Happy New Year! We’ve been having unusual cold this winter. Not record-breaking, but with more cold and snow than usual: many days with snow on the ground and temperatures down to 17 °F or so. That counts as cold by Western Oregon standards.
Before the cold set in, we took our last two pigs to the Woodburn Auction Yard. While selling pastured pigs at auction is no way to make money, it cuts our losses. (We raised a record eight pigs and sold six to our customers.)
Around here, the nastiest weather and the biggest chance of power outages happens between December 15 and the end of January, so we tend to take it easy this time of year. We’ll be brooding more and more baby chicks in a little while.
The chickens are holding up well. They don’t mind this kind of weather if they can stay dry, stay out of the wind, and have plenty of feed and water. Of these, the water is proving the most troublesome, since our pasture watering system is mostly just endless lengths of easily frozen garden hose.
Farmers’ Markets? In Winter?
Our local Corvallis Indoor Winter Market has been highly successful. It’s been operating for more than a dozen years and gets bigger every year.
How do you do an indoor winter market? Not by importing produce from sunnier climes! In January, local producers have root vegetables, nuts, eggs, poultry, cheese, meat, baked goods, honey, and other products. And soon the local greenhouses will provide flowers, early vegetables, and vegetable starts. Winter markets are apparently still unusual, but they can probably be duplicated anywhere. Ours gets positively mobbed!
The Corvallis Indoo r Winter Market runs every Saturday from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM from January 14 through April 8.
Publishing News
Win a Free Copy of Genetics of the Fowl!
Genetics of the Fowl is everyone’s favorite chicken genetics book, much more readable than most genetics texts, and written for people who aren’t geneticists, but poultrykeepers. But it’s a big book, which makes it sorta pricey. So let’s give a couple of copies away this week!
To enter, use the following link to enter the giveaway. When you enter, you have a random chance of winning a copy of the book free, gratis, and for nothing. You don’t even pay for shipping. The link expires in a week, so do it now! (You need to have an Amazon account to enter, and it’s one ent ry per customer.)
Good luck! And may the odds be ever in your favor.
All of these are fine books (I only publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh- Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get good reviews.
I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print—techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1960. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles.
January, Already?
January’s not so bad. No, seriously! (If you keep rolling your eyes like that, they might fall out.) The hatcheries send out their catalogs in January, which is always fun, with early-bird discounts to tempt you to place your orders early. (Hint: the discount is often for ordering early, even if you select a much later delivery date.)
And we’ll tend to look good for the next few months because egg production starts increasing as soon as the days start getting longer, in spite of the nasty weather.
If you sell eggs at the farmer’s market, chicks hatched in January will start laying sometime around Memorial Day, the traditional start of the season. If the thought of brooding January chicks appalls you, you should read the winter brooding tips in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. January brooding is perfectly practical, and I spend quite a bit of time in the book showing you how.
January To-Do List
Inspired by a similar list in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.
Take stock of your chickens, housing, and equipment. What do you have? What do you need for the coming season?
Clean up your brooder houses before you even order baby chicks.
Clean, repair, and install brooders. If you use heat lamps, inspect the sockets and the bulbs, since both tend to burn out over time
Purchase brooding equipment if necessary: brooders, feeders, waterers, etc.
Decide what records to keep during the coming year.
Look at last year’s records before you invest in this year’s project.
Continue using artificial lights on hens if you already are, but don’t bother starting them now if you aren’t. (Traditional usage is to use 14 hours of light, between September 1 and April 1.)
Deal with damp or dirty litter. If you heap up soggy or yucky litter, it will drain and start to compost, and it will be ready to spread out again in a few days.
Keep waterers from freezing. Chickens prefer warm drinking water in cold weather, and it takes longer to freeze.
Always give chickens as much feed as they want during the winter, when they need extra calories to stay warm.
Our farmer’s market season ended the day before Thanksgiving. We have a mild climate here in Oregon, but don’t kid yourself: an outdoor farmer’s market in November can be challenging! One market was canceled due to high winds.
