Backyard Chickens Done Right: Jim Schultz on Heritage Breeds, Predators, and Why Cornish Cross Isn’t the Answer

Originally aired on the NOFA Podcast, “Backyard Birds,” Season 4, Episode 3, 2021.

Before you buy a single chick, know your town’s rules. That was the first thing Jim Schultz told listeners of NOFA’s Backyard Birds podcast. Schultz, who raises heritage chickens, turkeys and pigs at Red Shirt Farm in Lanesborough, sits on his local agricultural commission and said most towns cap backyard flocks at six hens with no roosters, even in right-to-farm communities. Check before you build a coop.

Schultz steered listeners hard toward heritage breeds over hybrids, and toward birds built for New England winters. The tell is in the head. “If you have one of the birds that has this tall, beautiful, showy red comb, you’re more than likely that’s going to get frost bit in the winter,” he said, warning it can cause serious pain and even kill a bird through sepsis. Red Shirt Farm raises Buckeyes and Black Australorps, both known for small combs, gentle temperaments and hardiness. Hybrids, by contrast, are bred for output, not longevity. “Hybrid breeds are really meant as sort of like disposable commodities in the industry,” Schultz said. “They’re rarely kept for more than a year.”

Disposition matters more than people expect, especially with roosters. Schultz recalled his own early mistake: a rooster on the farm’s original small flock turned aggressive toward women. “He would come at them with a vengeance to the point of chasing my wife around the house and trying to get into the house to get her.” His advice for a rooster like that is blunt. Euthanize it, both for safety and because aggression is a genetic trait that gets passed on if the bird is used for breeding.

He was equally direct about the industry’s default meatbird. Cornish Cross dominates commercial production, reaching table weight in seven or eight weeks, but Schultz doesn’t raise them. “In my opinion, it exemplifies all the downsides of commercial agriculture,” he said, noting the genetics are owned by two multinational corporations and the birds’ legs and hearts often fail before ten weeks. He also cautioned first-timers not to mistake a cute Cornish Cross chick for an egg layer — it isn’t one.

On housing, Schultz pushed back against the trend of fixed backyard coops, however charming they look. A stationary pen turns to bare dirt within weeks, he said, and becomes a breeding ground for flies. His fix is mobility: a small wheeled coop moved regularly, paired with flexible poultry netting so birds always reach fresh ground. Rotating pasture, he said, also solves problems people assume require intervention, including cannibalism. “If there’s an issue of cannibalism, it’s almost always because your management isn’t right,” he said — birds with real room to roam rarely fight to that extreme.

Feed economics came up too. A 50-pound bag of conventional feed runs around $11, Schultz said, versus $22 to $28 for organic — and freshness matters more than people think. Ground feed loses roughly 40 percent of certain nutrients within its first week, which is part of why store-bought bags that have sat around lose their appeal to the birds. “It’s the same thing with grain” as stale bread, he said. “The fresher it can be, the better.”

Schultz’s larger point was that raising healthy birds mostly heads off the problems people worry about. In over ten years of raising hundreds of birds on pasture at Red Shirt Farm, serious disease has been rare. His go-to remedy when something does come up: apple cider vinegar, liquid vitamin E and liquid garlic in the water. “Those three things together administered in the water for the birds has seems to have cured almost everything that we’ve gotten,” he said.

He closed with encouragement more than caution. Get the housing and fencing sorted, get birds in spring, and don’t overthink it. “Raising chickens is just an incredibly enjoyable and rewarding activity that’s going to nourish you and your family,” Schultz said, “but just provide hours of enjoyment for you and for the kids.”