Category: Chickens/Poultry

Organic vs. Antibiotics

My cold turned into a sinus infection, so I went to my favorite doctor to cadge come antibiotics (Dr. Foley at Philomath Family Medicine, a clinic started by hippie doctors in the Seventies, and still a laid-back and mellow place). Given my chronic sinus conditions, I do all the usual stuff, with an air filter in my office and saline nasal rinses, but sometimes the bacteria get the upper hand anyway. When this happens, it’s time to see the doctor and get some drugs. Most people do this, even people who love the idea of “natural remedies.”

(And why isn’t penicillin considered to be a natural remedy? It’s harvested directly from the penicillium mold.)

It saddens me that so many people don’t use the same approach with their livestock. The use of antibiotics sullies their political correctness and organic status, so people drag their feet and let their animals suffer before breaking out the drugs. I don’t think they have their priorities straight.

Standard-Breed Broilers

Here’s a data point for you: we just butchered and sold a batch of New Hampshire broilers, 11-week-old cockerels. They ranged from 1.25 pounds to 1.5 pounds. These little broilers are what is meant by a “spring chicken.”

Hybrid broilers of the same age would have dressed out at 5-6 pounds.

This 4x difference in weight is why no one raises standard-breed chickens for meat anymore. The labor in raising chickens is per-chicken, but the payoff is per-pound, so it’s hard to make money with little chickens.

Chicken Geometry II

In a previous post, I talked about chicken geometry, a topic which revolves about where things should go relative to other things for best results, and how much to use.

For example, anyone who keeps free-range hens at a density of over 100 hens per acre is probably scamming you, since their acreage turns into a barren, parasite-infested mudhole. This is partly due to the way the chickens scratch at the ground, ripping up the turf, but it’s mostly a matter of overloading the soil with far more manure than the ground cover can handle. Do the math.

(People point out to me that the EU allows up to 400 hens an acre, which is true. The folks in the EU didn’t do the math. Hardly anyone ever does, unless there’s a dollar sign in the equation.)

So here are a few geometry-based rules to help with your chickens:

  • Don’t put feeders under the roosts.
  • Rats like to hide under floors, wooden pallets, and other kinds of shelter. They don’t feel safe unless the ceiling is low. Raising floors, pallets, etc. 18″ off the ground will help keep ’em away, and will allow cats and terriers to hunt them.
  • Chickens like to roost at the highest point available. Make sure that’s a roost and not a nest box.
  • Chickens like laying at ground level, in a dark space, and in corners. You can do worse than putting your nest boxes there.
  • If your waterers aren’t as high as a chicken’s back, there will be some backflow out of their crops and into the waterer when they drink. Keeping the waterers high keeps ’em cleaner and more sanitary.
  • For laying hens, high roosts can make your chicken houses more manageable. You can walk around bent over like Groucho Marx under roosts four feet off the ground. Useful for getting at those eggs in the back corners of the houses.
  • Lots of hens like to crowd into a single nest. If the nest is large enough to permit this, you get fewer broken eggs.
  • Chickens will rarely try to fly over a barrier they can see through, so they can be confined by absurdly low fences, such as a single strand of electric fence wire 5″ off the ground. The same low wire deters dogs, coyotes, and raccoons.
  • In hot weather, you can’t count on chickens crossing a stretch of blinding sunlight to reach a waterer. Put the waterers in the shade with the chickens.
  • Dominant chickens will often prevent the ones at the bottom of the pecking order from eating. Be generous with the number of feeders, and space them out. A bully can’t be everywhere at once.

Feeding Chickens, Cafeteria-Style

Back before people had nutritional science figured out, the key to success was to let livestock (and people) pick and choose from a wide variety of foodstuffs. Confined animals (and people) fared poorly. Sailors suffered from scurvy at sea, and people in institutions suffered from pellagra, but the same people never had these problems when given a little freedom, even though they knew nothing about nutrition. They just listened to their cravings.

Nutritional science means that you can get away with giving livestock (and people) a balanced diet without any food choices, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the right thing to do.

The most time-honored method of feeding chickens a balanced diet is cafeteria-style feeding. The original method included “chicken mash” (a mix of grains, steamed beef scrap, and other ingredients) in one trough, grain in another trough, oyster shell in a third, and pasture or hand-fed green feed on the side. The chickens were left to figure out how much of each ingredient to eat. This works quite well.

You can take advantage of the fact that the chickens won’t starve in the midst of plenty in the following way: always provide a feeder full of a quality, balanced chicken feed, and offer anything else you’ve got on the side. If the chickens like the side offering, great. If they don’t, they’ll just ignore it and eat the balanced ration. This method leverages the fact that the chickens are better judges of chicken feed than we are. Practically the only way to poison or starve your chickens is to force them to eat an inappropriate feed by offering them nothing else. If you give them at least one decent alternative, they’ll be okay.

I feed a high-protein layer ration in one feeder and whatever grain is cheapest in another. I feed a second grain as scratch feed, scattering it in the grass. Hand-feeding keeps the hens friendly. Oyster shell goes into yet another feeder. Grain is usually cheaper than a balanced ration, so you can save a little money by feeding it on the side.

For some reason, lots of people don’t like the idea of separate feeders, and want to mix everything up. Don’t do that. It wastes your time and annoys the chickens. Other people prefer superstition to science, and go out of their way to find a hippie-dippy feed formula, or feed nothing but grain. Don’t do that, either. When humans adopt ludicrous diets, they minimize the damage they do to themselves through the miracle of cheating. Your livestock have no such option, so their diets need to live up to a higher standard than ours.

So now you know the secret: a feeder full of high-quality chicken feed gives you the freedom to try anything else on the side and see what happens.