We’ve had some heavy rains, with 3.5 inches of rain falling on Thanksgiving day alone! This flooded our back pasture, and the hens there were wading through a couple of inches of slow-moving water for a day or two. They weren’t enthusiastic about this, but they didn’t panic, either. Things are now back to normal. One of the things that’s part of the package when you do old-fashioned free range is that weather matters more than it does with confined chickens.
Now that it’s December, the weather is turning cold right on cue, with snow in the forecast for the first time today.
My hens in snow, a few years ago.
Egg production has recovered somewhat, probably due to our use of lights, as discussed in my October newsletter.
We had some mystery predators killing a few hens on the back pasture. This seems to have stopped after we added some solar-powered anti-predator blinky lights. I’m trying the Yinghao anti-predator lights: so far, they seem excellent, both fancier and cheaper than the Nite Guard lights I use on the front pasture. Both models have simple red LED lights that blink all night. These are supposed to make predators think they’re being glared at by other predators. They work pretty well.
My Neighbor Invented the Modern Christmas Tree
One of the inventors of the modern Christmas tree, Hal Schudel, lived a mile or so up the road from us. He introduced all sorts of innovations, including hauling out the trees by helicopter to eliminate the need for roads and their attendant erosion, and the introduction of the Noble Fir as a premium Christmas Tree. Hal, who was once an agronomy professor at Oregon State University, knew a good tree when he saw it! He also figured out how to raise them sustainably in bulk and help many farmers make a living from them. He passed away two years ago at the age of 96.
Publishing News
In case no one told you, Christmas is coming! (No, really! It is!) And I can’t think of a better gift than a book from Norton Creek Press! Unless it’s more than one book from Norton Creek Press.
There’s still time to get my paperback books in time for Christmas, except a couple (Turkey Management and Poultry Production) that list longish shipping delays on Amazon and probably elsewhere. My ever-increasing list of Kindle editions, being electronic, can be downloaded immediately. Kindle books can be read on almost anything with a screen these days: computers, tablets, smartphones: you name it. You can even read them on a Kindle!
Giving Kindle Books. Did you know that you can give a Kindle e-book as a gift? Even as a seriously last-minute gift? Just follow these instructions.
New Kindle Books
I’ve introduced seven(!) new books for the Kindle since last time. In fact, two of these are Kindle-only (no paperback edition). The new books are:
Genetics in Practice: Expert Techniques for Successful Chicken Breeding, by F. B. Hutt. (Kindle only.) For years, I’ve been telling people that it was worth buying Genetics of the Fowl ($44.95) for the “Genetics in Practice” chapter alone. And it’s true! It converts all the genetic theory in the other 500 pages of the book into practical, actionable concepts. I’ve created a separate Kindle book to feature this important section for $9.99. It has everything, including how to eliminate unwanted characteristics and fix desired ones, when to use ordinary selection, when to use progeny testing, how to do rapid progeny testing without the need for vast numbers of chickens, the use of inbred strains, strain crosses, and breed crosses. Genetics in Practice is a must for every serious chicken breeder.
Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers’ Handbook by Robert Plamondon. (Kindle and paperback.) My guide to playing role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, written when I was in college, is available on Kindle for just $4.97.
Back when we were just starting out, beginner’s luck ensured that our first batch of baby chicks did very well, but after that things became erratic. At the time, there were no books that spent more than a few pages on caring for baby chicks.
So I did what I always do: I immersed myself in the literature, especially the poultry books and experiment station bulletins from 50-100 years ago, before high-density confinement methods started monopolizing the attention of poultry scientists. This revealed a wealth of hard-to-find information about raising baby chicks. We tested an enormous number of techniques. We discarded the ones that didn’t work and repeated the ones that did.
After a few years, our results became consistently good. What were we doing to ensure our success? I wrote all this up in my book, Success With Baby Chicks, the only book devoted solely to the brooding period.
One thing’s for sure: we weren’t solving the brooding problem by throwing money at it. All our methods are simple, inexpensive, and not even very time-consuming.
