Chook. The Podcast

A sneak peek at upcoming guests during Season 2 of Chook. The Podcast. 

For almost 40 years, Phil and Anne Westwood have run Freeranger Eggs in Grantville, 90 km south east of Melbourne. 
 
What’s super interesting about Phil and Anne’s operation is that growth has never been part of their business model. 
 
They have stayed deliberately small, deliberately avoiding automation including a total lack of autodoors and rollaway nest boxes. 
 
There were several motivations for this strategy. 
 
Firstly, the idea was to keep things small enough that a single person could run the entire business without the need for staff. 
 
Secondly, an intentionally smaller, truly free-range operation, as Phil describes it, is also able to maximise hen welfare sine the chickens are living in smaller groups. 
 
Thirdly, smaller flocks produce less manure with its associated impacts on the land, making the whole operation more environmentally sound. 
 
Topics covered include: 
What kind of living you can actually make with a one-person operation like Freeranger (listen to the end where Phil does share some figures)
Environmental impacts of running 10 000 birds per hectare, the maximum allowed to still qualify as a "free range" egg farm
What regenerative poultry farming looks like 
How native vegetation coexists with chickens on the Westwood's property
ISA Browns — how many eggs they lay, and how long they can live when cared for the way the Westwoods do, without lights
Whether you could run an economically-viable egg farm with heritage, coloured-egg laying breeds
Egg production in free range vs. caged systems 
Use of lights with laying hens (Impacts on health and longevity)
Mite and lice control
Wormwood as a natural deterrent against parasites, internal and external
Sawdust over straw as preferred nest box bedding
Diotomaceous earth 
Managing wild birds, goannas, snakes around chook food and nest boxes
Maremma dogs as livestock guardians
Use of mobile sheds 
What it's like running an egg farm solo
How to stay enthusiastic about hands-on egg farming after almost 40 years
Use of the Kangaroo Apple shrub around chickens 
What trees Anne would plant around a home chicken coop
Whether the egg industry is becoming more sustainable

Brendon Murphy presides over the Australian Facebook group dedicated to Cream Legbar breeding. 
 
In this conversation, we discuss:
How Cream Legbars were created in Australia
How to tell the difference between Australian and import bloodlines
Egg colour
Ways to work with faults like high tails and floppy or twisted combs 
Perhaps the most interesting thing Brendon shares in this chat is why some Cream Legbar chicks hatch with vaulted skulls, a defect Brendon says stems from how the Araucana, one of the breeds used to create Cream Legbars, was itself created in this country.
 
The level of detail in this conversation means this really is one for those of us seriously into this particular breed. 

Roosters can be tragic figures.
 
The reality is, for every hen in a backyard flock, there is a rooster, her brother, that almost certainly didn’t live happily ever after.
 
Lisa Short, from the Victorian-based Rooster Warriors Rehoming, tries to make a small dent in this unfortunate aspect of chicken keeping by helping find homes for hundreds of roosters. 
 
Most of those roosters, she says, come from kinder and school hatching programs, which she'd like to see banned. 
 
From rooster dumping to crow collars and night boxes that allow roosters to be kept where you otherwise probably couldn’t, Lisa ventures into some uncomfortable territory in this conversation, in hopes of raising awareness. 

Belinda Burgess tried having a regular job. She tried retiring. Neither stuck. 
Despite 12 hour days, 7 days a week, she says running a commercial poultry farm is a good job, a passion. Therapy, even.
She sells 30-40+ dozen eggs per week at the height of the season, and hatches hundreds of chicks per week. She sells year-round. 
Ask her how many breeds she keeps and she'll have to check. 
In this conversation, Belinda is beautifully candid. She shares what it’s really like selling hatching eggs as a business — the ups and downs and some of her major learnings along the way.
Whether it’s leg banding baby chicks at midnight or packing eggs at dawn…this chat will give you a feel for what it takes to build a successful operation.
Topics discussed include: 
How much Belinda pays per week in feed
The problem with hatching pullet eggs
Her most popular breeds
Why she's phasing out her chicken tractors
How she ended up with silken Araucanas
How to breed stronger chickens
How she accidentally killed 2 of her best hens with scratch mix 
ILT (infectious laryngotracheitis) and how her birds tested positive for it without having the disease
Marek’s disease
Quarantining birds
Challenges in dealing with egg customers
Her advice to someone considering starting an egg business

