Every time I go out on the pasture, I have to feed the chickens some scratch feed. They come running out, eager for a treat, and it’s really hard to look at all those expectant faces and disappoint them. Besides, it’s a good practice. By feeding your animals kinda-sorta by hand, they come a lot tamer, you become a lot more attached to them, and you get a good look at them, close up and in good light.
I didn’t always do this. For a while, I just kept the range feeders topped off and didn’t feed anything by hand. But the whole exercise of poultrykeeping became mechanical — just another chore. And the free-range egg biz doesn’t pay anywhere near well enough unless you enjoy it. Things got better when I started using scratch feed again.
I use whole grains, usually about a gallon or so. You want to feed enough that every chicken can get some, even the timid and the latecomers, but you want it all to be gone within a few minutes. If there’s still grain leftover from last time when it’s time to give them some more, they don’t much care about the new feeding. Sorta defeats the purpose.
I broadcast the grain into the grass, as if I were sowing the seed rather than feeding it. I like to cover the area thinly, covering an area roughly a hundred yards long and a few feet wide. I try to do this in the greenest, cleanest grassy area available. If the grass is reasonably short, the chickens will find every single grain. Ground grains or finely cracked grains will be wasted, though. They shouldn’t be fed on the ground. The chickens scratch up the ground looking for the grain, so the area looks a little shopworn after a few feedings, so using new patches of grass each time is a good idea.
You get extra credit for using a kind of grain that’s different from what they have all day long. Usually we have whole corn in some of the feeders, so something else — whole wheat or whole oats — works best as a scratch grain. Chickens like variety.
If the chickens seem unusually happy to see you, your feeders are probably going empty. If they act as if you don’t exist, either you overfed them last time or something has happened to put them off their feed — being chased by a dog, for instance.
Most chickens will rush out for a treat (including the ones loitering in the nest boxes and who otherwise make it hard to collect the eggs). The ones that don’t are likely broody or sick. Separating the sheep from the lambs in this way makes it easier to spot the ones that need attention.
I ended up in the egg business because I couldn’t resist a 25¢ hen.
We were raising our very first batch of chicks, 25 New Hampshire Reds we got from Oregon State University. At the same time, a barn owl was raising its own offspring in our barn. One day, we saw one of the fledgling owls flying around at dusk: a beautiful sight. A little later we discovered the body of our sole rooster, which was probably the owl’s first kill. Oh, no!
So I called up OSU to see if they had a replacement rooster. “Sure,” I was told, “and plenty of hens, too. We’re having a hen sale.” I bought three replacement roosters, then lost my marbles and bought $7.50 worth of White Leghorn hens at 25¢ each. This brought our total flock up above 40 layers.
Within a few weeks, our New Hampshires started laying, and our Leghorns started laying, and we had more eggs than we knew what to do with. The rest is history.
And the owl? We guessed that it was a practice kill, since the dead rooster (which was delicious, by the way) didn’t have a mark on him. We did nothing about the owl, and it never killed another chicken. Would that other predators were so wise.
Since then, we’ve bought a great many hens from Oregon State University and a few other places. Older hens are called spent hens in the industry. Some people call them rescue hens. (Why it’s a “rescue” when it’s a hen and an “adoption,” when it’s a cat, I couldn’t tell you.)
Rescue Hens 101
Let’s not be superficial. Hens that have been kept in laying cages always look terrible, but that’s not the problem. Their neck feathers have generally been rubbed off (the feed trough is outside the cage and they rub their necks against the bars when reaching for distant morsels), as have the ends of their tail feathers. Their toenails are too long. Their combs often have a bleached appearance. Their beaks have probably been trimmed. None of this matters.
The problem is that they’ve been cooped up in a tiny cage with (usually) two other hens, and this makes up their world. Drop them into an existing flock of uncaged birds, and they will be bullied mercilessly by the other hens, and will probably retreat into a dark corner and refuse to come out, even to eat and drink. Rescue hens need to be transitioned slowly and gently, left alone except by other hens that were removed from their cages at the same time. Keep an eye out for hens that may be hiding. Driving them out of the corners may help. Be prepared to move some to an isolation ward where they won’t be as freaked out. Later, when they’ve adjusted to a cage-free life, you can reintroduce them to the main flock (preferably at night).