Anyway, I’m giving away two copies. To enter, use the following link to enter the giveaway. When you enter, you have a random chance of winning a copy of the book free, gratis, and for nothing. You don’t even pay for shipping. The link expires in a week, so do it now! (You need to have an Amazon account to enter, and it’s one entry per customer.)
Good luck!
And if you don’t win, it’s still worth your while to buy your own copy of Success With Baby Chicks, available in Kindle and paperback editions.
All of these are fine books (I only publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get good reviews.
I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print—techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1960. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles.
December Notes
December weather tends to go from bad to worse, with freezing and power outages to keep things interesting. (See one of my blog posts about winter experiences with free-range birds in open housing.) On the other hand, most people don’t have any baby chicks in the brooder house in December, and adult chickens are relatively tough, so December is something of a low-stakes gamble.
Later in the winter, though, people start brooding their early chicks, so the stakes get higher. If you want to have pullets laying well by the start of a traditional Farmer’s Market season (Memorial Day), you need chicks in January. If you hatch your own eggs, that means incubating eggs in December. Wait, wasn’t winter supposed to be the slow season?
Not to mention that the hatchery catalogs will start arriving right after Christmas, with special low prices on early chicks. As soon as you’ve cleared away the remains of the New Year’s party, you’ll be on fire to start the new season!
December To-Do List
Inspired by a similar list in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.
Do final winterizing before things get really nasty.
Stake down portable houses so they don’t blow away!
Get the equipment and coops you don’t use in the winter put away. Remove the tarps from tarp-covered range shelters to ensure they don’t collapse under snow loads.
Ensure plenty of liquid water for your chickens in cold weather: keep it from freezing. Warm water is better than cold if you can manage it easily.
Give your chickens as much feed as they want. Winter is no time to save money on feed! Keeping warm requires lots of calories.
Use artificial lights to maintain the rate of lay and to give the chickens enough light to eat by on those short, dark winter days.
Remove wet or caked litter. If you use the deep litter system, toss it into a corner, where it will heat enough to dry out and decake itself in a few days.
Clean out brooder houses and make ready for early chicks.
Put out rat bait in empty houses (use bait stations and bait blocks: they’re less messy and more foolproof than other methods). Nobody likes using poison, but having rats invade the brooder house is far worse. (Been there, done that.)
Get your brooders and incubators ready for the coming season. Lay in spare parts (heat lamps for brooders, thermostats for incubators, etc.)
If you have a breeding flock, figure out your matings now. (See Genetics of the Fowl.)
Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter, November 2016
News from the Farm
Hey, let’s experiment with giving the news in bullet-point form!
Just three more weeks in our 2016 Farmer’s Market season. Here in Corvallis, we’re among the proud-but-shivering vendors in the November outdoor markets.
Karen reports that the seasonal decline in egg production seems to have ceased, thanks to her use of lights in the henhouses, using methods summarized last time.
Four of our six piggies have been converted into pork, ham, and bacon for customers, and we’ve lined up a customer to take the other two as-is. Which is just as well, since it’s been raining like the dickens (or even the Bulwer-Lytton). Pigs plus rain equals mud, at least when they’re living the kind of outdoor lifestyle our pigs do. Our pigs have just a little Port-a-Hut shelter to sleep in, not the usual spacious roofed pig shed with a concrete floor.
We’re not doing Thanksgiving turkeys this year. Why not? One reason is that heritage-breed turkeys have a distressing tendency to escape and vanish en masse into the woods, never to return. We were hatching our own turkey eggs until the breeding flock skedaddled. And just to rub it in, about twenty wild turkeys are hanging around the farm, bold as brass.
I suspect that modern broad-breasted turkeys are more likely to stay put, partly because they’re less agile, partly because they dislike going far from the feed trough, and partly because they grow at least twice as fast, leaving that much less time for them to get any funny ideas. This would involve buying day-old poults during the summer, since spring-hatched poults would be the size of hippos. A neighbor down the road has a nice flock of white broad-breasted turkeys that are still where they’re supposed to be.
