Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Chicks are cute, fluffy and come in all sorts of colours. It is an amazing thing to put an egg in an incubator or under a broody hen and just 21 days later to have a real, live, cheeping fluffy bundle in its place! And as our owners will admit, hatching chicks is very addictive, once you have done it once, you want to do it again and again. BUT a bit like the question: what shall we do with all those eggs?', you need to be able to answer the question: 'what will we do with all those chicks?' A good half will be males, plus whilst some of us chickens (or in my case bantams) grow up looking beautiful, chickens are not quite as cute as chicks, in the same way that sheep are not quite as cute as lambs. BUT, assuming you want to hatch some chicks and you know WHY and have a plan in place, the next stage is to get hold of some fertile eggs...