is inside under cover and also seem to have grown tremendously in confidence and agility,

There have been some other new additions to our flocks. We have a lovely White Sussex girl who has spent most of her time with the young seven, Mr J and I have decided to call her Auntie Mabel. She's a very friendly although somewhat timid, chicken who no doubt will find her feet and settle into the mixed flock very well.

Two new thirteen week old pullets (young female chickens who haven't started to lay), these are a cross between a deep brown egg layer and a very dark brown egg layer and they should (fingers crossed) give us deep to dark brown eggs when they start laying. There are also two more of this cross-breed chicken that are now six weeks old and they will remain in a nursery house for a couple more weeks.

Yesterday four laying girls arrived, three that will also lay dark-ish brown eggs and one that is a Leghorn cross and she lays white eggs. 

Between the new arrivals and our existing flock, we should be able to offer a nice selection of colour of eggs in our egg boxes.

All the newly hatched chicks, the four week olds, the six week olds, the eight week olds and the thirteen week olds cost a pretty penny to feed, so thankfully we are now selling the eggs of the layers to help pay for the feed costs.

I've also sold some of the Jersey Giant eggs for hatching and as long as we continue to see hatching eggs and eating eggs, the girls will pay for their own food. At least during the summer. When autumn returns and throughout the winter, feed costs go up as there is less grass to eat and fewer bugs in the garden and of course, if there is a lockdown again this year, the feed costs will soar as the birds are restricted to being inside.

Not all of the chicks will be laying birds, obviously some will be males and they will either be kept as breeding stock or will feed us throughout the latter part of the year. So today we have fifty chicks that over the next few months will start laying or be moved to a separate area. And that should keep us in eggs for a while!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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Not enough eggs!

On Wednesday I put a small item on our local community page on Facebook asking whether anyone would be interested in buying some of our eggs. In my last blog I talked about my hope that a couple or three people may want to buy our surplus eggs rather than them going to waste.

Well a few minutes after I posed my question on the community page something amazing started to happen. Someone responded and then someone else and then quite a few more and then it became a rapid stream of people saying that they'd be interested in buying our eggs. As I type there are in excess of 230 responses! It seems that I won't need to do a delivery service, folks are more than happy to travel to collect them from us.

I spent Wednesday evening feeling more than a little overwhelmed, the positive response was a delight and they have kept on coming steadily ever since. As a way to communicate with quite so many potential egg purchasers at once, I set up a Facebook page for the smallholding. And I've amended the original post to say that I've set up a farm page, but still the comments from people interested keep appearing.

Anyway, I ordered some plain egg boxes from eBay (this is an affiliate link) and will spend a while designing a suitable label that I can stick on top of the box. 

Thursday the first of the local residents arrived to buy some eggs. It was very nice to know that the girls' eggs were going to be appreciated by someone else and not assigned to the food recycling bin. Since then several more boxes of eggs have been sold and although I will never become rich (or even make a profit) from farmgate egg sales, the few pounds each week will help towards the cost of the chicken and duck feed for at least part of the year.

The response was so good, that I feel it would be worth having some more chickens, but only if they are good layers and are dual purpose birds that can be used for the table when either they stop laying in the winter or slow down with age. Having additional birds here that cost us money to feed throughout the winter, purely so I can sell their eggs in spring and summer would be pointless. Even I know that it wouldn't make economic sense to do that!

I spotted an advert in our local farmer's store for a trio of Light Sussex birds for £20 and when I texted to see if they were still available, I was told that there were only two left but that they were free to a good home. Well, I consider us to be a good home and so delightfully, we will be picking up the new birds this evening.

There's another positive to this, one that is less obvious, but in some ways more important. And this is that I have met almost more local people in seventy-two hours than I have in the sixteen months since we moved here! It's not that folks here are unfriendly, just like everywhere, they are mostly lovely, it's just that I don't really go anywhere to meet anyone. I am more than happy pottering around on our smallholding and most of the time don't feel the need to venture further afield. I don't go to cafes, pubs or other places that I might bump into people and start chatting and I don't go to the local shop regularly as Mr J does the local shopping. So the lack of socialising is entirely of my own doing and while I am very happy in my own company, it has been jolly nice to meet some new people.

