Category: Chickens/Poultry

Metal Siding on Coops: The Noise!

I previously wrote about metal siding on chicken coops. It lasts forever, is easy to install, and it’s fairly cheap. Just one downside…

When I do the morning egg collection, every nest in the nest house has one or two hens in it, and they’re clucking up a storm. “Cluck” doesn’t give any idea of the actual volume of sound we’re talking about. In metal-sided house, this can be very, very loud.

In the afternoon egg collection, most of the hens have wandered off, and everything’s all peaceful. But it’s pandemonium in the morning.

People in the autistic spectrum (which includes both my kids) may find the noise to be more than they can bear. For most people, it’s just a nuisance. In either case, hearing protectors will restore peace and quiet and let you hear your iPod.

I’m going to use more metal siding as I repair old pasture houses, but the noise issue, if manageable, is real. Thought you’d like to know.

Coccidiosis Again

It’s been a cold wet spring, and this always makes us slow at putting chicks out on pasture, even though we know that keeping ’em in the brooder house too long will give them a nasty case of coccidiosis. We just encountered a mild case in the broiler chicks we put into their pasture house at four weeks of age.

Coccidiosis is a protozoan parasite that lives in your chickens’ intestines and will scar them up something fierce if you let it, killing some chicks and stunting others. It has a screwy lifecycle that can be broken if you prevent the chickens from re-ingesting their own feces, or by a variety of drugs. It can also be mitigated by the use of deep litter that’s more than six months old, because the ecology of the microbes in deep litter eventually includes things that eat coccidia. (See my deep litter guide.)

Anyway, four weeks in the brooder house on non-medicated feed is too long for broilers, and their manure showed the occasional pink splotch. That’s blood. Bad. They weren’t acting sick, though, which assuages my conscience. Still, damage is being done.

The pasture pens we use for broilers are moved to a new patch of grass every day, which effectively interrupts the coccidiosis life cycle. The problem will fade very quickly — I hope before any chicks stop acting perky and before any damage is done. But we cut it too fine. We shouldn’t allow symptoms to develop at all.

If you ask for advice about coccidiosis, a lot of people will give you home remedies for treating it after the symptoms get bad. Most of these don’t work, and you shouldn’t wait that long, anyway. Prevention is what you want. Others will tell you, in effect, that their chickens never get coccidiosis, in spite of their lack of precautions. Sometimes this is true — coccidiosis outbreaks tend to be sort of random — but usually it just means they don’t know it when they see it, and blame their sick and stunted chicks on the feed or the hatchery.

That’s why I recommend that beginners use medicated chick starter. The medication is aimed solely at coccidiosis, which is the #1 baby chick disease. Once you’ve raised a bunch of perkey, uninfected chicks, you’ll notice if your next batch does poorly on unmedicated feed.

I like using medicated feed, but Karen doesn’t. Part of the difference is that my chicks are egg-type pullets, which grow more slowly and have to spend more time in the brooder house, putting them at greater risk for coccidiosis. On the other hand, my pullets won’t start laying until they’re five months old, which is more than three months after I’ve discontinued the medication (which isn’t toxic in any event, especially at second hand). The timescale is a lot shorter with broilers.

The other trick is to have wire-mesh floors in the brooder house so the chicks can’t forage around in their own manure.

All this is covered in loving detail in my baby-chick book, Success With Baby Chicks, along with every other baby-chick technique I’ve ever heard of. Take a look!

Grass and Chickens

Time to put the mower on the tractor. I have a 1957 Ford 640 tractor and a five-foot rotary mower.

The surest sign that it’s time to mow is that the electric fence starts shorting out against it. You’ve really gone too far when the chickens have little jungle paths through the tall grass to get from their houses to the outdoor feeders.

Chickens do best on short grass. They can’t digest grass unless it’s bright green, and tall grass is a serious barrier to them. I read some research done way back when that said that two inches is a good grass height for chickens. Six inches is too tall. Also, when tall grass starts providing seclusion, they start laying there instead of in the nest boxes.

Predators, on the other hand, prefer tall grass. It allows them to lie in wait, which works better for them than chasing chickens all over the yard.

It’s important to either be (a) the kind of person who always puts everything back where it belongs, not matter what, or (b) to start mowing the pasture before the grass gets high enough to obscure the stuff you’ve left lying around. Otherwise you discover your missing possessions by shredding them with the mower.

There are different kinds of tractor mowers. Like everyone else, I use a “bush hog,” (which I put in quotes because it’s really a generic rotary mower, not by Bush Hog) — a rotary mower with swinging blades that make it resistant to damaging itself or your tractor’s drive shaft if it whacks a stump or a big rock. Don’t forget to fill up the oil in the transmission and sharpen the blades if you can get at them.

Also, you really need to have an “overrunning clutch” between the bush hog and your PTO drive shaft. Otherwise, the inertia of the spinning blades will act like a flywheel, making your tractor hard to stop. (The power take-off is on the wrong side of the clutch, so stomping on the clutch has no effect on this. The ratcheting mechanism on the overrunning clutch does the trick.)