If we could avoid it, we probably would but dispatching a chicken is something every chicken breeder really needs to know as an unavoidable part of their repertoire.
If you’re building a homesteader lifestyle, working towards sustainability or even if you’re keeping just a few chickens in your backyard it’s an indispensable skill.
It can be tricky though to know how to get started.
For permaculture educator Joel Meadows, who’s been keeping chickens for 30 years, it was about taking responsibility for both where his food comes from, and for the birds in his care.
This is an honest and practical discussion that spans the gamut from the ethical underpinnings to the detail of three specific methods for dispatching a chicken.
Truly there is noone better to have this conversation with than Joel —  respect for the bird is at the heart of his approach.
We discuss:
— Where chickens fit in permaculture systems from small, productive backyards to orchards and larger properties
— Joel’s own first experience dispatching a chicken
— Why he began offering workshops teaching others how to dispatch a chicken, how much demand there’s been and the range of people who’ve attended
— The ethic and grounding in traditional cultures that underpins Joel’s perspective
— The unavoidable truth that behind every laying hen there is a rooster that’s been killed
— Benefits of knowing how to kill your own chickens versus eating chickens that have been factory-farmed and abattoir-slaughtered
— The way in which chicken keepers are both carers and peak predators
— The complicated calculation behind a decision to dispatch a chook
— How the ability to dispatch your own chickens allows you to take control of where your food comes from, and extricate yourself from industrialised meat production
— Grappling with the tension between loving your chickens and dispatching them
— What might constitute “a good death” for a chicken
— Why Joel asks participants in his workshops whether they’ve ever killed anything before
— A description of 3 different methods for dispatching a chicken: 1. Axe 2. Neck break 3. Cone
— Which method Joel prefers, which he thinks is fastest and best for the chicken and which is easiest for a beginner to successfully carry out
— Downsides of each method
— A fourth method using a broom handle for the neck break
— What to expect including flapping, blood and convulsions and what is going on, to the best of our knowledge, when this happens
— The cause of death associated with each method
— Equipment needed for preparing a chicken for human consumption
— How to pluck and eviscerate the carcass including water temperature and duration for dunking
— How pasture-raised, heritage chicken meat compares to what you may be used to buying at the store e.g. red leg meat, yellow fat, flavour
— Resting, brining and cooking heritage chicken meat
— How to utilise all parts of the chicken’s body from blood to bones
— Joel’s idea for a canvas/velcro device to hold a chicken, so a single person could swing the axe without needing a second pair of hands to hold the bird
— Fasting chickens before dispatch
— Skinning versus plucking
— The value of dual-purpose breeds to provide both meat and eggs
— Using chicken bones in compost
— The insight dispatching your own birds provides into the health of your flock, what normal anatomy looks like and the influence of green pick and nutrition on body condition
— The permaculture “oversell” of chickens vs the reality of keeping chickens in gardens as pest control
— How Joel feeds and manages his birds including his feeding routine, rotation and the use of tree guards
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The second in our series of conversations about Cream Legbars, the increasingly popular blue egg laying chicken. 
This is a really illuminating conversation with the experienced British Cream Legbar breeder Emma Middleton.
Emma knows more than anyone I’ve been able to find about the origins of the breed and more importantly the genetics behind the various traits that make this such a challenging and, as Emma says, “uniquely frustrating” bird to breed.
Emma’s been able to answer questions I’ve had about Cream Legbars for a long time including exactly where the cream gene came from. 
She clears up, too, some major misinformation circulating in Australia about how to properly select for and breed this variety including what colour chick down is correct:
Over eight generations, Emma created Cream Legbars from scratch using the exact breeds that the variety’s creators, geneticists Reginald Punnett and Michael Pease did at Cambridge University in the early 1930s.
She’s also crossed pure Cream Legbars back to Brown Leghorns to improve the bloodline.
Emma explains in detail how to tell whether you actually have a Cream Legbar, as distinct from a Gold Legbar. Not to mention the confusion that silver can cause.
Other topics include:
Where Emma sourced her genetic information about Cream Legbars
The problems in trying to fix faults in Cream Legbars by bringing in other people’s lines
How many generations it took to get back to cream after outcrossing to Brown Leghorns
The test mating process
How long she’s found you can run a closed flock without encountering inbreeding depression
Her experience with small egg size in Cream Legbars
The lack of a fixed genetic base in most lines of Cream Legbars in its home country of the UK
How many birds Emma typically bred per generation
How she created cream, gold and silver Legbars from scratch using other breeds
The exact steps she took in each generation
How to tell a Cream Legbar from a Gold and a Silver, based on both chick down and adult feathering
The significance of gold smudges in the wing triangle as a telltale sign of a bird that is not cream
The role of autosomal red in Cream Legbars, male (chestnut) and female (salmon breast)
Crest size
Yellow leg colour

