Flock plan, step by step
Interactive lesson: the goal of your flock, hybrids or heritage breeds, how many hens for your family, a cockerel, buying healthy pullets and what must be ready before the first hen.
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The whole lesson as text
1. What you want from the flock
Before breed and numbers, decide what the flock is for.
- Goal first — Eggs, meat, both, or keeping a heritage breed going. Write the goal down before you head to a poultry sale.
- Eggs only — Hybrid layers or light heritage breeds. Watch out: layers lay noticeably fewer eggs after 2–3 years.
- Eggs and meat — Dual-purpose breeds and your own cockerel. The cockerels from hatching go for meat.
- Closed loop — Eggs, chicks and meat need a dual-purpose or heritage breed, a cockerel and a broody hen. You also need space for the cockerels until slaughter.
Why: Everything else follows from the goal: the type of chicken, the size of the hen house, how much feed you buy and how much work you take on. A flock bought on impulse soon becomes a cost: too many cockerels, hens that don't lay and a hen house too small for winter.
- If this is your first flock, start with eggs only. Bring in a cockerel, a broody hen and meat birds in the second year.
- The hen house, fence and water must be ready before you bring home the first hen.
2. Hybrids and heritage breeds
Hybrids lay more, heritage breeds last longer.
- Hybrid layers — Brown and red hybrids (ISA Brown, Lohmann Brown, Hy-Line, Black Rock and others) often give 280–300 or more eggs in their first laying year. Laying drops fast after the second year, and they almost never go broody.
- Dual-purpose breeds — Sussex, Plymouth Rock, Rhode Island Red, Wyandotte, Australorp, Orpington and similar: a hen weighs 2.5–3.5 kg (5½–7½ lb) and lays roughly 150–220 eggs a year. The cockerels make good table birds.
- Heritage breeds — Light Sussex, Marans, Welsummer, Dorking and, in North America, Buckeye, Dominique or Chantecler: hardy, good foragers and often good broodies. They lay roughly 120–200 eggs a year.
- Mixed flock — A few hybrids for eggs in winter and a few heritage hens that raise chicks in spring. When the hybrids tail off, replace them with pullets from your own hatching.
Why: At poultry sales, farm stores and breeders you will meet commercial hybrids, "pure" standard breeds and old local heritage breeds. Heritage breeds cope better with free range, winter and disease and often hatch their own eggs, but they lay fewer.
- On free range and without a complete feed, hybrids don't reach the figures in the catalogue.
- For pure lines of rare breeds ask the breed clubs, the Poultry Club of Great Britain, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (UK) or The Livestock Conservancy (US).
3. How many hens · Locked
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4. A cockerel: yes or no · Locked
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5. Buying healthy birds · Locked
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6. Ready before the first hen · Locked
Buy the Flock plan module and you get the PDF to download and print, plus lifetime access to this interactive lesson: all 6 chapters, 25 steps.