We won’t be doing many new projects until the new year. My current feeling about brooding pullet chicks in the winter is that it’s a great idea once you get the moves down, but, for our personal convenience, not during the holidays. January is soon enough.
My science fiction novel, One Survivor, contains a number of things that might seem extraneous in a book that starts with a space battle. This includes three fairy tales, a prophetic flight simulator run, and much else. I’ve broken out one of the fairy tales as a stand-alone Kindle e-book: Jack & the Magic Software: A Future Fairy Tale. It’s yours for a measly ninety-nine cents.
If you hang around with poultry enthusiasts, you hear a lot about how to feed chickens. People talk endlessly about feeding: what to feed, how to feed it, and which changes in feeding to make in response to any imaginable problem. But you can stand out by having something few of them have: an actual book on poultry nutrition!
Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser is the kind of book I spend days in libraries looking for: detailed, readable, based on careful observation and research, and full of information that most people have never heard of. Information you can often use right away.
For example, it has a whole chapter on range and green feeds. Not only that, it was written when free range was still widely practiced, but before it was politicized or turned into a market niche. So the material is presented on the basis of real, often long-term experience, and without any kind of spin.
It also talks about some pretty wacky feed ingredients (wacky, that is, unless you can get them cheap because they’re a byproduct of a local industry). If you happen to have access to starfish meal, should you feed it? How about silkworm chrysalis flour? Coconut oil meal? Distillery yeast? Sauerkraut? You name it: it’s listed here.
Of course, it talks about the more normal ingredients, too: every kind of grain, bean, protein supplement, mineral supplement. It tells you the difference between #1 corn and #2 corn, and the difference between fresh soybeans, roasted soybeans, and the many different kinds of soybean oil meal.
It also covers the nutritional chemistry: Which amino acids, vitamins, and minerals are likely to be missing in different kinds of diets, and what to add to bring it up to where it should be.
And of course it tells you the different requirements of poultry of different ages and species, because this isn’t just about chickens: it covers all species of poultry (though there’s more about chickens than the other species).
And the book tells you many, many practical details. (It should: it’s 640 pages long!) Including about a zillion feed recipes that have been tested under controlled conditions, using different ingredients according to what tends to be cheaper in a given region. For example, here in the Far West, feed wheat can be cheaper than corn, and there are recipes that take full advantage of this.
I’m not claiming that you’ll sit down and read this book cover to cover, but you’ll read more of it than you think.
Anyway, I’m giving away two copies. To enter, use the following link to enter the giveaway. When you enter, you have a random chance of winning a copy of the book free, gratis, and for nothing. You don’t even pay for shipping. The link expires in a week, so do it now! (You need to have an Amazon account to enter, and it’s one entry per customer.)
Good luck!
And if you don’t win, it’s still worth your while to buy a copy of Feeding Poultry. Pretend it’s a Christmas gift for someone else in your household, then monopolize it yourself. (That works, right?)
And if Feeding Poultry doesn’t float your boat, I have plenty of other books just waiting to go under the Christmas tree. Just rummage around in my Norton Creek Press web site. You’re sure to find something.
All of these are fine books (I only publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get good reviews.
I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print—techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1960. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles.
November Poultry Notes
Preparing for Winter
Open-Front Houses. One of the more eye-opening books I’ve read is Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D. Dr. Woods described how one of his healthiest chicken flocks spent the New England winter, not in a hen house, but in the branches of a nearby grove of pine trees. The exposure to the weather kept them from laying much, but they were astonishingly healthy and active!
This was around 90 years ago, when a lot of people were knocking out the south walls of their chicken houses to allow more light and ventilation, winter and summer alike. It worked then, and it works now. It’s an amazing thing to witness. So counter-intuitive! But it works.
