Poultry

At South Yeo Farm East we have a wide range of poultry breeds chosen for their character, looks and importantly to help preserve rare and traditional varieties. Our birds are kept on grass and are guarded devotedly by our border collies who first learned to round up chicken rather than sheep... We sell hatching eggs, young birds, and free range coloured eating eggs.

Free range coloured eating eggs

click here for hatching egg sales

We keep a team of pekin bantams as natural broody hens to hatch and raise young in preference to the incubator wherever possible, although we now hatch every week during the main hatching season from February to August. Breeding groups of adult birds are housed separately during the main season to ensure no cross breeding. In our breeding pens we have 4-5 hens of each breed along with one or 2 unrelated cockerels. Each breed is kept in a separate run with a purpose built house that allows plenty of room for the birds while being easy to clean. During the winter months when the birds stop laying they are given a break from the breeding pens. We are constantly striving to improve the quality our breeding stock by keeping the best hatched each year and by introducing new bloodlines where necessary. We only breed from healthy birds that have not knowingly suffered any type of disease. Because we rarely buy in birds (all new stock is hatched from eggs to reduce the risk of bringing in disease problems), and our birds are free range, fed a healthy ration and have unlimited fresh air, we do not believe vaccination is necessary or practical at our scale. We only ever sell healthy birds that have had their MOT before leaving!

Chickenopolis

Movable aks by Peter Green

Learn how to keep chicken:
For a number of years now we have run beginners ‘Introduction to Poultry Keeping’ courses at the farm to enable those just starting out to have hands-on experience of handling birds and to learn of their housing, feed and daily care requirements. For further details of dates, agenda, prices etc, please see our training pages. 

The breeds we keep are as follows:
(Click on a Breed name to see further information, or click here to view a full price list of the breeds we have at the farm).

We also have a few non-breeding birds kept as pets or for their colourful eggs or broody characteristics, including some Araucana x Maran layers of olive green eggs. Photos below are all of our own birds.

Birds  for sale: For up-to-date details of birds we have for sale, please see the ‘For Sale’ pages. Alternatively, if you wish to be sent an email notification when new birds are listed for sale, please click here