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Carolyn Carden

Hi I’m Carolyn Carden. I’m an Agriculture Teacher at Galston High School. Galston High School has been here for 40 years and Agriculture has always been part of the school curriculum. Traditionally we’ve kept poultry at the school for many years.

Keeping chickens is a really good enterprise to have in High Schools because as an animal they are easy to maintain and they fit in well with the Agriculture Syllabus.

I inherited lots of different breeds when I started teaching at the school and there was a need to do some improvements to the existing facilities and in order to do that, we really needed to look at what breeds of chickens we wanted to keep. We decided to choose breeds for quite a few different reasons.

First of all, from an educational point of view, it’s really good to have a variety of different breeds that show the multitude of different feathers, comb types, legs, different body sizes that there is in poultry.

Dr Brendan Sharpe

There’s three main varieties of poultry that could be kept by schools and they include meat chickens, commercial laying chickens or pure bred varieties.

Meat chickens form the backbone of the chicken meat industry and they’ve been selected over many years to grow rapidly, so to put muscle mass on their skeleton rapidly, and currently, they generally reach processing age within eight weeks of age.

So I think schools should only really be keeping meat chickens if they’ve got the suitable processes in place to be able to get those meat chickens processed within that time period.

Likewise the commercial laying chickens, there’s two main varieties, the Hy-Line and the Isa Brown breeds.

They’ve been genetically selected to, to lay a lot of eggs over their lifespan, so I think in a situation in schools where you’re interested in egg production they’re great varieties to have because they’re typically quiet, they’re easy to handle for students and they produce a lot of brown eggs.

Pure bred varieties are different altogether, they hold traditions in a whole lot of different roots for example the white leghorn and the Australorp formed the backbone of the Australian egg laying industries for many years.

Breeds such as the Plymouth Rock, and the Rhode Island Red were used for meat production prior to any commercial varieties for many years. So I think there’s a lot of traditional values that that you can benefit from in keeping purebred poultry in schools.

Carolyn Carden

When you’ve got a lot of different types of students participating in Agriculture you really want to get as many students as possible involved, and some of those students don’t have a lot of confidence in handling animals so the smaller breeds like silkies are easy for them to handle.

Then it’s good to have breeds that are harder to handle and bigger so they feel like they’ve got a little bit more confidence and those breeds ended up being the breeds we chose for showing for a number of reasons.

It’s good to have rare breeds because that allows a good opportunity when they’re showing to win prizes, and participating in shows encourages students to be involved because then they have the chance to win prizes and they feel very proud when they have that ownership of a chicken and it’s won a prize.

For those reasons, we keep a number of breeds. We have silkies. We have buff sussex and light sussex hens. They’re a soft feathered, larger size breed.

We have silver spangled hamburgs, which are a soft feather breed but they’re a smaller sized bird so a little bit easier for some of the smaller kids to handle.

And we also have faverolles which are a very old fashioned French breed that were actually donated to the school and when we received a breeding pair we were then able to start breeding them and we had a lot of success with that, which we’ve continued on with.

Dr Brendan Sharpe

You need to consider the facilities required to breed stock on school and that means having incubators, it means having brooders for warming chickens and it means having suitable shed space to grow chickens from hatch through to point of lay and to maturity.

Additionally, you need to be able to vaccinate these chickens at the appropriate ages and vaccine storage and administration is a technique that you would need advice on, and I’d recommend seeking veterinary advice, prior to considering doing this.

There are a lot of different breeds that could be kept by schools.

I certainly recommend soft feather varieties, which are your typical egg laying or meat varieties. Hard feather varieties are game fowl. They’re often very flighty and I think are difficult to keep in a school situation.

The soft feather varieties that I’d advise keeping are ones that are easy to handle, so they’re quiet, they’re typically not flighty and also ones that are fertile so they’re easy to breed.

Whether you choose standard or bantam varieties will depend on how much space you have available. Bantam varieties require less space. The larger birds obviously require more space.

If you’re just wanting to, to keep chooks for eggs and to exhibit one, one side of the Australian Ag poultry industries, I think commercial laying varieties would be of benefit.

However, the benefits of having purebred poultry would extend to being able to actually breed the chooks on site at the school and also to exhibit them in poultry shows if that was your choosing.

If you’re having commercial laying stock I would advise getting those pullets at point of lay. The reason being that they can be sourced vaccinated.

If you were to breed poultry on site at the school, purebred poultry would be the easiest way to do this because the breeding stock for some of the commercial varieties are very hard to source.