I have however made lots of friends via social media. A group of smallholders chat to each other regularly and at the end of summer last year some of us met up for a barbecue at the home of one smallholder. We had planned to have another meet up in November, but the Avian Flu Prevention Zone meant that it was unwise for smallholders, all of whom are poultry keepers, to go trekking across the country to meet  up, so we delayed the gathering.  
Now that the Prevention Zone measures are relaxed a little, we decided that the next week or two was a good moment to meet up. We can't wait too much longer as lambing will begin for many of the smallholders, so next weekend a few friends are coming to our smallholding for a bite to eat and a bit of socialising. Not only is it nice to be able to see other's smallholdings, but it's great to be able to pick a few brains about ideas for our smallholding. It certainly won't take people very long to walk around it, but the compact size of our land means that we have to make every inch count and work well for us.

As spring has arrived, Mr J and I have started to tidy up after the cold winter months prevented us from tackling too many tasks outside. Of all the maintenance jobs that there are, picking the weeds out of the gravel in the yard is one of our least favourites. So on Saturday, I grabbed a padded kneeler (block of foam) and got down on my hands and knees to work on a particularly weedy and grassy corner. It doesn't take too long to clear a patch, it's just rough on the hands and knees!

And as another growing season is starting my thoughts have turned to the greenhouse and planting seeds. I spent one morning a week or so ago planting seeds into module trays and am pleased to see that some of them have already germinated. Next week I hope to continue with sowing seeds to fill the greenhouse with small plants that are strong and healthy before the end of May when it is safe to plant out the more tender of the plants.

Back to today, before we collect the new birds this evening, we need to clean and prepare the isolation house for the new birds so that they can have a few days in there before joining the rest of the flock. We do this to give the birds a little time to acclimatise to their new surroundings and get used to us and for us to be sure that they don't have any illnesses that they could then pass on to the rest of our birds.

But before I prepare the isolation house, I think there's just time for a cuppa!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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Goodbye Big Red, goodbye Squeaky

I don't usually put up two vlogs in one day, but yesterday's vlog was delayed and I felt it was important to put up today's vlog promptly.

FAST AND EASY making a door for the chicken house

Attacked by the rooster

I love having the chickens and ducks, I really do, but there are some aspects to chicken keeping that I'd happily do without. This is the first spring that we have kept poultry and so I am learning daily about their behaviour and it's fascinating. It seems that as the days get longer and lighter, the boys get more, well, everything. They are growing again, into tall, broad fine cockerels, they are 'paying attention' more and more to the girls and they are getting decidedly feisty, actually it's more like aggressive, with each other.

The boys that only a fortnight ago would come up to me for a cuddle are now unrecognisable, gone are the sweet natured youngsters, they have been replaced by proud, strutting adults with one thing on their mind - and nothing nor nobody had better get in their way!

Today I learnt to give the boys a little more respect and a wider berth. The Australorp boy that lives with the two girls and Dieselette (also a girl but not an Australorp) has been getting increasingly feisty over the last week and I have sensibly taken to using a poultry panel as a guard to put a little distance between me and him whenever I go into their enclosure. The poultry panel is a wooden frame about 3 feet by 2 feet and is covered with chicken wire. It means that he can see me and I him, but by holding it between us, we have a polite distance in which we can manoeuvre.

Well this evening, he caught me off guard. I had the poultry panel with me and had been using it to give us our own space and then just as I turned away to leave their enclosure he tackled me. 

Actually what he did was to peck the back of my leg. Hard. Hard enough to make me yelp! He really went for me.

But he hadn't finished with his assault, two more hard pecks on my calves and as I moved the panel between us, just for good measure he threw a couple more pecks at my hand.

Cockerel 5, Liz 0.

What's a girl to do? I am not going to have a go back at him, he is just defending his territory and protecting his girls, which is what I want him to do. Just not against me. I don't know if he finds the poultry panel threatening, but I am still going to use it when I have to go into that enclosure. Naturally I am now a little wary of going into the Australorp field, but I will still have to enter it at least twice a day, to open and close their house, but also to collect any eggs. Perhaps this is what made him so cross today, I have been into that part of the field several times today, to see if the girls had laid as I wanted to add a couple of Australorp eggs into the incubator.

Hey ho, whatever the reason for his aggressive behaviour, I have learnt my lesson and I won't be turning my back on him again any time soon. When I came back into the house and washed the five little bleeding wounds and felt thoroughly sorry for myself. I also felt somewhat foolish for having let my attention slip at just the wrong time.