Horse breeding and chicken breeding may seem like completely different endeavours but it turns out they have quite a bit in common… and of course they’re underpinned by the same genetic principles.
With more than 50 years' experience raising foals, esteemed Australian stock horse breeder Jeanette Gower knows a thing or two about genetics and its practical application.
I was keen to find out and find out what the horse breeding experience can teach us about how to approach poultry. 
In this conversation I pick Jeanette's brain on everything from inbreeding and inbreeding depression to outcrossing and hybrid vigour.
Jeanette writes a fantastic blog on Substack which is where you can also find more information on her books about horse breeding.
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Worms are often the chief suspect when a backyard chicken gets sick.
But how often are they to blame?
This is the starting point for my conversation with poultry vet Grant Richards who has spent his 40-year career in chickens and chicken health.
Grant sits at the helm of Parasite Diagnostic Services where you can send poultry manure for worm testing so you might think he’d be talking up the dangers posed by intestinal worms. But his perspective is a lot more nuanced than that. 
We discuss:
— How often worms are the culprit for sickness in backyard chickens
— The importance of testing for worm loads before de-worming a chicken
— Whether you should worm on a schedule
— What is a healthy worm burden in a chicken
— How chickens become “bombproof” against intestinal worms
— The necessity of exposure to worms in order for a chicken to develop natural resistance
— Understanding the parasite life cycle
— How chickens get worms and the role of intermediate hosts
— Why the mobile chicken tractor set-up is helpful in avoiding issues with worms 
— How often to move your flock to fresh ground to avoid parasite problems
— How sun, rain, frost and grass length affect parasite survival in the environment
— How long to rest the ground before rotating your flock back there
— Whether baby chicks can hatch with worms
— The critical age for roundworm build-up in a chicken
— Why not to google your bird’s symptoms
— How long post-hatch it takes for a chick’s immune system to ‘fire up’ 
— Grant's take on diatomaceous earth
— Whether you or your dogs can catch worms from your chickens
— Whether Dr Richards thinks you should vaccinate your chickens
— Whether it makes sense to cull your flock if mycoplasma is detected
— The use of ivermectin-containing pour-on sheep and cattle drenches to control lice and worms in chickens

Cream Legbars are one of the most sought-after chicken varieties among those of us who love coloured eggs. They’re also one of the more complicated chickens to breed well. That’s why I went straight to the source, to the Cream Legbar’s home country of the UK where they were originally created at Cambridge University.
There I found experienced Cream Legbar breeder Ethan Rivers who's been breeding the variety longer than it's even existed in Australia. 
In this conversation we discuss the faults found in the variety, how to work with them and mistakes that can trip up beginner breeders.
The cream gene is denoted by the abbreviation Ig — you’ll hear Ethan refer to it that way in this conversation. Another term you’ll hear is “gold, split for cream” which means a bird that is gold but carries one copy of the cream gene, hidden because it’s recessive.
Is there a topic you’d like Chook to look into? A guest you’d love to hear from?
Let us know by sending a note to jane@chookjournal.com.au
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