To learn-by-doing, Harriet sourced about 20 fertilised duck and chicken eggs in the mail and bought her own incubator. Harriet selected heritage breeds to avoid the problems of conventional chickens. Heritage breeds are a possibility for her, because she plans on having a smaller flock (no bigger than a couple hundred chickens). Sourcing heritage breeds in small batches also allows her to get the particular breeds she wants and to observe for their desired characteristics. For example, her research suggests Cream Legbars can withstand heat as well as being active scratchers and alert foragers, which are very desirable characteristics for the rangelands. Harriet also sourced Welsh Harlequin ducks for their nutritious eggs (because duck eggs are not sold in town) and Silver Appleyards as slower growers for meat.

Over time, Harriet’s goal is to hatch all her own chickens and ducks from her selected breeds. Her primary goal is to ensure she knows the source of feed for all of her products (e.g. she only feeds the chickens organic food, whereas the history of sourced fertilised eggs is harder to confirm). Hatching her own poultry also has the added benefit of strengthening the relationship between the poultry stock and their suitability with her land.

As part of her poultry experiments, Harriet sourced several turkeys. However, because they ‘breed like crazy’ (having eighteen chicks per bird at one time) and their fragility to extreme temperatures, and older turkeys, Harriet’s plan going forward is to have turkeys available for Christmas. This strategy would help her meet her goal of being a local meat provider, but also allow her to focus primarily on chickens and ducks for now.

Whereas Harriet was able to invest in heritage breeds because of her small flock, Adam had to source commercial breeds because of his desired scale. One of his first tasks was finding reputable suppliers of chickens. One challenge in sourcing commercial scale ‘layers’ (chickens that are bread for their egg-laying qualities) for pasture raising, is that commercially bred chickens today have been bred to be indoors. Quoting his consultant, Adam reminds us that the:

“The original bird that once lived in the jungle would be just fine. But for about 50 years, we changed their genetics to increase their productivity. We changed the genetics in these chickens so much, and they produce so many eggs, that they need a great deal of care to be able to produce.”

Adam would love to see a chicken that is larger and more robust, coupled with lower and more reliable egg production. He would ‘buy that in a heartbeat’. However, these breeds are not produced in commercial quantities in Australia. So, the Lilleymans are essentially locked into buying from a few commercially available breeds in Australia. Typically, they buy a flock at roughly 1,400 hens. Then hens can start producing eggs at about six months and continue for three to five years.

Adam made his selection based on the robustness of the breed, for example, ‘Can they handle fluctuations in temperature and weather?’ Currently there are two commercial breeds that are available to Adam: Hyline and ISA. Right now, Amberly has Hyline, who are starting to be genetically bred to be more robust (which suggests the company’s response to consumer preferences regarding poultry production systems). Adam has used both ISA and Hyline, each with their advantages and disadvantages.

For housing the chickens, Harriet and her father made several movable coops, as well as repurposing a caravan to house the chickens and move them around the paddocks, following the cattle.

The caravan was completely gutted to be a tin shell, now retrofitted with two long, plywood nest boxes on the back wall, a 44-gallon drum for grain and a 44-gallon drum for water, as well as hanging logs for the chickens to swing, sit and play on.

The ducks are not moved around the property like the chickens. Rather, in the beginning, Harriet was watching wild ducks swim on the restored dams on the Bokhara property and thought, ‘Yep, if I was a duck, I’d be here too’. The wild ducks flock to the water and reeds surrounding their restored dams.

So, Harriet is adding shelters, feeders and nest boxes inside the exclusion fence areas around their restored dams for her ducks. For sixteen weeks, the ducks grow on one dam, while the other restored dam rests. While she is in the observing and learning phase, she only wants to have a maximum of 50 ducks at a time.

Adam was also interested in building his own chicken sheds. The original idea for sheds was to have around 50 of Joel Salatin-style moveable chicken sheds, and to walk them across the paddock in a wave, fertilising the pasture as they went. The challenge, however, is that to be technically ‘free-range’, there must be space for one bird per square meter. Thus, twelve square meter hand-pulled chicken sheds only allow twelve chickens as opposed to the 75-100 often stored within these ‘chicken tractors’. Adam decided that this system wasn’t viable in terms of production, workload, and ethics. Using these moveable sheds with any greater density would have meant Adam could not reach the free-range standard, which ethically, was very important to him.

Adam called up another farmer to inquire about getting started, and the farmer invited them out to look at his operations and chicken sheds. Looking around further, they ascertained their options as: buying available sheds in Australia (which included the Leghorns Industry sheds made in Wagga Wagga and the Chicken Caravans) or building one’s own. After touring the sheds built in Wagga, they decided to invest in this option (which since this time is not in business).

Adam has three trailers for 1,500 hens and one trailer scaled for 500 hens. Even though Adam did not build his own sheds, he certainly undertook significant retrofits. The sheds had power, nest boxes with automated conveyor belts, and inside lights. But the breed’s night vision is ‘appallingly bad’, so having lights only on the inside means the chickens are less likely to go outside early in the morning to start feeding when it’s still dark out or can’t find their way in at night. To address this, Adam added external lights (which means the hens do actually go outside and feed). Adam also put larger solar panels on top to support the new electronics, including an evaporative cooling system of misters and fans.

The original water system in the sheds included troughs on the outside. However, in the hottest days of summer, the troughs on one side would be 35 – 40 degrees, and ‘the chickens just wouldn’t drink when it’s that hot’, which means half of the available water is lost in summer. So, Adam tore out the watering system and installed fully contained nipple drinkers on the inside of the shed so that the water stays cool. He chose the nipple drinkers, because ‘if you put open water sources inside, they are likely to fill with poo and then you’ve got another problem’.