So my advice is not to fret over cold or drafts for your grown chickens—that’s for day-old chicks. Resist the temptation to remove the last vestige of airflow and light from your chicken houses. Instead, do what you can to keep the water and feed flowing in freezing weather, and generally provide an environment where the chickens can stay active. Ventilation, daylight, some kind of freeze-proofing in the waterers, and the ability for the hens to stay busy are the keys.
Winter feed and water. Because our hens are in little houses scattered over acres of pasture, snow makes it wearisome for us to carry feed and water to them. We use big range feeders that minimize the frequency with which we have to fill them. Because over 90% of winter days here have highs above freezing, our water is (usually) flowing through our humble network of many hundreds of feet of garden hose.
This means that, on most days, even if there’s snow on the ground, the heaviest things we have to lug around are baskets of eggs. If it’s colder and the hoses stay frozen, we have to carry water, too. I object to carrying water in buckets. Not carrying water in buckets is what technology is all about. But we do it a few days per year.
First experience with snow. Chickens are startled by the first snowfall if it’s heavy enough to completely cover the ground, so if you put all in outdoor range feeders like I do, their reluctance to go outside will cause them to miss some meals. This in turn will cause a slump in egg production. If we scatter a little straw on top of the snow, making a path between the houses and the feeders, the chickens will venture out willingly. They don’t mind walking on straw. They quickly get used to snow after they’ve seen it once or twice, and the straw becomes unnecessary.
Scratch feed as exercise. In the old days, farmers liked to use straw on the floor of the chicken house and scatter some grain in it every day. The chickens would spend hours and hours hunting for the last morsel. Their scratching around in the litter would fluff it up and keep it from caking. This gives them exercise in cold weather, which presumably keeps them warm, and gives them something to do.
Temperature and egg production. The rule of thumb is that the rate of lay falls whenever the chickens are exposed to daytime highs (indoors) below freezing. Their health starts to suffer around twenty degrees below zero when they’re kept dry.
Frostbitten combs are more a sign of excessive dampness than excessive cold. Some chickens can’t seem to drink from a bucket or pan without getting their combs wet, so using waterers that don’t present that much surface area may be a good idea.
Insulation. The folk wisdom used to be that heating a chicken house never paid for itself. Also, it didn’t let the chickens get hardened to the cold, so any interruption in the heat was bad news. In the old days, insulation was considered a bit extravagant, even in cold parts of the U.S. and Canada. Insulation pays in big chicken houses, but the chicken houses were pretty small in the old days, rarely bigger than 400 square feet.
The main advantage of insulation in a chicken house is to keep the chicken house dry. Specifically, it prevents condensation from forming on the ceiling (and, to a lesser extent, the walls) and dripping into the house. With an insulated roof, you don’t need as much ventilation, but it still takes quite a bit of airflow to maintain a reasonable level of dryness in the house, since the chickens introduce plenty of moisture through their breath and droppings.
Food is warmth. Most of all, don’t let chickens run out of feed or water in cold weather. They can stand a lot of cold if they have plenty of food energy, and to eat, they must also drink.
November To-Do List
November is usually a fine month for grown chickens, and can even be a good month to start baby chicks if you’re set up for it. We tend to avoid receiving baby chicks in December and January, due to the increased chance of long power outages here, but we brood the rest of the year. November is a good month to prepare for winter, and it’s not too early to prepare for baby chicks, either!
Remove litter that becomes wet or disgusting, or pile it in a heap in a corner until it composts into nice clean litter again (this only takes a few days). Add more litter as required. Don’t be stingy with litter.
Don’t let the house get too dark. Chickens don’t like eating or drinking in the dark. Don’t block off your windows.
Flag pasture obstacles and equipment with something tall if there’s a chance that you won’t mow in the spring until the grass is as high as an elephant’s eye. You won’t remember if you put it off. Bleach bottles stuck on the tops of T-posts are traditional.
Recent Blog Posts
Here are the new and updated posts on my various blogs since last time:
Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter, October 2016
News from the Farm
The farm year is winding down. Our last batch of broiler chicks in in the brooder house. Our pigs will be sent to be reincarnated as pork, bacon, and ham before the end of the month.
