Chickens
We eat quite a bit of chicken and one of the relatively few specific goals we have come up with since starting down our path to farming was to try and become self-sufficient in meat. So that means raising a lot of chickens. But we also want eggs, both for us and also to sell.
To begin with keeping several flocks of different breeds of chicken didn't seem like a viable option so we decided that we needed to look at dual purpose or utility strains. Combined with our desire to support rare and native breeds this narrowed the list further and we ultimately picked the Sussex.
The Sussex chicken comes in a number of colour strains but sourcing hatching eggs proved a challenge initially - perhaps because we were looking for them in October as we really wanted to get going as soon as we moved in. So we ended up with an incubator full of a mixture of Light Sussex, Buff Sussex and a few Rhode Island Reds to make up the numbers.