Coralstown teen counting his chickens as they hatch

It was during the Covid lockdown that teen John Glennon from Coralstown first started keeping chickens.

“I bought an incubator and started hatching chicks and selling them on Done Deal,” says John, who is a competitive runner and has a number of national awards under his belt.

There was no “typical” buyer as such: just people looking to keep busy during lockdown.

John says quite a few town families keep hens in their back gardens.

Now, he has incubators in a number of schools, including some primary schools in Dublin, where children would, prior to this, have had no knowledge of poultry at all.

“I came up with the idea after my sister, who works in St Mary’s, said she wanted to hatch some chicks in there. So I had incubators, because I was hatching chicks at home,” John explains.

He rents out the incubators and supplies the eggs, and then the students get to watch as the eggs hatch and, eventually, the chickens mature into layers themselves.

“It’s a very straightforward process,” he says of the role the schools take.

“For the first 21 days, they have no work to do and when the eggs have hatched, they feed the chickens and give them water.”

John’s enterprise ties in well with transition year, as he gets experience at accounting and business as well as at the farming end: his hope is that after school, he will go on to study ag science.

• If you would like to find out more, contact John at Johnglennonfarm@gmail.com.