This timidity problem is, I think, the main barrier to success with rescue hens.
They are also clumsy from their long confinement. They can fall into a bucket of water and drown. They can’t make it up onto perches or generally move without stumbling. This wears off completely within a few days, but don’t expect much until then.
The stress of the move will cause the hens to stop laying, and they’ll all molt. Don’t expect a lot of eggs until a couple of months after you get them.
My experience is that, in the fullness of time, they learn to act exactly like chickens that had never been kept in cages. Spent hens don’t lay well enough to be profitable in a normal commercial operation, but commercial layers produce so much better than standard breeds that a three-year-old commercial hen will probably outlay a standard-breed pullet.
Picking and Choosing
There are basically two kinds of spent hens: ones that are culled periodically from the flock because they look like they aren’t laying (or look ill), and the entire rest of the flock, which is gotten rid of all at once. Generally speaking, you want to avoid the culls, who have been selected specifically because something’s wrong with them.
My preference is to get birds from full-time poultry professionals, because they can be counted upon to know diseases when they see them and do something about it. Every time I go to the small-animal auction, I see diseased poultry from backyarders and small farmers. Mostly scaly leg mites. (An auction yard is a place to sell poultry, but never to buy.)
I should point out that one of the reasons everybody buys day-old chicks is that a hatchery that’s run halfway competently can guarantee that you get disease-free chicks (because the eggshell is a highly effective barrier to disease transmission, but this just isn’t the case with older birds.
Connecting with good sources of spent hens may be tricky. Find out who your area’s Extension Service Poultry Specialist is and ask: that’s probably the best way.
It’s 18 °F outside and there’s about four inches of snow on the ground. My chickens are all in open coops that most people would consider suitable only for summer housing, never for winter housing. Not even in my mild Oregon climate.
But I not only have open houses, but all my feeding and watering is done outdoors, year-round. What’s up with that?
An open-front house in winter, from almost 100 years ago. Fancier than mine, but still wide open. From Fresh-Air Poultry Houses.
Yesterday there was snow, and the day before there was a little bit of snow, but it was above freezing. My chickens didn’t like the looks of the snow and most of them stayed inside. To get them out to the feed, water, and nest boxes, I drove them out of their houses. The first time, there was hardly any snow, and you could see their reaction of “Hey, this isn’t bad!” Once out of the houses, they were in no rush to go back in. Later, with more snow, they were less certain, and some jumped back inside right away. We’ll see what happens today. They’ll get used to it eventually, but they need to keep eating if they’re going to keep laying, so I want them to get used to it now.
Today, the temperatures are going to stay below freezing all day, so I’m going to have to schlep buckets of warm water out to them. In very cold weather, the water in the buckets will freeze, but I just bring them back inside and put them next to the stove, and eventually they thaw. A lot of people like rubber feed pans because the ice can be dumped on the spot, and I’ll be trying that, too.
My houses don’t have insulated roofs. It usually it doesn’t matter, because with open housing like mine, the inside temperature is the same as the outside temperature, so water doesn’t condense on the ceiling and drip on the chickens. If temperatures are above freezing but there’s snow on the roof, this isn’t true anymore. The floors in the houses were pretty nasty yesterday. No doubt they’re frozen now. I haven’t been out to check yet.
I’ll report back later and tell you how it’s going. Based in past experience, the chickens’ health will be completely unaffected by any of this, just like it says in Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, (which is full of all sorts of surprising stuff). I’ll post some photos, too.
First Look, 8:15 AM, 20°F, Light Winds
Here is one of my “low houses,” whose occupants don’t seem to want to go outside. Note that some of the hens are roosting on the front wall rather than inside. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them.
Only a handful of chickens were moving around outside, but I scattered some whole wheat and drove the chickens outside. Once there, a lot of them started their usual routines, heading off to the feeders or the nest boxes.
