Author: Anna & Mark

My gut feeling said that our
Light Sussex broilers were better foragers than either of this year’s
other breeds —  Black
Australorps and Cuckoo Marans.  The numbers argued
otherwise.  Black Australorps won the feed
conversion rate race, followed by Cuckoo Marans, with Light Sussex
trailing in a close third.



Part of this dwindling
efficiency could be that wild prey are most bountiful in the
spring.  Despite harvest bounty, October and November chickens
have to work harder to find their grub.



But will they eat it
when they find it?  When they were two months old, I had to shut
our Light Sussex broilers into the forest garden because they were
starting to scratch up our young garlic plants.  I felt sorry for
them, so I turned over some hugelkultur logs, the undersides of
which were wriggling with huge grubs and luscious worms.  Our
Light Sussex came running when I called, but seemed a bit confused
about what they were supposed to do next.  They pecked at the
grubs then moved on to something more tasty, even though our
Golden Comet hens used to think these fat grubs were the world’s gift
to chickens.



The friendly
nature of Light
Sussex chickens does make them fun to be around, but I suspect it also
keeps them from trying new things.  They look to me, and if I’m
not pecking up those grubs, they don’t either.



Of course, a mother
hen could turn the tables quite nicely, teaching her flock to
forage avidly on things they’d otherwise ignore.  That’s why I’m
keeping a small Light Sussex flock for further experimentation even
though they lost the race (and even though we have to house them
separately so our two cockerels won’t fight).  Maybe next year I’ll
have a different story to report.

I was curious whether my
Light Sussex had been getting enough to eat on their strict
diet.  I
figured that if the combination of storebought feed and scavenged feed
were below the optimal levels, we’d have a wide variation in chicken
sizes — some big ones that were able to forage best (or hog the feed)
and some small ones who just couldn’t find their own food.



One pullet seemed to
support that hypothesis.  Even though we straightened out her foot
as best we could, the chick born with curled toe stayed the runt, clocking in
at a final dressed weight of only 0.87 pounds.  But she’s not
really a fair data point since I can envision how having only one foot
to scratch with would slow a chicken down even under the best of
conditions.  How did the other chickens do?



The chart below compares
our poorly fed Light Sussex to our third batch of chicks, which were
overfed in my opinion.  In both cases, I split the birds up into
pullets and cockerels since the latter are naturally larger than the
former.  I also deleted the curled toe
pullet since she unfairly skewed the results.



I was interested to see
that there was actually less
variation in size among the Sussex than the Australorp cockerels. 
The pullets showed more variation, perhaps because they are smaller
than cockerels and thus got less of the storebought feed?  Or
maybe the pullet variation was because of three hybrid pullets who
clearly weren’t purebred Light Sussex (they had gray instead of black
neck markings) and who grew much faster than their sisters.



I was careful to select
only the largest pullets and cockerel to keep as the foundation of our
new flock, so hopefully that means I will have chosen the best
foragers.  Maybe the next generation will have a feed
conversion rate
better than 5.3:1 at 12 weeks.  Yes, that means my darling Light
Sussex didn’t quite beat my spring
Australorps, but
they came close.