Intensive animal 'farming' of any kind is a disgusting business, but intensive chicken factories are really repulsive and infinitely crueller than any kind of hunting. Battery hens live in tiny cages and are treated like slot machines: just enough food and water is put in to produce an egg as cheaply as possible. Neither the quality of the egg nor the life of the hen is of any consideration at all. If you like eggs, then you either buy free-range organic eggs or you keep chickens yourself. It is as simple as that.
Well, almost. I hate chickens. They are cruel and stupid, have hideously ravaged bottoms, cost a bleedin' fortune and, worst of all, destroy gardens. But I would not be without them. I have kept them all my life, except for one period in London. I even kept chickens as a student and used to take the cockerel to parties where he would bad-temperedly peck people and shit on the floor.
The reason, of course, for enduring their repulsive habits is the eggs they produce. Fresh eggs - by which I mean eggs eaten within a day or so of laying - are incomparably nicer than ones that have been through the supermarket food chain, even if they are free-range and organic. It is the difference between freshly-squeezed oranges and processed stuff or mackerel straight out the sea and a supermarket ready-dinner.
For the organic gardener, chickens are almost a necessity, although put a chicken in a flower border and they will scratch up every seed, seedling and piece of mulch and eat every piece of juicy green growth. They will also find a beautifully prepared seedbed, wait until every last seed is sown and then use it as a dustbath. So you must have a chicken run, both to protect the garden from the hens and to protect the hens from foxes. Foxes are the number one enemy. Not only do they pick off individual birds, but a fox in a henhouse will kill the lot. Over the years I have lost almost every bird I have owned - including ducks and guinea fowl - to foxes.
But assuming that they are fox-proof, the birds are really good at cleaning up a piece of ground before it is cultivated. Ideally they would have a movable coup or ark that can be put on a patch of soil where the birds will scratch around eating every pest, as well as most weeds - and also fertilising the soil. They can also be put into fruit cages after the fruit has been gathered and into greenhouses and tunnels in autumn to give the place a good going over before it is prepared for spring. We let ours out into the orchard so that they can scratch around under the trees and eat the pests.
The really important thing about chickens is to give them access to fresh grass. The best method for a small garden is to have a few in a movable hutch and to move it around the lawn every day. This, plus some organic grain, pretty much guarantees a steady supply of eggs from February through to October.
We also give the chickens all our leftovers that would attract rats in the compost heap. But chickens are a magnet to the local rat population. The secret is to keep the henhouse moving and not to leave uneaten scraps around at the end of the day.
We use straw as bedding for the hens, although with the continuing foot-and- mouth crisis this is getting scarce. Sawdust would do as well.
Chicken manure is very high in nitrogen and is too rich to be used directly on the soil unless it is very well rotted. So every couple of months ours goes straight onto the compost heap where it is a powerful activator, and the straw helps bulk out and improve the texture of the final compost.
This, I think, is the real satisfaction of keeping hens. We get the best eggs you could eat, and the hens integrate perfectly into the organic system of gardening. Nothing is wasted. Even the eggshells go either onto the compost heap to provide calcium - which encourages worm activity - or to the hens, because it helps keep their eggshells thick. Everything that is owed is returned.
