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The Home Chicken Flock for Self-Reliance, by Keith in Minnesota

The little details in being prepared for self reliance are often the most important ones. Often people think, chickens would be a good thing to have in a survival situation, after all they produce free eggs, right? Unfortunately they are not free, they cost feed. How can you pay less? Breed survival chickens. Store and feed mill bought chickens are typically ridiculously inbred, and solely dependent on you providing them food. I got started raising survival chickens for meat and eggs about five years ago. My goal was to end up with a breed of chickens that were both adept at foraging, and had a better ability to avoid both disease and predation. Egg production was an afterthought since all chickens are going to lay eggs, it is just a matter of how many. We have a chicken coop that is open for the chickens to come and go as they please. I don?t lock them up at night to keep them safe. The entrance and exit hole is about four feet off the ground, and consists of a piece of electrical conduit sticking straight out of the ground about three feet away from the opening of the chicken house. Connected to this post, I have a thin board that is about two inches wide running directly to the hole of the chicken house. I plan on replacing this with another piece of conduit. This helps to prevent some predators from climbing the pole to gain entrance to the house. My next security measure was to cut an upside down U shape into the plywood I used to block the entrance window to the house. The hole is just big enough for the chickens to squeeze through to be able to get into the chicken house.

My next step started with picking a chicken to use for a breeding line. Several different kinds of chickens were bought at a local chicken swap. The one that proved to be the most resilient was a small bantam we named crow. Crow is now going on to her fourth year, and still produces eggs, just not as many. She has large wings compared to her body size and can fly similar to a pheasant, getting about six feet off the ground, and being able to fly/glide about sixty yards or so. She is an excellent forager, and for the most part, provides for herself. The other much wanted trait she possessed was that she would wait until she got 12 plus eggs, then sit and hatch them if she was allowed to do so. I purchased several more breeds of chicken, and let nature take its course. If a chicken was killed by an owl, or coyote, then to me it was not smart enough, or physically adept enough to get away. I also culled out the lazy roosters that would go and sit under the bird feeder to avoid getting used to handouts, and to avoid any diseases from wild birds. I looked for roosters that had smaller body sizes, had good wing to body ratios, would keep a good look out for danger, would actively search for food and call the other chickens over when they found it, and liked to roost in trees if there was danger, versus trying to make it back to the chicken house. The rooster that made the final cut was my breeding rooster. I allowed these two to breed, and crow hatched out 12 chicks. After several predation attacks, I was left with 5 out of 20 chickens one year. The survivors were bred the following year, and produced another 15 or so chickens. This number was again knocked down by both predators, disease, and injury to about 10.
I added a few challenges to them along the way. The roost height is about four and a half feet off the ground. The heavier bodied chickens would have a tendency to dislocate a hip when jumping down. These became dinner. My next hurdle I threw in their way was to hold back feed in the summer, and only feed them once a week. The ones that did not want to go and forage, became dinner. I know this may sound harsh, but there were plenty of insects, weed seed, and greens for them to eat in the yard, pasture, and woods. It was just a matter of working to go and find it. This is where the chickens separated into groups. One was the forager group, and the other was the dinner group.

My last challenge was disease. I know many people believe that making sure the chicken house is clean to prevent disease is very important. I feel exactly the opposite. The more you shelter both the chickens, and your own immune system, the weaker you make it. In a survival situation, just make sure you put on a disposable mask that you can use much more than once, and gloves if you are worried. I only clean the chicken house once a year in the fall. The chickens don?t seem to mind, as they only use the house for sleeping, and are on roosts that are well above any chicken droppings on the floor. It gets pretty dirty by the fall, but it seems to strengthen the chickens immune systems. The ones that are weakened by the inability to find their own food, and the ones that don?t have strong immune systems tend to get sick and die off. Once a chicken was obviously sick, I would remove it from the flock and put it in a separate house that was the quarantine house. I would be careful to use gloves, and use a mask. If after a couple of days they got better they were re-introduced to the flock. If they were not better, they were put down and burned. When I get new chickens, typically 30% die from disease, or are killed within the first two weeks. Only about 10% make it a full year. (Since my flock is primarily self sufficient in reproduction, it does not cost me anything) These are then allowed to breed into the line. The end result has been a group of chickens that:
1. Can provide 70% of their own food, in the spring, summer, and fall (I do feed them a small amount of layer crumbles, and supplement with finely crushed egg shells, with full feed rations in the winter)
2. Have the ability to fly away from most ground predators.
3. Are smart enough to scatter when hawks or other above ground predators (eagles/hawks) come hunting.
4. Have strong immune systems. (typically after their first year I have no losses to disease)
5. Raise their own chicks, thereby keeping an average flock size of 10.

I have not paid for any chickens for several years now, the only cost is feed. If I need new birds to keep the gene pool from getting too shallow, I typically find someone to trade a few of the hens I don't want for a few roosters that have the physical traits I am looking for. Trust me, it is very easy to trade hens for roosters. What I have ended up with I have appropriately named survival chickens. They require a lot less care, feed, are tough and much smarter than the average bird, and for the most part, take care of themselves. If I needed to, I could breed within the line for several years. This all requires living on your retreat, if you do, it is something to think about ahead of time. This years project is growing my own feed for winter, I plan to start experimenting with the most time and energy efficient grains/seeds I can raise. The goal in the end is to have the end product outweigh the energy expenditure it takes to produce it.

The Memsahib Replies: You are to be commended on your forward thinking breeding "survival" chickens in advance. Based on Keith's experiences it takes several years to develop a survival breed, so it behooves those of us who have land to get going on this project right away.

The ideal stock to use as the starting point for a breeding program would be acquired from someone in your area who has a mixed breed flock of free range chickens that have been allowed to cross breed at will. Even better if this neighbor has practiced benign neglect--letting predators and disease carry off the dumb and weak birds. Barring that look for breeds that have a rose comb, since a small comb is less likely to suffer from frostbite in cold climates. One handy resource is the breed selector tool at MyPetChicken.com. If you are going to start with commercial breeding stock, Sand Hill Preservation Center has some scarce breeds. You might try crossing one of the small-combed Dorking breeds with something like the Norwegian Jaerhon. This would likely yield a very hardy bird that forages well, is sufficiently broody and maternal, and that is fast and wary of predators. OBTW, when visiting the Sand Hill web site, be sure to take a look at their heirloom seeds.

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