My eldest is breeding a chicken. Not a show bird — a landrace: a bird shaped by foxes, hawks, heat and a dry Woomargama hill, selected on foraging and toughness instead of egg size. Here's what's in the mix, why broody mothers matter, and why we think Australia needs one.
Years ago I opened a shed door early on a late-spring morning and 350 chickens showed me something that I've been chasing since. My eldest, Otto, has now taken that lesson and together we are breeding his own bird. He's called it Ottofowl, after himself, which tells you everything you need to know about him.
We had three eggmobiles out on pasture back then, about 350 layers in each. I'd just been ringing up and ordering hybrid browns like everyone does. One batch came through as "blacks" — some sort of Australorp cross, I believe.
We were still opening the doors by hand in those days. So I walked down early, late spring, and opened up.
The browns came out and crowded straight around the feeder, gobbling up the grain.
The blacks — all 350 of them — flapped out, ran straight past the grain bins, and went a hundred metres in every direction out into the paddock. Berserk after bugs and grubs and crickets and whatever else they could find.
Same shed. Same morning. Same feed on offer. Completely different expression. Completely different animal.
So much of the farming we're trying to do is observation-based. It's not just being observant enough to make the observation — it's what you do with it afterwards. How do you interpret it? What does it actually mean?
What it meant was this: not all chickens are equal, and there are different tools for different tasks. I'd been buying the wrong tool for years.
Have a think about what the commercial laying hen has been selected for over the last century or so.
Docility. Ease of handling. Eggs per week. Egg size. Uni-formality.
Every one of those is a trait that makes a bird easier to keep in a shed. None of them helps a bird stay alive in a paddock with a fox in it.
Nobody selected for "spots a hawk". Nobody selected for "gets itself up a tree at dusk". Nobody selected for "feeds itself". Those traits weren't bred out on purpose — they just stopped mattering, and anything that stops mattering quietly disappears.
Years ago, these behaviours were the norm. I recently read a fantastic book called "Free-Range Survival Chickens by Florida Bullfrog".
He expertly describes early domestication of chickens and explains how they were still hardy and tough. How then fended for themselves to be a low input valuable asset to a homestead. We want to bring back these behaviours, traits and genetics.
So on our place I'm putting egg size to one side. I'm shifting egg volume down the list. I'm putting foraging ability, alertness and sheer toughness up the top where they belong.
That's a heresy in the egg industry. Economic suicide.
It's just common sense on a sun kissed hill in Woomargama.
If you read the piece about our African animals, you'll remember I drove six hours each way to bring home a handful of Egyptian Fayoumi — and that I brought them home for my boy Otto to breed.
He ran with it. He's nine, which I think is worth stating plainly before you read the next paragraph.
He's down at the birds constantly, building something, moving something, checking something. He keeps a ledger of what he spends and what he earns. He's had an actual phone call with an actual angel investor, which I found funnier than he did. (Nothing has happened here to date, which is fine. Less pressure on the boy - for now.)
And he's assembling a bird. He calls the project Ottofowl. Every so often he decides there's a flavour missing from the mix and negotiates for another breed to throw in. I think we have all the genetics we need at our fingertips & the rest is up to us.
This isn't a recipe — it's an ongoing argument between a kid and a paddock. But the backbone is there:
The crosses are starting to throw some genuinely striking birds. There's one walking around here with a naked neck and an Araucana head, which is a combination I don't think anyone has ever deliberately set out to create.
Strip away the colours and the fun and it comes down to four things. We want a bird that can:
That's the whole brief. Everything else is negotiable.
The early signs are good. We've got a breeding bunch we've started letting out during the day, and most are coming back to roost of an evening — but a good half of them have decided the shed roof is better than the shed. Up out of the way, where a fox can't get a look in.
That's fine by me. That's the entire point.
Foxes are not a hypothetical here. Before we had our Maremma we were losing a lot of birds to them, and we still shoot many. They are a relentless scourge that we will never be completely absolved of. A bird that solves that problem by going up a tree is worth more to me than a bird that lays an extra egg a week.
Those four are the brief. But there's a fifth thing we're working towards, and it's the one that would change the whole project: hens that go broody and raise their own chicks.
Broodiness is another trait the industry has spent a century breeding out. A hen sitting on eggs isn't laying, so she's a problem — out she goes. That's fine if you own an incubator and a brooder. It's a dead end if you want a bird that can keep going without you.
Plenty of heritage breeds still hold this trait, so luckily it shouldn't be too hard to breed in.
We've got it happening here now, and the difference in the chicks is something else.
The instinct and the character of a chick raised by a mother hen is unmatched. They forage hard. They're busy all day. They've had a teacher from the moment they were dry — one who's constantly showing them what's worth eating and what's worth running from.
I want to be fair here, because it would be easy to overclaim. Chicks out of a brooder can absolutely pick all of this up. Put them on pasture and they'll learn it — most of our birds have come out of a brooder and they turned out just fine.
But we believe a chick raised by its mum starts with an edge. Out here the lesson is "that shape in the sky will kill you", and getting that lesson early, from something that already knows it, has to count for something.
Here's why it matters beyond the chicks themselves, though. If the hen does the hatching and the teaching, then we're out of the loop — and the paddock goes back to doing the selecting, the way it's supposed to.
These chickens will never be a real Landrace unless they can self replicate without human intervention.
A breed is something made to a written standard and judged in a pen. Feather pattern, comb type, weight — all decided by committee, then locked in.
A landrace is different. A landrace is a population shaped by a place. Nobody writes the standard down, because the environment writes it for you. The animals that suit the conditions breed on. The ones that don't, don't. Over enough generations you end up with something that fits that patch of dirt like a key in a lock.
That's exactly how the African animals we love were made. Nguni cattle and Damara sheep were never bred on a spreadsheet — they were stewarded for thousands of years by people with no pharmaceuticals to prop them up, so nature did the selecting on one brutally simple rule: stay alive and breed, and we'll keep you.
Australia never did that with chickens. We imported British and American breeds built for a soft, green, mild climate, then propped them up with sheds and grain and medication so they'd cope here. We have no chicken of our own that answers to 48°C, five months of dry brown feed, a fox under every log and a hawk over every hill.
So why not make one? Not a Wolki Farm bird. An Australian bird — one that a bloke in the Mallee or a family on a block outside Toowoomba could keep alive without a shed full of inputs.
It's the same idea as everything else here: fit for purpose. Start with an animal that has its survival tools built in and you don't need to prop it up. The tough self-sufficient animal and the drug-free paddock are the same idea from two different ends.
This is a long way from done. A landrace isn't a thing you announce — it's a thing you get, eventually, if you keep selecting honestly for long enough and are willing to cull hard. We're a handful of generations in. There will be birds that don't make the grade and they'll go in the pot. There are traits we're hoping for that we simply haven't proven yet.
We have a goal, we have a plan, we have the foundation genetics, we have a method and a kid who's more committed to it than most adults I know.
Good enough's perfect, as Joel Salatin says. Just start.
If you'd like to start your own flock from the same genetics — and have a crack at selecting for your own patch of Australia — Otto sells fertile eggs:
Hatch them, run them, and keep the ones that thrive. That's how a landrace gets made — not by us, but by a few hundred people all selecting for the same thing in different country.
— Jake