Here’s a view after I scattered some grain and made them go outside. Business as usual, more or less.
The snow is a very light powder and my houses are very open, which means that there’s some snow in all the houses. The chickens look active, alert, and dry, though they would like the snow to go away.
The chickens all looked fine, except one hen who was shivering badly. I think she spent the night outside. I put her in a nest box, which gets her out of the wind and should allow her to warm up quickly.
Later I’ll bring them some warm water. Their waterers are hidden under the snow and are frozen solid.
Noon, 21°F
Partly sunny. I brought two buckets of warm water out to the chickens, who pretty much ignored them. Obviously, they aren’t very thirsty.
Buckets of warm water are the second-simplest approach to winter watering. The simplest is to believe “they’ll just eat snow and it won’t crater their rate of lay” (which is only true if their rate of lay has already cratered for some other reason). See my winter watering article for the full range of cold-weather watering solutions.
They showed more interest in the grain I scattered for them, but they aren’t acting like they’re starving. There were a reasonable number of eggs to collect.
The hen I’d put in one of the nest boxes died, which surprised me, because I didn’t think she was in that much distress. I also thought the nest-box trick would work. I have community nests (with are big nests that hold a lot of hens at once, and have no interior partitions), and I knew that there would be other hens right up against her in there, which would help warm her up. It wasn’t enough.
All the other chickens look fine. The situation looks stable. Tonight at dusk I’ll go out with a flashlight to make sure there aren’t any other hens sleeping outdoors.
This cold snap is supposed to last about a week and will reduce egg production significantly unless the hens get used to snow in a hurry. I don’t expect any other ill effects (except for any remaining chickens that sleep outdoors).
This kind of cold snap occurs only about once every five years. If it happened more often, I’d take more steps to prevent it.
7 PM, 19°F. All Quiet
I took a a tour around the houses. One hen was sleeping on the roof of a house, a couple were roosting on the side walls, and at least a dozen on the low front walls. I moved them all inside.
I retrieved the two galvanized buckets I’m using for waterers, since they’ll just freeze solid if I leave them out. I’ll take them back onto the pasture first thing tomorrow morning.
Back when I used winter lights, I had extension cords out on the pasture, so I could use electric birdbath heaters to keep the automatic waterers from freezing (see my winter watering article). This didn’t prevent the hundreds of feet of garden hose from freezing, but most days have highs above freezing, and the hoses thaw by themselves. During a cold snap, I can just fill the chickens’ usual waterers with cold water a couple of times a day. Without the extension cords and the birdbath heaters, I’m reduced to buckets of warm water. [Note: when I wrote this post, I wasn’t using winter lights, but I’ve since started again]
I forgot to mention that I’ve seen weather this cold before, and this much snow before, but not both at the same time. Before, with cold weather but no snow, the hens were happy to leave the houses and visit the feeders, and my only problem was providing water. In previous snowstorms, the above-freezing temperatures meant that the watering system continued working and (more importantly) that the snow didn’t last long enough to cause much trouble. We’re in for a week of this snowy, below-freezing weather.
Tuesday Evening, 19°F
Today was more of the same, except that the chickens look happier now that they’re getting used to the snow. They’re spending more time outside. They greeted buckets of water and scratch feed with little more than polite interest, meaning that they’re probably making it to the feeders on their own and learning to eat snow. If anything, they looked less cold today, although the temperatures weren’t any higher than before.
Bottom line: except for one hen sleeping out in the open, none of the chickens seem affected by the cold, in spite of wide-open housing and temperatures as low as 15°F. Being freaked out by their first encounter with snow has been by far their biggest problem.
The weather report is for pretty much the same kind of weather for another week — highs in the twenties or low thirties, lows in the teens or twenties, occasional snow — which is very unusual for around here, a once-a-decade event at most.