I will monitor how he behaves over the next couple of months. I can't keep a bird that is going to have a go at me whenever I am nearby and I certainly don't want to breed from a bird that has a bad temperament. However, I suspect that today's grumpiness is due to a surge in hormones and being disturbed several times and that over the next couple of months his hormones will level out and die down and he will once again become a pleasant member of the flock.

Sadly if he doesn't settle down again by mid summer, he will have a date with a pot. There is no room on this smallholding for birds that aren't safe to be around us.

It's all change tomorrow in the chicken field. Squeaky, the Cream Legbar cockerel is going to a new home (in Aberdeenshire) where he will have lots of girls around him to woo. 

Big Red will be dispatched, we have two of his offspring and I have just set several eggs into the incubator that may well be his offspring too. It will be a sad day and I have mixed emotions about dispatching Big Red, but the bottom line is that we have more cockerels than we need and I would rather keep a rare breed boy than a mixed breed one and we only have so many spaces in which we can keep 'spare' cockerels.

So the mixed flock will be attended to by another Australorp boy and I can only hope that he doesn't get feisty with me too. This other boy has been living in the chicken palace with the Jersey Giants, but Big White (formerly known as Little White) has made it clear that he doesn't want another chap in his space and to prevent any fighting between the boys I have separated them and the Australorp boy will go into the mixed flock field tomorrow.

The other change that has happened is that this evening, after the birds had gone to sleep we moved the two young Jersey Giants into the chicken palace so that they can live with the rest of the Jersey Giant flock. They should have been moved weeks ago, but the lockdown messed up our plans and only now are they going to the space where they should be. I will keep a close watch over them tomorrow that they aren't being picked on too much by the other Jersey Giants and no doubt in a few weeks they will be fully integrated into the flock.

Thinking ahead, I am not sure how Big White is going to like his flock being increased by quite such a large number when we move the youngest chicks into his care in seven weeks time. There are ten little Jersey Giants in the nursery pen and assuming we haven't sold many of them by then, he will certainly have a boost to his flock.

I will be glad when the hormonal rush of spring subsides and the chicken fields can once again settle down into a gentle rhythm.

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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The miracle chick

 Today we aren't counting our chickens so much as counting our blessings!

By Friday evening eighteen little chicks had hatched. For us this is a fabulous hatch rate, 90% of the eggs had hatched and we were over the moon. I had already moved eight of the chicks into the brooder box. This is a small secure cage with an electric heat pad on legs that the chicks can walk under to keep warm and feel secure. Effectively it's an electronic mother hen. So at supper time I moved the remainder of the chicks to the brooder, switched off the incubator and watched the eighteen little chicks finding their feet, exploring their cage and eating and drinking. Then I returned to the kitchen where the incubator was and started to clean it out.

There were lots of eggshells and the two remaining unhatched eggs. Sometimes, but not always, I carry out a simple post mortem by opening the unhatched eggs to see whether the chick had died in the shell early on or whether it had just become too exhausted to hatch. It's a useful process as it gives me an idea of whether I have let the incubator dry out or the humidity level was too high etc. It's a bit of a grim process, but it's the best way for me to learn whether I am doing things wrong (or right!).

I picked up the first egg to examine it. It was pipped and the shell was broken in a line about 3/4 of the way round, obviously this little chick had just worn itself out trying to hatch. I started to open the shell when the little bird inside started cheeping and moving! Good grief, I had switched off the incubator about 20 minutes earlier and left the lid off for several minutes while taking the chicks out of it to move them. So, I put the egg back into the incubator and put the lid back on. I grabbed a water sprayer and filled it with warm water and then lifted the incubator lid a little and sprayed warm water on to the shell of the unhatched bird and on to the empty shells in an attempt to quickly increase the humidity levels in the incubator.

Lifting the lid of incubator reduces the humidity levels significantly and leaving it off will mean that the air inside will be as dry as the air in the room. The air surrounding hatching chicks needs to be around 65% humidity (or more) to enable them to hatch properly, if it drops too low then the membrane inside the egg ( you know the one you have to peel off a hard boiled egg) will dry out. Then what you end up with is a shrink wrapped chick that can't get out of the membrane and shell and dies before it's even hatched.

The little chick struggled for some time to get out of shell and eventually the shell was off, but sadly the membrane had got too dry and part of it was stuck to the back of the chick. This little bird was weak, exhausted, had been subjected to cold, dry and being handled and neither Mr J nor I had much hope of it surviving. It was another white Jersey Giant and I would have loved one more to add to our growing flock.