About those Pigs…
We have some pasture-raised pigs available. This year’s batch is going to be good-sized, with a half-pig yielding 100 pounds of wrapped freezer meat, give or take. Call it five paper shopping bags full. These pigs have been fed not only on custom-milled feed, but whole wheat, all our cracked and otherwise unsaleable free-range eggs, and bushels and bushels of carrot tops and other scraps from Gathering Together Farm’s market booth.
Pork is the ultimate luxury meat: bacon, ham, sausage, pork chops (mmm … pork chops). It’s a purchase you won’t regret, even if you need to buy a chest freezer while you’re at it. Everyone needs a chest freezer.
Tempted? Contact my wife Karen Black at karen@nortoncreekfarm.com, or drop by the Corvallis Wednesday or Saturday farmer’s market and talk it over.
In the end, you’ll write two checks: One to us and one to the custom butcher, Farmer’s Helper in Harrisburg, Oregon. We charge $4 per pound, hanging weight, and the Farmer’s Helper charges, um, quite a bit less (I don’t have the numbers in front of me). They’ll prepare your pork according to your instructions (thin/medium/thick bacon, whether the portions that end up ground become pork sausage or porkburger, whether you want pork chops or loin roast, etc.).
Electric Lights and Hens
Wondering about winter lighting for hens? Some people claim that putting lights on hens is like espresso, making them all jittery and hyperactive, and causing them to shoot out eggs like a machine gun, deflating the poor hens like a balloon and causing them to die before their time.
That would certainly be something to see! But it doesn’t work that way. The effect of lights on hens is far more boring and subtle than that. What actually happens is that hens given a reasonable day length (12-16 hours) in the winter lay more eggs in the winter and fewer in the spring, with a slight increase in the total production. (In one test, the difference between hens given 24-hour daylight and those kept in 24-hour gloom was only 15%. Under more realistic conditions, the difference is less.)
Anyway, the short form of traditional hen lighting (with a couple of modern wrinkes) goes like this:
Use a day length of 14 hours, such as 6 AM to 8 PM.
In my latitude, doing this without wasting too much electricity can be done using a plug-in timer set to turn the lights on at 6 AM, off at 9 AM, on at 4 PM, off at 8 PM.
An “on at dusk/off at dawn” sensor is also good for turning the lights off during the day.
Use outdoor-rated extension cords.
Don’t mess with batteries or solar panels, which are expensive and labor-intensive.
Use electrical tape to wrap the connections between two extension cords, lamp plugs, or three-way outlets to keep them clean.
Elevate connections above the ground. We’re using step-in fence posts for this.
Outdoor-rated LED bulbs are best.
Many LED bulbs are outdoor-rated (“suitable for damp locations”), but check the packaging.
You can use a 25-watt-equivalent bulb for a 64-square-foot house, but a 40-watt-equivalent bulb is okay, too, and easier to find.
Compact fluorescent bulbs are fragile and don’t like to start in cold weather; incandescent bulbs use a lot of power.
Reflectors are not necessary. “Daylight” bulbs don’t help, and may work less well than normal LED bulbs.
Chickens and the Third World
From time to time I see a proposal about scientific chicken raising in the Third World, with emphasis on small flocks. Now, you can probably guess what the traditional top three barriers to success are for poor people who want to raise chickens:
Malnutrition or starvation of the chickens,especially baby chicks.
Predators.
Thieves.
For some reason, lofty statements are being made (including by Bill Gates, of all people) that claim that the biggest problems as:
Lack of vaccinations.
Lack of improved breeds.
Note the total lack of overlap! Starving chickens and chickens carried off by predators and chicken thieves don’t need vaccination or a pedigree: they need feed and protection.
