Category: Chickens/Poultry

Mixing New and Old Chickens

Okay, so your baby chicks aren’t babies anymore, and the brooder house is bulging, it’s so crowded. Time to house the young chickens with the old. So how do you do that?

This is an important question, because sometimes it goes horribly wrong:

  • Young chickens whose response to stress is to pile in corners may smother each other in a new and frightening environment.
  • Dominant chickens can bully newcomers to the point where they hide somewhere and refuse to come out to eat or drink.
  • Chicken coops and yards can harbor diseases and parasites that the older chickens are resistant to, but the younger ones are not.

So there’s a lot that can go wrong. Let’s talk about making it go right.

Piling and Smothering

Baby chicks respond to stress by diving underneath the mother hen’s feathers. This is instinctual, so even incubator chicks do it. The problem is, if there’s not mother hen, the chicks hide in a dark place, typically the corner of the chicken house, and heap themselves in a big pile. Birds have very weak lungs, so the ones on the bottom smother. Not good!

Practice perches. As it happens, when the chicks learn to roost, the roosting instinct replaces the piling instinct. So the earlier the chicks learn to roost, the shorter the danger period. Chicks learn to roost by roosting, so the way to speed up the process is to give them something to roost on. I set long 2×2’s on the floor of the brooder house to start with, when the chicks are just a few days old, so the chicks can roost before they can fly. Later I move them a couple of feet up in the air.

Night lights. Chicks also panic more easily in the dark, so when I put them out in their pasture houses, I hang a flashlight from a rafter and leave it on all night (hooray for rechargeable batteries!). That really helps.

Shipping crates. Another gimmick that works pretty well is to move them into the chicken coop in poultry shipping crates, set the crates inside the coop, open the lid, but don’t remove the chickens. They’ll gradually start jumping out, but it takes a long time before the timid ones emerge, and in the meantime, the crates are sized to make piling impossible. It’s a long time before there are enough chickens in any one place to get a good pile going.

Fencing. Keeping the older chickens away for at least a day or two also helps prevent piling. Electric garden fence (electronetting about 18″ high) does a pretty good job, and doesn’t exclude the farmer, who can step over the fence without bothering to turn it off.

Bullying

Being bullied to the point of death happens mostly when you add a few chickens to a large existing flock. Surrounded by strangers, every one of which wants to shove you to the bottom of the pecking order, is hard on the new chickens, who will retreat into a hiding place and refuse to come out, often starving to death.

There are some time-honored ways to prevent this:

Add large numbers of new chickens at a time. The bigger the group of newcomers, the less trouble they will have, because of flocking behavior. The new chickens will band together and head to the feeders and waterers as a body, and the old chickens will back off in the face of the mob. This only works when the new chickens all know each other, though. It’s one reason why I have little difficulty introducing a batch of new pullets into the mix.

House the new chickens separately. If you think you can get away with having just one chicken coop, you’re fooling yourself. You need at least two. (I have more than a dozen!) Life is much simpler if you can house the new chickens in their own coop. They can share a yard with the other chickens. Having a house of their own helps. Keep the new chickens cooped up in their new house for a couple of days so they know where home is, then let them loose to mingle in the yard with the others. Just make sure that the older chickens have equally good feed as the new ones, so there’s no incentive to raid the newcomers’ coop.

Segregate the newcomers. Keeping the newcomers fenced off from the oldsters for a few days helps. The chickens can see each other and interact somewhat, which helps. It also lets the newcomers get used to their new environment without having to deal with the older chickens. This technique can be used when housing two groups of chickens in the same coop, by partitioning the coop with chicken wire temporarily.

Disease and Parasites

These days, most flocks are disease-free, but not parasite-free. Roost mites, coccidiosis, and various kinds of worms are hard to avoid. Older chickens usually have a tolerance to these things unless your environment is particularly unhygienic. Unfortunately, lots of people have small, barren yards for chickens. A muddy, over-manured yard is parasite paradise.

In fact, it’s so bad that I noticed the following pattern when surveying the poultry literature of the past 100 years: People with yarded operations would have a wonderful first year, an okay second year, and would suddenly vanish without a trace the third year. What happened was probably this: Their first batch of chicks was given access to a pristine yard. They quickly denuded it, but it takes time for parasites to build up. In year two, the yard is entirely barren and has an increasing manure and parasite load, but the hens’ tolerance to the parasites keeps pace with the threat. The replacement pullets, however, don’t do so well. The effect of this is masked because most of the original hens are still laying.

Then Year Three comes around. The baby chicks die off horribly as soon as they are added to the older flock, killed by the ever-increasing parasite load. The original hens are too old to lay much. Egg production plummets, and the farmer goes out of business. The End.