It seems to me that about this point in any hatch I start hoping for miracles, hoping that the weakest little chick will find the strength to live. Up to now we haven't had much luck with the hoping, wishing and fingers crossed method, up until now that is.

Little chick no.19 lay in the incubator, too weak to stand up, its breathing alternated between deep gasping breaths and rapid shallow breathing. Its eyes were closed and looked swollen, its abdomen looked distended. As the evening went on the swelling went down a little and it opened one eye, although it still couldn't stand but looked like it had a little more control of its head and neck muscles.

When we went to bed we anticipated coming down to a dead chick and were prepared to be sad for the one and to celebrate the eighteen healthy hatches. 

But to our delight, no.19 made it through the night and as its tiny feather fluff had started to dry out, it began to look a little healthier. It was also up on its feet, wobbly and weak looking, but upright! 

By mid-morning it was moving tentatively around the incubator and with each passing hour, it looks stronger. It is still sleeping a lot, but then all chicks do that and it has started cheeping which indicates that it's lungs may not have been damaged by the rocky hatching experience. Chicks can stay in the incubator for up to 72 hours as they have enough nourishment from the yolk absorbed into their bodies and I think no.19 is going to need most of that time to become strong enough to join the others.

As I type it is late afternoon on Saturday, about twenty-four hours since the chick hatched, it is now cheeping away in the incubator and walking about, a little wobbly still, but definitely gaining strength hour by hour. It is not out of the woods yet, it still needs to be able to stand steadily, but we are both now hopeful that this little chap or chapess will survive and that if it continues to improve at the same rate, it will be able to join its brothers and sisters in the brooder box in a day or so. 

Every time we hatch some chicks (or ducklings) I am struck by how clever nature is, that little beings can grow inside an egg, go through the struggles of hatching and be well and lively within hours is nothing short of a miracle. The additional struggle that no.19 has gone through surely earns it the title of today's 'Miracle Chick'.

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You can see videos of the chicks on my YouTube channel where I post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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Chickens, chickens everywhere

The next batch of chicks is due to hatch on Tuesday and I am starting to get excited about our chicken breeding plans for the year.

In the chicken field, we have now separated the Australorp breeding group from the White Jersey Giants, so in two weeks time the eggs of both will be ready to start hatching as pure breeds. It also means that we will be able to offer hatching eggs for sale. Both the White Jersey Giants and Australorps are in groups from different bloodlines, so the offspring should be strong and healthy.

We have two Australorp boys, one is with the girls and one is going into his own house and pen with a few hybrid girls for company. We want to keep the second male as insurance, in case anything happens to our first choice of breeding male. These two cockerels were selected from the seven we hatched last year, I hope that we've made the correct decision about which ones to keep.

The Jersey Giants (JG) have Little White (who has now become known as Big White) as our breeding male and three unrelated females and there are also two young JG birds in the nursery area of the chicken condo. They are around 14 weeks old and as yet, still a little young to be certain of their gender. It matters little what their gender, they have a different bloodline to the adults of the little flock and will add another set of genes to the group.

One of the young ones has the wrong colour of legs, so sadly will only be joining the flock for a few weeks before being dispatched as I don't want to add poor traits to our flock (or to anyone else's for that matter). A Jersey Giant should have olive colour legs with yellow underfoot and not a blue leg with pink underfoot that this little chicken has. It has occurred to me that it looks more like a Gauloise chickens than a JG, but it's character is the gentle, friendliness of a Jersey Giant rather than the flighty feistiness of a Gauloise (or at least what I've read about them).

In the chicken condo we have more birds than I want. We have decided to reduce our Cream Legbar group to just two girls, so we still have some blue eggs in our egg boxes and we will rehome the boy. I also want to rehome the two white bantam girls, who are great egg layers but small, as a bantam would be and not any use for us to breed from as we are focusing on large birds. I will be advertising them (to be homed for free) on a local poultry group on Facebook. We don't need as many hyline girls as we have now so they can either be rehomed or as they die naturally we won't replace them. They have been great over the winter period, but now that the JG and Australorp girls are laying, I don't want to become overrun with eggs. The young birds that are currently in the nursery pen will become part of our mixed flock as they grow up.

Mr J and I continue to have discussions about how, what and where to build pens in the chicken field. We want the birds to be able to free range, but are also aware that we want to keep some birds in separate groups and to do that, we will need separate living arrangements for them. 