Ideally, Harriet and Adam move the chicken sheds to follow the cattle, so the chickens can pasteurise the cattle dung (by eating the fly larvae) and scratch the dung into the soil, as well as disturb and fertilise the grass with their own waste around the trailer.

At Amberly Farm, where the pastures are thicker than in the rangelands, the cows and chickens are in a mutually supporting relationship in additional ways. The cows are used primarily as a tool to shorten the grass. Firstly, the cows will mow the grass, as long dry grass is, ‘particularly bad for chickens. Chickens love to lay their eggs in the long grass, and enjoy eating the short, soft green grass.’ Some chickens, however, will have a particular fancy for long dry grass, which, ‘Turns into a sort of knotted fur ball in their gizzard’, hindering the absorption of nutrient dense foods. So, using the cows to mow the grass is better than simply mowing or slashing the grass, because the grass isn’t left there to dry, and leaves the soft green grass for the chickens to eat.

In return for providing the hens with short soft grass, the cows leave piles of dung all over the place. Once the cows have moved through, and the dung beetles have done their job, the hens follow closely behind. The hens love digging out and eating the fly larvae and bugs and can completely eradicate the swarm of flies that follow behind the cows, ‘So if you can get the timing right, it works a treat.’

Harriet moves the caravan every couple of days. Adam moves the three trailers every week over a roughly 40 hectares of their 100-hectare farm, providing an estimated 40 – 80 tons of organic matter over the pasture each year.

Planning where the sheds can and cannot go, based on the characteristics of the landscape is very important. For example, because the chicken sheds (each with 1,400 hens) deliver higher nutrient density, it was important for Adam to map out and avoid sensitive parts of their water catchment. He avoids parking the trailers in runoff areas to prevent nutrient erosion and water nutrification. Recent water tests showing zero nitrate levels in one of the farm dams (fenced off from cattle 5 years ago) confirmed that the strategy has been very effective.

After six years of working with the chicken trailers, the more strategic, long-term planning for moving the chicken sheds is now the focus for Adam. ‘The effect on the ground is so profound that you can still, probably 12 months later, see there was a trailer there, so we move them into places that haven’t previously had the trailer parked, a bit like making a huge jigsaw puzzle.’ Adam is exploring how to plan to integrate nitrogen across the whole paddock, working from the ‘patchwork’ that has built up over the past 6 years. Impacts of the chicken trailers on soil are captured in the Amberly Soils Report.

In seeking to understanding the impact of chickens on the soil, Adam has found that the farm no longer needs any synthetic fertilisers, with the pastures continuing to improve every year. Although the chickens spread their manure around as they roam, Adam notes, ‘The area directly under the trailer, about 40 square meters, really struggles with the level of nutrients deposited over the week that the chickens are there.

Hence, after moving the trailer, Adam uses surface pasture harrows to break up and spread the thick layer of chicken manure, to allow in a bit of air, and then to reseed. These areas grow back and are visually more vibrant, with faster and more sustained growth than the surrounding areas because of the added nitrogen, phosphorus and organic matter.

One of the landscape functions, from a regenerative agriculture perspective, is enhancing the diversity of communities above and below ground. To support this goal, one of the approaches is to reseed the pastures with the diverse native grasses endemic to the area. However, there could be a tension, if some Australian native pastures are not well adapted to high nitrogen levels, meaning the area needs to be reseeded with non-native pasture seed that has been selected to deal with these nutrient levels. One of the consequences over time in the use of chickens to regenerate the mineral cycle, is that farmers may see a transition away from more native pastures towards improved (often non-native) pastures. This tension currently remains an open question among Australian chicken farmers i.e. which native grass species would chickens find most appetising, and how could grazing management create a symbiotic relationship between chickens and these native plants? Adam is now seeding these highly nutrient dense areas with a more diverse range of species to promote greater biodiversity in their pastures, such as cocksfoot. He is also exploring the use of native pastures that are more tolerant of high nitrogen levels, such as Microlena.

Right now, Adam realises that he has reached a balance between the number of chickens, the amount of space, and healthy levels of deposited nutrients, so that ‘We’re not over-fertilising any part of the ground.’

Adam believes that if they were to run too many chickens, ‘we might negatively impact the soil health; you need to ensure that you leave the space under the trailer long enough for it to regenerate and for the nutrients to be integrated into the plants and soil.’ If you don’t, ‘then you leave yourself at risk of erosion and poor pasture productivity because of the overabundance of nutrients.’ Recently, with all the rain in 2021, he observes the trailer spaces growing back in around 4 weeks, or less.

To determine their limits, Adam said it was an integration of observations of the impact of the chooks on landscape regeneration complemented with calculations of DSE for chickens. ‘The standard is 0.2 DSE per chook, but the grass only makes up about 10% of their diet, so we use 0.02 DSE per chicken.’ Of course, the DSE per chook varies farm to farm based on ecosystem, feedstock and potentially even chicken type.

Our ecosystems are made of a set of complex dynamics. Every action we take in our lands causes changes in these complex set of relations. Sometimes these changes are desirable, and other times not. For example, right now, Adam is ‘fighting a battle’ with invasive birds. ‘Any feed that is dropped on the ground that’s not near a chicken will be snapped up by some generally invasive species, like a Myna or Starling. There’s a large flock of these birds that is causing us real problems.’ Adam is working with the Indian Myna Action Group in Canberra to try and build some traps and get them under control.

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