Disease is not commonly associated with the high mortality, the steady rate of attrition being unlike that of an infectious or parasitic disease. The primary cause is starvation (Prawirokusomo, 1988; Ologhoho, 1992; Roberts & Senaratne, 1992), the chicks and growers which die tending to have lower growth rates than the average for their brood (Wickramaratne et al, 1993). The growth rates of survivors to 70 days ranged from 2 to 7 g/day with a mean of 4.4 (Gunaratne et al., 1993). Chicks and growers which die, also tend to be those with lighter feather colors, that is, those which are more conspicuous (Wickramaratne et al. 1993). Predation is the ultimate fate of most chicks and growers (Branckaert, 1992; Roberts & Senaratne, 1992; Gunaratne et al. 1993; Wickramaratne et al., 1994). Presumably anything which weakens a chick, such as inadequate nutrition, infection or parasites, increases the likelihood of it being taken by a predator.
And it offered a very simple means of reducing mortality: creep feeders for baby chicks (a creep feeder is often used for sheep and calves, who can creep under the bottom rail of a fence an reach a feeder that the adult animals can’t reach. The same idea works for baby chicks: give them the high-grade feedstuffs they need only in tiny quantities, while preventing the bigger chickens from gobbling it down instead).
Placing household refuse in a creep feeder for chicks in villages, for a short period, twice a day, increased the survival rate; but did not improve the growth rate. Supplementing the household refuse with protein improved both survival rate and growth rate (Roberts et al., 1994).
It’s sad that simple, appropriate, well-researched techniques are so often ignored.
Publishing News
Win a Free Copy of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses!
Why should you have an open-air coop this winter, instead of a tightly enclosed one? Find out by buying (or perhaps by winning) a copy of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D. This is the best book I’ve been able to find on the subject, covering fresh-air coops and many other topics. It’s an older book, from 1924, but it’s chock-full of good ideas that you won’t find anywhere else.
To enter, use the following link to enter the giveaway. When you enter, you have a random chance of winning a copy of the book free, gratis, and for nothing. You don’t even pay for shipping. The link expires in a week, so do it now! (You need to have an Amazon account to enter, and it’s one entry per customer.)
Good luck! And may the odds be ever in your favor.
October Poultry Notes
Is that a chill in the air?
Traditionally, October is a month where pullets are just about to lay, and are moved from pasture (where they had been raised) and into winter quarters that are much closer to the farmhouse, and thus more convenient for winter access.
Because many of the old hens were still around, there tended to be more chickens than there were room for in the winter houses. The usual technique was to cull all the early-molting hens, but to keep the rest for another year. About half of the old hens would be sent to market this way, sold as stewing hens. The winter flock would thus be about one-third old hens and two-thirds young pullets.
With modern hybrid layers, the flocks are much more uniform, and most of the flock will molt at once. Only a few percent will molt early. So the idea that you can sort the flock into 50% winners and 50% losers doesn’t work very well anymore. They’re mostly winners.
October is the start of a big shift in what your chickens need from you. It only takes a few months of warm weather to make you blind to the needs of approaching winter, so this month’s checklist is particularly important–especially if you follow it!
Replace litter. (If using the deep-litter method, replace enough of it that the house won’t be filled to the rafters by spring.)
Make a final culling of early molters (next month, pretty much the whole flock will molt)
Cull any poor pullets. (“One strike and you’re out” is a good rule unless your birds are pets.)
Remove damp or dirty litter on an ongoing basis.
Use lights on layers. (14 hours of light a day between September 1 and April 1, bright enough to read a newspaper at floor level, is
traditional. Incandescent bulbs are much more trouble-free than compact fluorescents, but LED bulbs are best. Don’t use “indoor-only” compact fluorescents in a chicken coop).
Get equipment put away, under cover. Don’t forget the lawn mower!
Stake down range houses so they won’t blow away during storms. (I mean it. Do it now.)
Summer houses such as tarp-covered hoophouses should have their tarps removed so they won’t collapse under snow loads.
Flag pasture obstacles and equipment with something tall so you won’t blunder into it in the spring, when grass is as high as
an elephant’s eye. I have accidentally mowed feeders, nest boxes, faucets, sheet metal, and plenty of other things that got lost in the weeds. Empty bleach bottles or coffee cans
stuck on the tops of T-posts are traditional ways of marking hazards.
