The way we live our lives on a daily basis is changing rapidly. The way we approach certain things in life is different to approach we may have taken 10 - 15 years ago because of the way we are educated by the television media and news paper media towards certain issues. One such issue is the way we eat and what we eat. In years gone by we would eat a fast food meal for convenience without giving a second thought as to what it might have been doing to our body, it was simply treated as fuel to get us through the day until it was time for our next meal. But in recent years there has been a concerted effort in the media and by health organisations to move us away from fast food and towards a more healthy way of eating, which can only be good news for us. The other thing that has changed over the past few years is the way we buy our food. More and more of us are now shopping in large faceless supermarkets because they are convenient and because they are cheaper than local stores. But there is an extra price to pay for cheaper food and that is generally in the quality of the produce or how that food was reared. So what is the real price of cheap food and what can we do about it?

In simple economic terms the more you produce of something the cheaper it gets to produce, it is called economy of scale and it is true about every form of production whether it be glass production, plastic production or the production of a chicken for your dinner table. The production of the chicken is what affects you and I most of all, we have all heard and read about battery produced chicken and other forms of meat and we all take the choice of whether we buy the cheap meat that is produced for a price or whether we purchase a free range chicken that is reared humanely and sold for a higher price. But there is another alternative open to you, why not rear your own chicken and have a truly free range bird that will produce both eggs and a meat for you.

More and more people are trying their hand at keeping their own chickens for these very same reasons, you can be 100 per cent sure that the animals have had a totally free life and that they have been reared in a natural way and even been fed on totally organic produce. Chickens take up very little space in your garden and can live side by side with other pets as long as they are kept secure.

Keeping chickens is a great educational experience for adults and children alike, seeing the birds grow up, learning about their characteristics as well as learning about the value of food and meat when it comes to the time that you have to slaughter the animal. Chickens can be a great way to help you with organic gardening as their manure can be used as an organic fertilizer on plants and vegetables that can then in turn be fed to the chickens.

Depending what you want from your chickens should depend on what breed of bird that you go for, certain birds produce better meat than others and certain chickens are better at laying eggs. Organic gardening is becoming more and more popular each year and with the improved education that we have regarding what we eat, where it comes from and how it is produced maybe the time is right for more of us to have a go.

Organic gardening is not hard work and rearing chickens in a safe, humane and organic way is both educational and therapeutic so why not give it a go this year.