The Great Chicken Vote 2026 — Wittenham Larder

Should Wittenham Larder acquire laying pullets now, or wait until the New Year and hatch chicks in 2027?

No plan survives contact with reality

I had ordered 48 hatching eggs from Winchester Poultry Farm to raise chicks for our cooperative. The hens would have become layers, the cockerels would have become dinner.

Unfortunately, reality got in the way.

The hot summer meant the chickens laid fewer eggs, and by the time they were ready, the chicks wouldn’t have been fully feathered in time for winter. So I made the decision to abort.

The plan is still to raise chickens to follow the sheep and help regenerate the paddocks, but we have a decision to make.

Option 1

We go out and buy laying pullets — 16-week-old, fully feathered chickens — and have eggs within weeks.

Option 2

We wait until the new year to acquire hatching eggs and raise the chickens ourselves as originally planned.

Choosing Option 1 does not stop us from actioning Option 2 in the new year.

The details

It’s worth pointing out that each option comes with its own intricacies.

Option 1: Buy laying pullets

I’m sure you’re aware of one of the most difficult things about keeping chickens in the Wittenhams: foxes.

As the chickens will be in the paddocks with the sheep, we’ll need to protect them from foxes and badgers. For Season One, we’ll build some chicken tractors to house and protect our pullets.

This requires buy-in from the DIY-handy members to help construct the tractors. The current plan is to build A-frames out of Heras panels.

The other consideration is the extra labour added to our sheep checklist.

We’ll need to move the chicken tractors daily to give the chickens fresh grass and allow the grass they’ve been on to recover. This will involve dragging each chicken tractor a few metres, checking for eggs, and making sure the chickens have food and water.

Option 2: Hatch our own chicks

If we wait, we go back to the original plan and raise our own chickens from hatching eggs.

We wouldn’t be able to hatch until spring and wouldn’t get eggs until summer, by which time, this round of sheep will likely be gone.

The hens would become layers and the cockerels would become dinner.

Comparison

At a glance

A summary of the key differences between the two options.

	Option 1 — Buy laying pullets	Option 2 — Hatch our own chicks
When do we get chickens?	Now	Spring 2027
When do we get eggs?	Within weeks	Summer 2027
Hens	Become our layers	Become our layers
Cockerels	None from this batch	Raised for the table
Chicken tractors	Need to be built now	Needed once the chicks are old enough to go outside
Other equipment	Food, water and chicken tractors	Incubator and brooder first, then chicken tractors
Extra daily work	Starts immediately	Starts when we hatch
Follow this round of sheep?	Yes	Probably not
Can we still hatch chicks in 2027?	Yes	Yes