Carolyn Carden

We also have a layer enterprise at the school, which allows the students to go through the whole process of understanding Agriculture as a business and managing those birds right from when they’re day old to when they’re point of lay and then starting the enterprise where they collect eggs, and they keep records of counting all those eggs every day that they collect them and then once a week those students go out and they sell the eggs around the school.

So that helps bring back a little bit of money back into the school, into Agriculture, because it does cost money to run Agriculture as a subject in the school.

A couple of times a year we like to run a batch of meat chickens.

We have a special section in the shed just for that particular enterprise. And the students look after those birds from day old to about 5 to 6 weeks old and then they are transported to be processed, brought back to the school and sold as chickens to staff around the school.

And this is a really good enterprise because it helps the students realise that we’re growing the chickens for food as well as having them as pets as well as having them as layer birds so it’s a multitude of different reasons for keeping birds.

But it’s really important that students learn that agriculture is not just about loving the animals and having them as pets but it’s also about producing food so they learn that, through doing that enterprise.

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Kate Hartcher

Laying hens have a range of instinctive behavioural needs that are important for their wellbeing. Housing should be constructed and maintained in order to cater for these behavioural needs and ensure that the birds are healthy and that their needs are met.

Dustbathing is one these instinctive behavioural needs where birds can crouch down or lie on the ground and throw dust through their feathers. This is important in order to clean and maintain the feathers in good condition.

If birds are unable to perform dustbathing, they can become frustrated and stressed and also have poor plumage condition. To allow birds to perform dustbathing, it is important to provide them with the appropriate flooring material, such as sand, peat moss or even dirt.

It is also important that the litter is an adequate depth to allow dustbathing so there should be a minimum of about 5cm. Their litter should also be maintained in a dry and friable condition.

Hens also have a behavioural need to lay their eggs in a secluded area. So birds should have access to a secluded area with soft bedding materials for the nest. They are more likely to lay in this area if it is darker than the surrounding areas.

Laying hens show a strong motivation to be able to perch, particularly at night, where they prefer to roost up higher. Adequate perch space should be provided to allow all of the birds to be able to perch at the same time comfortably.

The perch should also be wide enough to allow the birds to stand flat footed on it, so approximately 4cm is a good width. It should be constructed of non-slip material such as timber, although you should also keep in mind the ability to clean it.

Even if the birds’ nutritional requirements are met through the diet they still show the need to perform foraging behaviours such as food searching, ground pecking, and ground scratching. These behaviours can be encouraged by the provision of adequate litter such as wood shavings or straw. The birds’ ability to be able to forage can also prevent detrimental behaviour such as feather pecking, where the birds can pull each other’s feathers out.

Chickens will form social hierarchies, or ‘pecking orders’ in groups. There may be some aggression associated with the establishment and maintenance of a social hierarchy.

But if aggression is noticed for a long period of time and the birds become stressed or injured, such as feather loss around the neck, face and head regions, or there are injuries around the comb and wattle, it may be necessary to separate these birds at least temporarily.

However, it should be remembered that chickens are social animals and, isolation can cause them stress so they should be able to at least see and hear other birds.

Environmental enrichment is important for the birds, to enhance their behavioural repertoire and also to prevent detrimental behaviours from occurring.

When talking about welfare issues associated with laying hens, you really need to talk about the different production systems.

In Australia, there are two main types of housing systems. These are cage and non-cage. They both have their unique benefits and drawbacks.

The benefits of cage systems are that there are smaller group sizes, which allows easier monitoring. And there’s also a lower risk of transmission of socially transmitted behaviours such as feather pecking and cannibalism. There can be a lower transmission of diseases in this system as well.

Some of the obvious drawbacks associated with cage production include the severely limited behavioural expression. Birds can’t really perform dustbathing behaviour, foraging behaviours, exploration, perching or nesting.

In non-cage systems, some of the welfare benefits include: an increased behavioural repertoire; birds are able to express those sorts of behaviours, so foraging, exploration, social interactions.

Larger group sizes mean that there’s a higher risk of transmission of social behaviours such as feather pecking, cannibalism.

If the birds have access to the outside, there can also be an increased risk of disease and predation.

Although each production system has its own positives and negatives, it’s really dependent on the management in each farm as stockmanship has a huge impact on animal welfare.

From a purely economic point of view, it can be easier to control the cost of production in cage egg systems.

So consumers need to decide how much they’re willing to spend and which system they’re willing to support.

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