So don’t do that. Permanent yards are bad news, but if you must do them, recognize that they’re an accident waiting to happen. That’s why everybody went to confinement in the first place. The method that seems to work best is the one proposed by Geoffrey Sykes in “The Henyard” (sadly out of print, like most great books): put down a thick layer of straw, add more whenever the yard gets a little mucky, and remove it all once a year (preferably with some spiffy piece of machinery like a Bobcat, though you can use a spading fork and a shovel if you really want to). This removes the parasites and thus imposes some kind of upper limit on their density.

The other technique is to plow, roto-till, or spade the yard at least a couple of times a year, to bury the parasites. It also aerates the soil and allows some of the nitrogen from the manure to outgas, delaying the day at which the yard is so over-manured that nothing will grow there. If you combine this with double-yarding, you can get to the point where one yard is barren and has chickens on it, and the other one grows something. Of course, as soon as you put chickens on the green one, it will soon become barren again, but by planting it you get some value out of the manure and mess with the parasites’ life cycle.

Happy chickening!

Hen Lights At Last

Karen has been after me to set up hen lights this year, after a hiatus of several years. Hens normally don’t like to lay except when the day length is increasing or reasonably long or both, and neither holds true at the end of the year. Lights have been used since the 1880s to deal with this.

There’s a lot of superstition about hen lights, ranging from the idea that it somehow uses up the hens, to the idea that hens are kept under brilliant 24-hour light as a form of torture.

Lights may have been hard on the hens in the 1880s, which was before anyone knew anything about nutrition, and flocks were generally malnourished during the winter. But the bright-light idea is just silly. Hens respond to very low levels of light, and electricity costs money. Light stimulation works at levels so dim that the hens can’t see to move around. The real problem with traditional hen lights is that they’re so dim that it’s hard for the farmer to work by them. The hens have no difficulty sleeping with the lights on.

The main purpose of the lights is to shift some of the egg laying out of the spring and into the fall and winter. At best, it increases overall egg production by 15%, which is welcome but isn’t really the point. The point is to get the kind of steady, year-round production that occurs naturally in the tropics, but not in regions as far north as I am. I’m at 45 degrees latitude, and daylight lasts only eight hours on Christmas week.

My lighting system is distinctly retro. Because I use portable pasture houses, the main feature of my lighting system is a thousand feet of outdoor extension cord going from house to house. I use a single 40-watt incandescent bulb per house. The whole thing is on a timer set to remain on from 6 AM to 8 PM, which is in series with a dusk-to-dawn sensor to turn the lights off when it’s light out. This gives the hens 14 hours of light per day, which is the traditional amount to use. Traditionally, lights are used between September 1 and March 31. I’m off to a very late start.

I will post pictures later, after everything’s up and running.

Feed Quality: Who Cares Enough to Pay For It?

Is quality everything? Not to everyone. In his massive and invaluable “Poultry Nutrition” (now long out of print) W. Ray Ewing had this to say about quality in livestock feed:

First, let us look into the necessary quality levels. A feed is no good unless it can be sold and it cannot be sold unless it fits the community in which it is offered for sale. Therefore, we will have to study the community first.

If you go into any part of the country where feed is used, you will find that a small percentage of the feed users and prospective feed users have very high ideals with regard to feed quality. Possibly from 2 to 5 percent of the people in the community will say that they want a feed that is of absolutely top quality and that will produce the best results in growth and production of milk, eggs or meat that is possible, regardless of the price of the feed necessary to do such a job. You will find only a small number of people who have this ideal and are willing to back it up by buying such a high quality feed. Quite often those people have the idea that there is such a thing as one “best” feed and they want that “best” feed, but there are several of such high quality feeds possible, one or more of which may produce superior results, depending on the conditions under which they are used. Even when this viewpoint is understood, there are still people who want the best that can be made, with price no object.

At the other extreme we will find a varying percentage — anywhere from 10 to 30 percent or so, of people who look at a bag of feed from the standpoint of price as their first consideration. Then in the second place they ask, “How much for a bag of this feed?” In the third place they want to know how many pound of feed they can buy for a dollar. In other words, they have just one criterion for judging quality, and that is the price per pound, or per hundred pounds. Naturally, it also turns out that they are never a real customer of any feed dealer, because they buy only where the price is lowest and the man who is out with the lowest price at the moment gets the business — if you can call it business.

Incidentally, such people are not steady feed buyers for a considerable length of time, because they lack the sense to know that feed must produce good results in order to be worth anything and as a consequence, they fail in their feeding operations. A high quality community has relatively few of these folks.