If money was no object, I would have a series of covered pens built with a raised house in each pen, with a covered pathway (for humans only) that ran along the back of them. We could leave them open when the birds are allowed to free range and close the pens during periods of lockdown or when we want specific breeding groups kept together. However, money is a factor and we don't have the cash lying around to invest a considerable sum in pens and housing. So we continue to discuss how best to make suitable pens and housing for the chickens for the long term and will trundle along creating walkways, runs and pens as and when we can.

When I looked at the incubator a little while ago, one of the eggs was wobbling which means that the next batch of chicks are on their way! To follow their progress you can follow me on Twitter (click the link to the right of my blog) as I will give updates throughout the hatching period with the hashtag #hatchwatch2017.

Keeping chickens in UK v USA

I've been inspired by so many people over the years and most recently by a bunch of homesteaders and smallholders via the wonderful magic of the internet. Early in 2016 I started searching online for advice, information and inspiration and found that there are several (quite a lot actually) folks who share their daily working practices, knowledge and hard-learnt lessons online via blogs, websites and vlogs.

We had already decided on the direction and way that we wanted our smallholding to work, to use no artificial chemicals, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides etc., to raise as much of our own food as possible and to keep chickens and ducks for their eggs. Raising meat birds came as a slightly later decision and as a natural progression of the way we were living.

I made so many mistakes in those early months, I followed completely correct advice and ideas that I had seen online from American vloggers, only to discover little by little that many of those practices are not allowed in the UK.

So I thought it may be interesting and perhaps, useful to look at some of the differences in the practices of keeping chickens between the UK and USA as I understand them. Please feel free to comment below if I am mistaken about any of these differences, it would be interesting to learn more.

Registering your birds.
In the UK we have to register our premises and also our flocks as soon as we have 50 birds, that's not just chickens but all the poultry we keep. When we started keeping chickens I couldn't imagine how we would ever have that many birds, but it doesn't take long to build up to 49 birds, particularly if you are keeping meat birds and hatching chicks and ducklings. I don't know whether you have to register your premises and flocks in USA, perhaps someone could comment and let me know.

Feeding the birds.
In UK we cannot feed kitchen scraps to poultry. It is fine to feed fruit and vegetables from the garden to our birds, but not if they have passed through a domestic or commercial kitchen before being given to the birds. Here's the APHA (Animal and Plant Health Agency) information about kitchen scraps. This also means that we shouldn't feed crushed eggshells back to our birds.

So in our house, cooked food goes into a biodegradable bag (and then plastic bin) and is taken away weekly by the local authority services. As I understand it, the cooked food is sent to processing plants for Anaerobic Digestion producing Biogas which is used as a power source or In Vessel Composting which produces a soil conditioner. Thus reducing land-fill and reducing the amount of fossil fuels required for power. This great little animation explains the processes.

Because we have a good composting system in our garden, we put all of our raw fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps onto a compost heap. 

Likewise, we can't let our birds scratch through and eat any compost heaps that have kitchen scraps put into them. So I keep one or two heaps that have kitchen scraps in them which the birds are not allowed to access.

The other compost heaps have nothing that has been in the kitchen and the birds have access to these (usually). We make these heaps inside a ring of straw bales - on our smallholding we call these heaps the Circles of Love.

Washing & storing eggs.
In UK (and the rest of Europe) eggs are not washed and are not refrigerated. There is a protective layer on eggs that prevents bacteria from entering the shell, keeping them safe to eat for some time (weeks!). Washing eggs removes that protective layer and means that those eggs would need to be kept cool to stop the bacteria from forming. So our eggs are collected and put into boxes and kept at room temperature. If for any reason eggs do get refrigerated, they need to be kept that way because if they then warm up again there is a risk that bacterial growth may start.

Processing meat birds.
In UK on smallholdings (homesteads), backyards and small farms we have to dislocate the neck of a bird rather than using only a sharp knife, so the killing cones that make dispatch relatively simple in USA (and other countries) are only useful here to put a bird into after dislocation, to allow them to bleed out. Here are the UK government guidelines for slaughter at home. We can only dispatch a limited number of birds per day (70 birds) and larger, commercial farms have different regulations, which I am not familiar with at all.

The lockdown issue.
Since 6th December 2016 all poultry keepers (commercial keepers, smallholders or homesteaders and backyard keepers) in the UK have had to keep their birds under cover, preferably housed, but at the very least completely away from all contact with wild birds. This is because of the threat (and now reality) of Avian Flu H5N8 which has been found in birds as far away as China, India and more recently mainland Europe. Here's DEFRA's latest situation information.