Our household water system nearly gave out, but we kludged a fix for it. We have a two-pump system, with a submersible pump in the well, which pumps water into a 1500-gallon cistern, and a jet pump that pumps water out of the cistern and into the house. The path between the well pump and the cistern was frozen. I didn’t notice until I peered into the cistern this morning. It was almost empty and had a skin of ice on top. Not good! The pipe-heating cable that was supposed to keep things flowing had failed. We managed to bypass it with a length of garden hose from a convenient spigot at the wellhead and into the top of the cistern. The water comes out of our well at 50°F, which should prevent any more ice from forming in the cistern.
(In a colder climate, we’d have put this 1500-gallon black plastic cistern in a shed, but as it is, we just left it out in the open.)
Saturday
The weather is slightly above freezing but there is more snow than ever. The chickens are behaving normally and there are no problems. As I said before, my previous problems were not caused by the cold but by the chickens’ reluctance to go out in the snow, but they had to in order to eat and drink. In a normal operation with feeders and waterers indoors, there would have been no difficulty at all.
The snow causes another problem, though. Normally, my highly ventilated houses don’t have any problem with condensation. The air inside the house is the same temperature as the air outside the house, so there’s no tendency for moisture to condense on the ceiling or walls. But when the temperature is above freezing and there’s snow on the roof, water condenses like mad and drips into the house.
I only have to put up with this for a few days a year in my highly ventilated coops, but people with ordinary coops put with this all winter. By going to great lengths to shut their coops up tight and to keep the temperatures higher inside than outside, moisture is condensing on the walls and ceiling all winter long and dripping back into the house. It turns the chicken house into a disgusting, unhealthy mess. The dampness leads to frostbitten combs, the sight of which tends to make people redouble their attempts to add heat and prevent ventilation. It’s a vicious cycle.
I’ve republished Prince T. Woods’ excellent book, Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, to help get the word out and teach all the nuts and bolts of open-air chicken houses, summer and winter. You should at least click on the link and read the sample chapters. This week’s bout with unusually cold weather (for here) has certainly vindicated Dr. Woods’ main points.
I think the answer is different if you’re thinking from the point of view of the farmer or the consumer. If you’re the consumer, the answer is obviously, “The golden age is now.” You’ll see why in a minute.
For the farmer, we need to separate what’s picturesque from what’s good. Some aspects of the bad old days were:
Being connected to town by dirt roads that were often impassible.
Farming that was so labor-intensive that you couldn’t get along without hired help. (Even in Ten Acres Enough, Morris had to hire two people year-round on his little farm, and more at harvest season.) Let’s face it: the American farmer has never been a good manager, and never liked dealing with hired help.
No understanding of disease — the germ theory of disease wasn’t widely believed until the 1860s and wasn’t proven until the 1870s. This resulted in a generally low level of health in both man and beast.
Not being able to give your kids a high-school education unless they boarded with strangers in town.
Travel that’s so expensive that the local general store had a monopoly over your business — and mail-order hadn’t been invented yet.
No mass communication except newspapers and no free public libraries, leaving rural folks at a huge disadvantage in education.
Produce traveled to market via unrefrigerated slow freight, resulting in almost unbelievably low quality in the city.
An unbelievably high level of fraud and double-dealing at all levels of society, not just by politicians and CEO’s, resulting in low levels of both quality and trust.
Horses were essential, but many farmers weren’t good with horses. Few things are more dangerous than a team of horses hitched up to farm machinery and handled by a farmer who doensn’t have a close working relationship with them.
Farming is dirty work, but hot water for bathing and a room warm enough to bathe in were scarce.
So I figure that the Golden Age had tractors, paved roads, Rural Free Delivery of mail, high schools that could be reached on a school bus, radio, pickup trucks, tractors, refrigerated freight cars, the Sears Roebuck catalog, free public libraries, and labor-saving devices that allowed the hired help to be given the boot. So the Golden Age for farmers started around 1910 and ended roughly around 1960.
When I was a kid, people hearkened back to simpler times of horse agriculture and houses that lacked bath soap, but I think that such times are receding into the mists of antiquity — it’s a lot easier to relate to farmers with running water and a tractor than those of earlier times. And it’s easier to emulate them successfully as well.