In between these two extremes we have the great majority of feed buyers. They are people who want a dollar’s worth of results for each dollar they spend. As a matter of fact, they should have more than a dollar’s worth of results for each dollar expended. They are the sort of people who know what it costs to feed their livestock and they know the results they are getting. All of them may not know these things to the exact fraction of a cent, but at least they have more than a very general idea with respect of what is going on. To be sure, some of these people have rather high quality ideals — they approach those who want the best possible results regardless of price. On the other hand, we will find some who take at least two looks at the price before they concern themselves with results-producing ability. Success lies in sizing up the people in this general classification, particularly with regard to their relative quality ideals…

These considerations result in most feed manufacturers making more than one grade of feed. The manufacturer makes his first grade of feed to fit the quality ideals of the majority of the people in the community he serves. Then he makes a second grade where the price factor enters into the consideration more extensively. Some manufacturers also make a third grade of feed. Quite often these feed grades are “price” feeds only…

The first grade feed of a feed manufacturer must be quite complete from the nutritional standpoint. At least, the feed must be good enough that it will compete for animals under the more adverse conditions of feeding.

The second grade of feed is usually fairly correct from the nutritional standpoint. In making poultry mash feeds, the second grade of feed usually contains more wheat by-products and less of the high quality protein sources, such as milk and fish meal. The use of increased amounts of mill feeds may make the second grade of feed somewhat less palatable, but it is not always possible to attain as good palatability with the cheaper feeds. As a general rule, the second grade feeds possess a fair degree of nutritional excellence only, but the relative quality also varies with various manufacturers…

The third grade of feeds are practically always a price proposition. Nutritional ideas and ideals have been pretty well discarded. The feeds are often put together from the standpoint of meeting necessary legal guarantees only. When applied to poultry feeds, such feed mixtures are not worth what they cost, even though they cost very little. The poultryman must have results. Low feed intake and low feed cost never produced eggs or meat at a low unit production cost.

Robert’s Conclusions on Quality and Purchases

Note that the premium, “I want the best feed” market is only 2%-5% of purchasers, while the cheapskate, “I want the cheapest feed, no matter how bad it is” market is 10%-30% of purchasers. I have no data, but I’ll bet this pattern it true in just about everything, not just feed. You can guess that 2%-5% of people want the best socks, cars, or tax accountant that they can find, while 10%-30% look at the price without ever really noticing the actual product.

If you’re in the quality-product business, as I am with free-range chicken and eggs, then the quality obsessed 2%-5% are your best friends. The 10%-30% who are cheapskates are total write-offs. I’ve started posting my prices in bigger numbers so they won’t even approach my farmer’s market booth. No point attracting them when my prices are three times as much as what they’re willing to pay. The majority that’s sort-of price conscious is a mixed bag. Probably going after the quality-conscious folks is Job One, since it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but if you can reach the majority without going broke, it’s worth a shot because there are so many more of them. An attractive farmer’s market booth, sales or coupons or free samples to get people to try your product, and other techniques can tempt people who would otherwise balk at the price.

On the farming side, it should be clear that buying cheapskate feed is bad for you livestock and is also a stupid business move. Be suspicious of feed with the word “Country” in the title — that’s a code word for “cheapskate” in the feed biz. Any name that implies thriftiness is a warning not to buy.

If you ask around, most people know who has the best local feed mill, and you should buy from them. In alternative farming circles, some folks are obsessed with custom feed for some reason, but it’s the the competence and quality of the manufacturer, not the use of a special recipe, that makes all the difference.

Tasting the feed is a good quick test. Blandness is okay, off-flavors and off-smells disqualify the feed. It never hurts to use your senses for their intended purpose!

Don’t Get Too Fancy: Basics Always Matter

From World Poultry:

Poultry and pig producers who don’t test the new corn crop before feeding it are taking a risk this year, said Purdue University experts. Due to wet harvest conditions mould in corn is present in much of the Midwest crop.

This reminds me of something that I’ve seen over and over in the alternative foods movement: people take basics like moisture control for granted, and obsess instead over concerns that are trendier but less important.

You can make your livestock a lot sicker with moldy corn than GMO corn, and no doubt plenty of people are doing this right now. Poorly handled grain is bad news, regardless of how good it looks on paper.

I like to run my hands through grain, given the chance. You’d be surprised how much it varies. Some grain is moldy, some smells terrible, some is runty and full of straw and other contaminants, and some is pretty as a picture.

All of this means that your feed recipe means a lot less than you’d think. Whether the feed mill will take your top-notch recipe and turn out good feed or a travesty depends on their competence and good will, which vary all over the map.

In general, my experience is that organically certified grain makes a poorer showing when you do this than conventional grain. Less competition means that suppliers can get away with sloppiness and sharp practices, so they do. And a lot of buyers put more faith in certification than in the evidence of their own senses, so they don’t notice.

With mixed feed, I like to smell and taste it. Feed should not taste bad. It’s okay for it to be bland, but off-tastes are a flashing “do not buy” sign. Same goes for pet food, by the way.

We should all be careful to descend from the realm of theory and put our senses to work. Farming is a full-body experience, especially for our livestock!