List inspiredby a similar one in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.
All of these are fine books (I only publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get good reviews.
I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print—techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1960. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles.
Recent Blog Posts
Here are the new and updated posts on my various blogs since last time:
Right on cue, our hot, dry August weather transitioned into cooler, cloudier weather with a little rain—just as you’d expect in Oregon.
Autumn and Chickens
This is ideal weather for chickens, who don’t much like hot sunny weather. The pasture plants are greening up a bit as well, which will help keep the egg yolks dark and yummy. (The nutritional and flavor benefits of free range are mostly from fresh green plants, not worms, as some suppose.)
It’s also a good time to brood baby chicks. I’m a big fan of fall brooding. Most hatcheries still have a pretty good selection in September. Later on, they’ll only have commercial breeds (partly because off-season orders mostly come from people with commercial flocks, partly because the other breeds aren’t laying enough eggs to fill an incubator). Chicks hatched in October will be feathered enough to handle winter weather when it hits hard in December.
An Ice-Free Summer
Our ice machine is irreparable, and we’re looking for a new one. Because we have very limited water (see my low-yield well page), we need an ice machine that turns every drop of water into ice (a “flaker”) instead of wasting more than half of it (a “cuber”). These are available off-the-shelf, but we’re looking for a good deal, since we only use it two days a week. In the meantime, we’re buying ice at the Blodgett Country Store.
Mite-y Inconvenient
We broke our own rules a while ago and acquired some chickens from another farm, and of course they came with a free case of scaley leg mites, and this is spreading through the flock. So now we get to go out in the middle of the night, grab hens one at a time, oil their legs to smother the mites, and repeat at weekly intervals for three weeks.
Sadly, this tedious old-fashioned technique is still the go-to method. The dewormer Ivermectin is probably more effective and far more convenient, but it’s not approved for poultry. In the interests of science, we may isolate a couple of affected roosters and give Ivermectin a try to see if it works better than the treatment the others are getting, using leg bands to remind us never to sell them for meat.
What we were supposed to do was to never, ever allow a chicken on the farm unless it was a day-old chick from a reputable hatchery or an older bird from Oregon State University’s flock.
Publishing News
Win a Free Copy of Genetics of the Fowl!
Genetics of the Fowl is everyone’s favorite chicken genetics book, much more readable than most genetics texts, and written for people who aren’t geneticists, but poultrykeepers. But it’s a big book, which makes it sorta pricey. So let’s give a couple of copies away this week!
To enter, use the following link to enter the giveaway. When you enter, you have a random chance of winning a copy of the book free, gratis, and for nothing. You don’t even pay for shipping. The link expires in a week, so do it now! (You need to have an Amazon account to enter, and it’s one entry per customer.)
Good luck! And may the odds be ever in your favor.
September Poultry Notes
September is one of the easiest months in the poultry calendar: less hot than August, less nasty than December. Many people (but not us) don’t brood baby chicks in the fall and have already butchered their broilers, so it’s just the hens until next year.
To-do items:
Start using artificial lights for consistent egg production. The traditional practice is to provide a day length of 14 hours between September 1 and March 31. A bare bulb, equivalent to 60 watts for every 100 square feet of floor space, is plenty.
Avoid overcrowding. All problems become worse with crowding. And they flare up faster with crowding, too.
Cull molting hens. (Hens that start molting this early probably won’t start laying until spring. It would be cheaper and better to make chicken and dumplings out of them and replace them with baby chicks.)
Remove soiled litter. (If using deep litter, shovel some of it out to make room for the additional litter you’ll add over the winter, but only if it looks like the litter will get so deep it will make things impractical. “More is better” with deep litter.)
List inspired by a similar one in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.
All of these are fine books (I only publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get good reviews.
I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print—techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1960. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles.
Recent Blog Posts
Here are the posts on my various blogs since last time. Most are updated and greatly expanded revisions of older posts:
News from the Farm
