We love our Buff Orpingtons and with a natural broody tendency, this breed are a perfect way to incubate, hatch and raise the next generation of chickens in our flock, but we don’t leave it to chance. This is a viable professional model for us to cover all of the costs of keeping our chickens so we maximise the hatch, monitor and boost the health of our hens and reduce the risks to the chicks from outside factors.
At this time of year, the thought of tiny chicks fill many people’s minds. Hatching and raising their own chickens is a lovely thought. There are articles and articles out there supporting chicken keepers using artificial incubators and brooders to hatch and raise chicks including blogs that we have written, but broody hens are a viable alternative.
We have been told on more than one occasion that serious breeders don’t use broody hens, that this is only for hobby breeders and amateurs. We wholeheartedly disagree. We choose to utilise nature’s way of rearing chicks and we consider the broody hen improves the rearing of chicks and the socialisation of the resulting birds. Nature can be unpredictable at times so we bring a set of equipment to support our broody hens and act as their support team.
Many people will let their broody hen find a quiet spot in the coop, let her get on with it and let nature take its course. There’s nothing wrong with this approach at all, but we know from our experience that it can be improved upon.
Our little smallholding has an entirely self-funding flock. By careful use of broody hens and providing key support to those hens to maximise clutch sizes, we produce enough chickens to both refresh our breeding stock and sell enough hens to cover all of our feed bills for an entire year as well as infrastructure repairs including coops, shelters and fencing. As an added bonus, the cockerels produced provide us with meat which is essentially free as the chicken feed costs have been covered. We don’t believe that this in any way describes either a hobby breeder or an amateur, rather it is a less wasteful approach to self-reliant livestock rearing.
In this series I’d like to demonstrate how Hugh and I manage our breeding programme. We’ll talk about all the hints and tips that we have learned over many years to both support our hens and to maximise the clutch sizes. Happier hens, more chicks, what could be better?
The Cockerel Question
In our last blog “Essential Guide to Incubating Eggs for Better Results” we talked about hatching cockerels as well as hens. We cannot express how often we receive messages from people on our social media who ask us for help after 50% of the eggs they have hatched have produced cockerels. They do not know what to do with them. Genuinely we tell people not to be embarrassed as we receive so many of these calls for help.
I’d encourage you to read this blog so that you know what your options are and can select one to plan for. There isn’t “One size fits all” and the option we have chosen may not suit other people, but it’s useful to have a cockerel plan in place before starting to hatch chickens.
Why Use a Broody Hen?
The main reason that we started using broody hens is that they raise the chicks for us. She makes sure they are dry, warm, fed and watered. Our care for them from hatch to independence is very limited…when we say limited, we mean that we just spend time playing with them, socialising them to humans, we don’t need to ensure they are dry, warm, fed or watered as the broody hen has this covered!
It’s not just post-hatch that the broody hen is great, she’s nature’s perfect incubating machine too. We choose to assist in this process to maximise clutch sizes but in the main, broody hens are great at making sure eggs are at the right temperature, humidity and are regularly turning the eggs.
A broody hen can socialise chicks to an existing flock. Later in this series we’ll talk about how we approach this to ensure the chicks are safe and the introduction is drama free. Why is socialisation important? We get a lot of feedback from the buyers of our hens telling us that introducing our hens to their existing flock is the easiest transition they’ve had. Anyone with a mixed age flock will attest that age is a major factor in determining positioning in the pecking order. Our hens already understand this when they are introduced to an existing group of older hens but for a hen hatched in an incubator then introduced into a flock, this is an entirely new concept. They generally only know other chickens of their own age whilst being raised.
In addition, the broody hen provides a degree of safety for chicks that adds an incredible active defence layer that fences, runs and coops simply cannot provide. Log onto YouTube, type in “Mother Chicken defends chicks from Hawk attack” and it’s easy to see just how a broody hen can aggressively defend her chicks in the face of danger. Any UK predator looking to bag a tasty chick snack will think twice when faced by this level of aggression including crows, magpies, cats and even dogs. Essentially this means chicks will be safer with a broody hen if they are kept either outside or have access to an outside run.
Now for the Bad News…
There is one huge issue in using a broody hen. Broody hens are not a machine and do things in their own time. If you want certainty in terms of timing, then an incubator will be the better way forward for you.
This may not sound like much but when I’ve challenged people who say hatching using broody hens is only for an amateur, this is the reason that they give. There is an assumption that professionalism equates to timetabling. We disagree, but if a hatch timetable must be precise enough so that a clutch of eggs must start incubating on a particular day or hatch on a particular day, don’t plan on using a broody hen.
For us, we maintain professionalism in our breeding programme by planning for a target number of chicks to hatch which keep us within our agreed maximum numbers of birds with APHA/Defra (The UK Government agencies covering poultry keeping). Once we have this, we can plan how many clutches we need to hatch. This in turn allows us to derive the number of broody hens we need to keep. From there we calculate the number of hens we need as not all of our Orpington’s will brood so we need to keep slightly more to cover our margin of error.
It has to be said that until our hens become broody, we do not know when the chicks will hatch but we know approximately when it will happen from our experience within a short number of weeks.
So, when will a hen start to brood?
They need a combination of factors:
- They are mature i.e., already laying eggs
- The daylight hours increase and we would normally see signs at around 12-14 hours of daylight per day.
- The conditions are right which means they feel safe to brood and have somewhere that they feel protected
When these 3 conditions are correct for a particular hen their bodies flood their system with massive amounts of the hormone prolactin which causes them to brood.
The reality is that there is no way of knowing exactly when the broody hen will decide that the time is right to brood. The factors listed simply help us to understand roughly when the “window” of broodiness might exist. For example, in 2022, our broody window started in April and ended in August with all 8 Orpington hens brooding of which 2 brooded twice. The previous year our hens didn’t begin to brood until May so it can differ from year to year. If it’s possible to work with a window for brooding rather than planning for incubation starting on a precise date and creating a breeding plan around this, the rewards that a broody hen provides are fantastic.
As I write this blog, we have two hens actively brooding (Tiny & Winter). The broody season as just begun so there are more on the way!
Are all hens broody?
Every hen has the possibility for broodiness but for many it’s improbable. Most modern breeds and hybrids have been specially bred to remove the instinct to brood. This doesn’t mean that they won’t brood, it just means that it’s unlikely.
So how does someone find a hen that will be broody? The simple answer is research to identify a breed that will be predisposed to brood.
A great place to start are the older, more traditional breeds. The Orpington was chosen by use partly for its known notorious reputation for brooding. Other breeds known to be broody include Silkie’s and Cochins. Each of the breeds have different characteristics so it’s best to research each for suitability given your specific facilities and requirements. For example, Silkies are significantly smaller than Orpington’s meaning they will not be able to incubate as many eggs as an Orpington, but an Orpington will require a larger coop for the hen and her larger brood. Coops and other equipment are something we will look at in the next part of this series.
In the next part of our Series
In the next part of our series, we’ll start to reveal some of the hints and tips that give us a successful hatching programme using our broody hens including:
- Ideal conditions and set up for broody hens
- Obtaining eggs
- Equipment to plan for and the reasons why
Come back for part 2!