What about lawns, you ask? Oh, yeah. I mow them with a lawn mower, or, more often, Dan does. I don’t do lawn care besides that. I prefer working on a field scale, so a lawn seems too dainty to me. We don’t plant or fertilize it, we just mow whatever chooses to grow there. Grass and frisbees, mostly. And Oregon’s Coast Range plays this geological joke on us — it rains half the year, but that doesn’t mean your well produces much water. So we don’t water the lawn in the summer, either.

But take it easy on your first mowing session of the season. Tall wet grass is exhausting to deal with, except on a tractor or riding mower. The word “dainty” I used earlier doesn’t apply to the first cutting in the spring. My grandfather found this out the hard way back in the Seventies, duking it out his lawn and losing. Gave him a heart attack. That’s why he’s not the world’s oldest man today.

The Geography of Fertilizer

The parts of the country with the most intensive animal farming have so much manure they don’t know what to do with. Manure is bulky — it has a low value per ton. This is a problem. The reason Iowa farmers are putting chemical fertilizers on their cornfields instead of manure is that it’s a lot more concentrated, so it’s cheaper to ship. In fact, it’s cheaper to ship oil halfway around the world, make fertilizer out of it, and truck the fertilizer to the farm belt than it is to truck free manure to the farm belt.

So people are doing various dodges to try to get around this. An article in Wired discusses duckweed’s ability to grow in manure lagoons and create a lot of starch for ethanol, which is a lot simpler and cheaper than growing corn, and it uses manure that’s just being wasted, anyway.

But you gotta wonder. It’s supposed to be like the old ads for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “Hey, you put manure on my cornfield!” “Hey, you put cornfield on my manure!” Two great things that go great together.

You’re supposed to generate manure in an area where people will pay you money for it. You’re supposed to grow crops in an area where you can get cheap manure. In spite of the current namby-pamby attitude towards manure (“Ewww! It’s so organic and smelly! Shouldn’t we disguise its origins by composting it first?”), manure is something that belongs out in the field where plants can benefit from it directly. Plants know what to do with manure. Plants and animals co-evolved for 600 million years. Plants have this manure stuff figured out. Farting around with methane generation or composting is okay if you don’t have any fields to spread it on, but it’s second-best.

On a regional level, getting the location right is hard. Crop generation and animal raising have different needs and cost structures, and livestock production drifted away from the Midwest back when fertilizer was cheap. Now it looks like the poultry industry is shifting back towards the Midwest, with its insatiable appetite for fertilizer.

On a local level, though, your setup is more controllable. For one thing, it’s possible to go into the manure-generation business yourself, by raising enough livestock to generate the fertilizer you need for your crops. This is what Edmund Morris describes in his 1860’s classic, Ten Acres Enough, one of my favorite back-to-the-land books. (Go buy a copy.) Morris had a ten-acre farm near Philadelphia, where he grew high-grade fruits and berries. His expenses for manure were astronomical, so he started keeping cow-calf pairs over the winter. This operation only broke even when you considered just the cash, but was insanely profitable when you counted the value of the manure.

This can still be done today. Frankly, I’m amazed that anyone even considers going into the contract broiler-growing business without having enough acreage to use all the manure profitably, because it’s the only edge that’s available to you. But most people don’t, so manure is free, or at least cheap, near broiler-growing areas.

In our case, we do things the laziest possible way, and raise our chickens outdoors, where their manure is added to the soil with no intermediate steps. This increases the fertility of the pastures and keeps them lush and green through most of the year. Chickens can eat lush green plants but not mature, woody plants. A diet that includes lush green plants does wonders to the flavor and appearance of eggs and meat, so we’re getting direct value from the exercise, plus restoring the fertility of the land.

Quality is Something You Can Taste

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing people talking about chemicals when they think they’re talking about food. What’s the flavor of the month? Is it still Omega 3?

Egg hucksters always claim that their eggs are superior, at least with regard to the flavor of the month. People used to claim that brown eggs had more vitamins, then less cholesterol, and now more Omega 3. Those are pretty tall claims. (People don’t eat the shells anyway, so it doesn’t matter what color they are.)

The real test is a taste test. If an egg tastes better, it’s more nutritious. Seriously. The same is true for other products. What do you think your sense of taste is for?

This is also useful in dealing with feed. Taste your chicken feed from time to time, especially when you try a new brand. It should be bland but not unpleasant. If it tastes nasty, there’s something wrong with it. Feed your chickens something else. The feed industry has a lot of second-rate or spoiled ingredients flowing through it. You want to buy your feed from an outfit that won’t touch that stuff.

Your chickens and other livestock know this. You can starve them to the point where they’ll eat bad feed and then get sick or die, but if they have alternatives, this is very unusual. So if you see them turning up their noses (or beaks, as the case may be) at their dinner, pay attention.

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