In Europe (and the UK is still part of Europe) steps have been taken to try to reduce the spread of H5N8 which has included the mass culling of birds across regions. Here in UK there haven't been many cases of this strain of Avian Flu, but there have been some and the proceedures that follow an outbreak are heartbreaking for the owners of the birds (all birds on the premises are culled immediately upon confirmation of the disease).

We are heading towards ten weeks of the birds being in lockdown and the current regulations may or may not be changed on 28th February (the date that DEFRA have given for reassessment of the situation). After that date eggs which have previously been sold as 'Free Range' (which is what I think may be called Pasture Fed or Pasture Raised in USA) will not longer be allowed to carry that label. I understand that the majority of eggs in Europe are now Free Range eggs and so the industry could be devastated if the lockdown continues after a 12 week period as this is the maximum time that birds are allowed to be kept inside in a 12 month period and still be called Free Range. We can only wait and see what happens nearer the 28th February.

So there are a few differences between UK and USA in terms of how we can keep our poultry, but when all is said and done, in my opinion the most important thing that we all have to do (on both sides of the Atlantic) is to keep and treat our birds safely and humanely.

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Planning poultry pens

 Mr J and I are so pleased with how well the chicken walkway has worked for us (and the chickens) that we have decided to build further runs in the chickens' fields and to that end I have ordered some more of the roofing battens like those that we used for the walkway.

 Rather than runs that use a building as one wall, the new runs will be freestanding, well not exactly freestanding as they will be anchored into the ground, but they will have four sides made from posts and netting.

Our thinking is that we could create a series of large runs that, during lockdown, will provide covered areas that the chickens can use and for the rest of the year we can leave the doors open for them to access the runs or remainder of the field.

The runs would allow us to keep family groups together which would be especially useful when we want to ensure that a set of females are breeding with a particular cockerel. The downside to this plan is that I will be back to cleaning out several small houses instead of using a deep litter bedding system in the chicken shed. But that seems a small price to pay for being able to ensure that the correct male is with the girls that we want to collect eggs from.

When we made the walkway it was very much a hit and miss affair, we didn't have a firm plan of how we'd do it and just felt our way through it. For the next pen or two, we will have a clearer idea of how to put the wood uprights and cross piece together to make the structure that we want.

The only part that we really struggled with, when making the walkway, was making a door or gate that fitted the allotted space. Making it the correct size was simple enough, but to stop it from twisting out of shape was more tricky, not helped I think, by the uprights each side of the door not being a) completely perpendicular and b) not being completely in line with each other. It's something we will work on for the next pens.

Once the new pens are completed I will section off an area inside each one that the chickens will not have access to and I will grow some vegetables in it. Then when lockdown happens next year, there will be some cabbages or other green leafy vegetables that I can feed to the birds by opening the restricted area a little at a time. And of course, even if there is no prevention zone order next year, the chickens still will be fed the leafy green vegetables during the winter months.

We haven't decided as yet whether the new pens will have a gently sloping roof like the chicken's walkway or a pitched roof like the duck run (above). I think the gently sloping roof option will be easier to build and as neither Mr J or I have advanced construction skills, the simplest option may well be the best.

The other design of run that I will build from this wood is a mobile run about four metres (13 feet) long and one metre (just over 3 feet) wide with handles at each end to help carry it. It will be a low run about 90cms (3 feet) high. This will fit on top of the raised beds in the annual vegetable garden and once lockdown is over, will allow me to put the chickens to work on the raised beds. They can eat the weeds and any crops left in the bed, till the soil and add manure to it. A few chickens should be able to make light work of the bed preparation in a couple of days and each evening they will be allowed to return to their usual house for the night. 

This was fairly successful last year when I made a makeshift run and now we have the opportunity to make sturdier and mobile raised bed chicken runs I am keen to have them ready for the chickens to go into once the lockdown ends.

The raised bed chicken runs will then be used to cover brassica crops to protect them from cabbage white butterflies and cabbage moths, both of which did substantial damage to the January King cabbages and red curly kale. Having dual purpose mobile runs means that we won't need to find a place to store the runs when the chickens are not in them.

The local builder's merchant have just delivered the wood and I'm heading out into the chicken field to do some measuring up. Although, I'll have to walk past the kettle on my way, so perhaps first of all, I should have a cuppa!

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