Golden Ages sow the seeds of their own destruction. What’s good for the farmer isn’t necessarily good for the consumer. For example, eggs used to move from farm to city by unrefrigerated slow freight. In The Dollar Hen, Milo Hastings reports that eggs actually hatched in transit during the summer of 1901. Since incubation takes three weeks, this gives you an idea of how awful the distribution chain was back then!
Factory farms took over the egg business quite suddenly. Farmers with operations relatively close to town and who had walk-in refrigeration could guarantee the freshness of their eggs. Midwestern farmers whose eggs traveled by slow freight could not. In the Fifties, the market was taken over in just a few years by farmers who offered end-to-end refrigeration. The market price for eggs shipped the old way fell to unprofitable levels, and, just like that, eggs from diversified farms were a thing of the past.
Which goes to show that running a picturesque, old-timey, poltically correct operation counts for nothing if the eggs are bad. Lots of people don’t understand this, and when they start a little farm of their own, they skimp on quality six ways from Sunday, with the idea that they can do no wrong because they’re politically correct. It doesn’t work like that. As my Engineering professors liked to say, “Partial credit will not be given if the bridge collapses.” Only suckers give you credit for good intentions. Everyone else wants results.
Fortunately, in this day and age, results are at every farmer’s disposal, large or small. On-farm refrigerated storage is no longer a novelty, even on the smallest farms. Nearly a century of extending paved roads, telephone lines, and rural electrification mean that isolated farms are at no particular disadvantage except travel time. The nature of commerce ensures that most farmers and processors are focused on commodities and ignore niche products. If you play your cards right, this is a second Golden Age — and one that is more easily shared with your customers.
Let’s do the math. There were 76 billion eggs laid by US chickens last year (not counting hatching eggs), laid by 280 million hens (23 dozen eggs per hen). The vast majority of these hens are in factory farms. Suppose we wanted to get rid of factory farms. What would it take?
Well, before factory farms there were ordinary farm flocks. Between about 1900 and 1950, a typical “egg farm” held steady at about 1,500 hens. Some had more, some had less, but a farm family making most of its income from eggs typically had a 1,500-hen operation.
This makes sense when you realize that studies of labor efficiency on old-fashioned egg farms measured productivity at 2.0-2.5 hours per hen per year. A 1,500-hen operation would take between 3,000 and 3,750 hours of labor, which will soak up the time of two wage-earners.
Factory-farm techniques allowed the number of hens per attendant to increase to the current astronomical levels (around 150,000 birds per henhouse, with multiple houses per installation, and only one attendant per henhouse.)
280,000,000/1,500 = is about 187,000 egg farms that would have to be created, providing jobs for 187,000 new farm families. A 1,500-hen flock should lay (at 23 dozen eggs/hen) 34,500 dozen eggs per year.
Now, the median household income last year was about $50,000. Presumably, we can’t get rid of factory farms without paying an average wage, so we need to extract $50,000 of wage income per 1,500 bird flock. $50,000/$34,500 = $1.45 per dozen (as opposed to only about $0.0145 per dozen for the factory farm). That pays the farmer. Because the farmer only receives about half the retail price of the eggs, the consumer will have to pay about $2.90 extra for non-factory-farmed eggs.
This cost premium is more than the price of a dozen factory-farmed eggs (around $2.25 the last time I looked). Various other economies of scale that benefit factory farms won’t be available to smaller farms, so I figure that, in rough terms, non-factory-farmed eggs will triple the cost — in round numbers, $7.00 a dozen.
That’s for old-time confinement operations, which would have eggs that taste just as bad as factory-farmed eggs. Real free range eggs (not the fake kind that produces the eggs in the stores) cost more to produce. The labor efficiency isn’t that much worse, but production plummets in poor weather and there are predator issues. I figure that the costs will work out to around five times as much as factory-farmed eggs — $10-$12 a dozen.
True free-range farmers are thin enough on the ground that most of them can sell all their eggs locally, which is why you can’t get them in the city. Eggs are cheaper in the country, so eggs you buy from me for $5 would cost you $10 in the big city.
