Category: Chickens/Poultry

How to Have Grass-Fed Eggs in Winter

If you’re in a part of the country where the grass goes away or is buried under snow in the winter, how can you achieve your goal of grass-fed eggs? And if it’s twenty below and a gale is blowing, are free-range eggs really a good idea?

It’s easy to get hung up on definitions and take things too literally, but we ought to allow reality to intrude, at least a little bit. We don’t want our chickens going outside when it’s unhealthy for them to do so, and it would be stupid and irresponsible to do so just so we could cling to labels like “free-range” or “grass-fed.” Climate happens.

We are blessed with a wealth of practical information about such things if we know where to look. Back before scientists figured out about vitamins, everyone knew that poultry needed green feed year-round. They just didn’t know why. So they worked out a variety of ways to keep green feed in the picture, regardless of weather.

Some contenders were:

  • Vegetables. Carrots, kale, and lettuce are good, cabbage less so. Kale was particularly popular in the Pacific states, since it can be left standing in the field all winter and nothing will happen to it. The others were stored in the usual ways. Of course, these days such vegetables are available fresh year-round, and maybe you can get them for free through the discards of your local supermarket.
  • Lawn clippings are an obvious substitute for grass range, though of course they aren’t available except in weather where the chickens might just as easily go outdoors. In this modern age, maybe it’s practical to freeze lawn clippings if you only have a few hens. Grass clippings are also practical if your chickens can’t range widely (a lot of neighborhoods would tolerate chickens in the back yard but not the front, for example).
  • Hay. Alfalfa meal, alfalfa hay, and clover hay are all good and can be stored indefinitely. Alfalfa products are easy to find, too.
  • Sprouted grain. Greatly beloved by some people, there’s a lot of skepticism in the poultry literature. Not green and leafy enough to do much in the “green feed” line, and way too labor-intensive — that’s the verdict.

Feeding methods varied. Whole kale plants were often uprooted and hung upside down from a piece of twine, just above the floor, so the chickens could peck at the leaves. Similarly, farmers drove spikes into the chicken house walls and spiked cabbage and lettuce heads on them. Others thought that slicing the green feed made it more palatable, so they bought slicers or shredders and fed the cole-slaw-like shredded greens in troughs. Alfalfa pellets or cubes are probably more palatable if you soak them for a while first. Hay can be fed in troughs or hay nets. Tossing it on the ground is wasteful.

Basically, you give the chickens as much as they want, or, with wet feeds, as much as they can eat before it freezes. If they have green range available, they won’t like alfalfa hay, etc., but when the range becomes barren or inaccessible, their attitude will change.

Do it right, and your eggs will have a spring-like flavor year-round.

How To Build a Better Brooder House

We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We’re replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

  • We’re using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even “once in a while” is way too often.
  • We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
  • The three windows wouldn’t provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
  • A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
  • It’s as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It’s good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
  • We’ll be insulating the roof. This isn’t strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here’s a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]

Everyone’s Electrified by my Fencing Pages

Mother Earth News has featured my Electric Fencing FAQ in the Happy Homesteader section of their Web site. Check it out! No, not just my FAQ, but the whole section. It has a lot of good stuff in it.

Mother Earth News has been a great resource ever since I was a kid, with lots of hands-on practical stuff that you can cut out and paste down. It’s one of the few print magazines I still subscribe to in this Internet age.

Electric fencing resources:

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More about simple electric fences for chickens

In a recent post about electric fencing, I talked about one- and two-wire electric poultry fences, but not how to go about making or using them.

Plus, I found a funny video that features a simple electric fence (though with a high wire for horses rather than a low one for chickens).

Benefits of One-Wire Electric Fences

  • You can step over them — after all, they’re just a single wire five inches off the ground — no gates required!
  • You can drive right over the fencewire without turning the fence off. The wire will spring back.
  • If a predator gets inside the fence, the chickens can’t be cornered by a one- or two-wire fence: they pop right through. Usually this means that the flock scatters and the predator kills only one. With a conventional fence, the chickens can’t get away, and predators keep killing until they run out of targets. That’s a tragedy waiting to happen.
  • If a chicken ends up outside the fence, it will eventually work up the nerve to cross the fence to get home. Regular fencing leaves the chickens stranded outside.

One-Wire Electric Fences: Materials

  • A fence charging unit. I use AC-powered units from Parmak. The bigger, the better. Chicken fencing shorts out easily against molehills and growing grass, so you need a lot of zap.
  • Step-in fence posts. These are plastic fenceposts with an iron spike at the bottom. As the name implies, there’s a little step on them so you can plant them in the ground with your foot. Get one for every 20-30 feet of fenceline.
  • Aluminum fence wire. Aluminum fence wire is the good stuff. It stays bright and shiny forever, so the chickens (and other critters) can see it easily and avoid it. Galvanized wire becomes dull and invisible over time. Polywire sags too much for low-wire fences and is annoying to work with.
  • Insulators to carry the zap from charger to fence. It’s convenient to put the charger in a barn or shed and then run the high-voltage wire along a fenceline. At gates, some people use heavily insulated wire buried slightly underground, but I prefer to jump the fence on ten-foot poles (rot-resistant two-by-fours are okay). Use insulators anywhere the wire touches something.

    • That’s about it. I used to use metal T-posts at the corners, but I don’t do that anymore.

    Lay out the wire around the perimeter of your fenced area, and add fenceposts. Tension the wire by moving the fenceposts in or out until the wire goes tight. The wire should be 4-6 inches off the ground. A second wire at about 10 inches is a nice touch but isn’t absolutely necessary.

    The fence works best if you enclose a large area and keep the chicken houses some distances away from it. My fence encloses several acres. If you want to fence chickens tightly, you need something more substantial.

Electric Fencing: Simpler is Better

Electric fencing has been around a long time, and has been used with chickens since at least 1960. The methods used then still work today.

The earliest mention I’ve seen of electric fencing with chickens was in a 1960 issue of “Egg Producer” magazine. The electric fence consisted of a single strand of wire 4-5″ off the ground. That’s it! This single low wire was enough to hold in the hens and discourage predators. Sometimes they added a second wire at 8-10″ off the ground, but it was mostly just for show.

I’ve tried it, and it works! And I got independent verification by stumbling across a site that talked about keeping raccoons out of your sweet corn. Same deal.

I once watched a coyote chase a hen that was outside the fence, but come to an abrupt halt when the hen raced past the two wires. The coyote stopped so fast I almost expected to hear tire squeal! Clearly the fence intimidated it to the point where even the prospect of a certain meal didn’t tempt it.

I cover this more fully in a follow-up post about electric fencing.

I also have an Electric Fencing FAQ with more details.