Category: Chickens/Poultry

If It Were Any Fresher, You’d Have to Slap It

Karen butchers chickens the day before the farmers’ market, meaning that the broilers you buy from us have been on ice for no more than a day. Compare this to supermarket chicken, where sell-by dates are about ten days out from the date of butchering.

Also, our broilers are lovingly handled and kept on ice the whole time. No middlemen, no half-trained help. That’s what small businesses and buying locally are all about.

And it doesn’t hurt that they’re the best-tasting broilers in the world, or that we raise them with respect.

Thought you’d like to know.

Rule of Thumb for Brooding Day-Old Chicks

Here’s another good old-time rule that most people have forgotten:

“The floor of the brooder must be warm and dry to the touch before you add chicks.”

If the baby chicks get chilled as soon as you take them out of the shipping box, bad things happen. They lose the desire to eat and drink, and sometimes the ability to move, if they’re chilled. Cold or damp litter is enough to chill them.

Usually you should turn on the brooder the day before the chicks arrive. This is no time to try to reduce energy consumption.

The First Rule of Chicken Coop Design

I read this rule in old poultry books but have never seen it in newer ones:

“A chicken chicken coop needs to be big enough to walk around in, or small enough that you can reach into any part of it from outside.”

Coops that are somewhere in the middle — too small to walk in, too big to reach across — are nothing but trouble. Chickens need good care, and (let’s face it) we give better care when it’s convenient to do so.

In addition, coops that are hard to service usually provide limited visibility. Is that waterer in the back really working? Hard to tell. Is that an egg in the shadows? Everything works better if you can get up close and personal.

Predators and Daily-Move Pens

Keeping predators out of daily-move pasture pens can be difficult, since predators are motivated and can dig their way into the pen. Some things that help:

  • Having a dog close to the pens. I’m told this always works. We haven’t tried it.
  • Electric fence surrounding the area with the chickens. This mostly works. See my Electric Fencing FAQ. Most people think that electric fencing has to be way more elaborate that is really the case.
  • Electric fence wire on the pen itself. Does anyone do this but me? Hammer in a few nail-on fence insulators around the perimeter of the chicken pen, about four inches off the ground, add wire, and attach to the fence charger of your choice — possibly a battery-powered one attached to the pen itself.

These precautions are fairly effective, but sometimes you get a predator who isn’t afraid of an electric fence and wreaks havoc in spite of it. I’ll talk about that in another post.

Oystershell

One thing that amazes me is how fast hens go through oystershell, even if you’re feeding them a complete ration that theoretically has enough calcium in it. This is probably a good sign, meaning that they are getting some low-calcium nutrition off my pasture and eating less chicken feed.

They had run out of oystershell, and when I took a bucketful out to them today, they fought over it.

That’s the thing about nutrition — it’s hard to tell what the chickens lack. You short them on something, and they’ll be less productive, but you can’t tell by looking.

I recommend providing hens oystershell 24/7, regardless of what else you’re feeding them.