Category: Chickens/Poultry

Geometry, Chickens, and You

If you understand chicken geometry, your life will be a lot easier.

Take perches, for instance. Chickens will roost on the highest available perch. This might be on the railing of your porch or a beam above your car, or (in a pinch) on top of the car itself. (Free range is not an unmitigated blessing.)

If you have managed to keep your chickens within the confines of their yard, they’ll still want to perch on the highest thing they can reach. The smart money, then, is to ensure that the highest thing is an actual roost. This will save you a lot of trouble.

Now, hens like to lay eggs in dark corners at the back of the chicken houses, so you need to be able to go there. This is easier if the roosts are very high, so you can bend down and walk under them, or very low, so you can walk on top of them. Anything in between becomes a barrier. I have used roosts as high as four feet off the ground and have had chickens roost on rafters ten feet off the ground without any trouble. I suppose it’s possible for them to sprain their little ankles jumping down, but I’ve never seen any sign of it.

With very high roosts, you’ll have fewer chickens sleeping (and pooping) in the nest boxes, which his a good thing.

Another piece of chicken geometry is the nest boxes. Chickens like to lay in dark corners, so it’s a good idea to do it their way and put the nest boxes there.

Ordinary nests are okay, but I like nests that aren’t quite so cramped. I once had an ordinary eight-hole wooden nest box, but it seemed like three hens always tried to squeeze into the same nest, so I took out half the partitions (so that the nest had four double-width holes), and that worked better. Cornell University used nests with no partitions at all: just an eight-foot-long nest trough.

I tried an old gimmick from the Oregon Experiment Station and used 1/2 hardware cloth for the nest bottoms, with straw on top. This puts gravity to work by letting dirt and crud and broken eggs fall through the mesh, and the nests stay cleaner. The mesh is softer than a solid floor, too, so fewer eggs get broken.

Acreage is another example of chicken geometry. Chickens generally don’t wander more than a couple of hundred yards from their houses, usually less. The more distant a fence is, the less eager a chicken is to go through it. I can confine chickens with an electric fence consisting of a single strand of aluminum fence wire, if the wire is far from the chicken houses. But if the chickens are fenced into a small area, it’s hard to hold them even with 48″ high electric netting.

One final example: 100 hens will eat about 25 pounds of food per day, which is about two galvanized buckets of feed, drink about six gallons of water (again, about two buckets), and lay about half a bucket of eggs. Since I don’t have four hands, I would object to feeding and watering 100 hens from buckets — I’d have to make too many trips. But 25 hens would need about one bucket of feed and one bucket of water, which is plausible. You can put the eggs into the feed bucket after you’ve poured the feed into a trough.

Now, you can carry a feed sack over your shoulder, which gets you to 50 pounds of feed per trip, enough for 200 hens. After that, carrying the feed in a pickup truck starts looking good.

If you want to drive to the feed mill only once a week, a half-ton pickup truck can carry a week’s worth of feed for more than 500 hens. More hens than this might mean that you’re spending your Saturdays making two trips, which might not be what you had in mind.

You get a price break if you buy a ton of feed at a time. Feed should be used up within a month at the outside. A ton will feed about 250 hens for a month.

A standard egg basket can carry about ten dozen eggs, which is the output of around 150 hens, give or take. A three-gallon bucket holds a couple dozen less. Carrying more than one basket at a time is awkward, and carrying more than two is impossible. If you have a lot of hens, you’ll want to collect the eggs directly onto flats and pack the flats into egg crates so you can carry the crates off the field in your pickup. I figure that even a small pickup should be able to handle the eggs from several thousand hens.

Breed Preservation and Breed Improvement Are Mutually Exclusive

It’s always sad when well-meaning people embark on a doomed effort. Current attempts at breed preservation are a good example.

Breed preservation is a very simple task. The goal is to take the surviving remnant of an old breed and maintain it so that it retains whatever fraction of its genetic diversity still remains. This is fairly easy to do with chickens, which are reasonably inexpensive to keep in the required numbers. Basically, the technique is to keep several hundred individuals and do random matings, with no culling and no attempt at selective breeding. This can maintain the breed, unchanged, indefinitely. That’s what preservation is all about.

Selective breeding is the opposite of this: you breed only from selected individuals. With each generation, your flock becomes less representative of what you started with, and becomes something new instead. (Quite possibly, it becomes extinct through inbreeding.)

Sadly, groups like the American Livestock Breeding Conservancy just don’t get it. In their breeding guides, they are heavily into selection and culling, which is the worst thing they could do. Sigh.

This is the sort of thing that causes poultry scientists to periodically call for an effort to do it right. Selective breeding has caused commercial strains to lose about 50% of their genetic diversity (I’m surprised that it isn’t much higher). Conservation organizations like the ALBC aren’t helping, because they, too, are heavily into selection. So far, government attempts at breed preservation have always seemed to fail as soon as budgets became tight.

The remaining option is probably for someone to endow a foundation with enough money to acquire several dispersed facilities and hire some geneticists to acquire stock and manage the breeding program. The methods of breed preservation are well-understood by geneticists, but apparently not by anyone else.

This would be a very cool thing. I’d contribute my share.

Deep Litter for Healthier Chickens

The “deep litter method” was one of the most important poultry developments of the Twentieth Century. It resulted in a dramatic drop in disease and a reduction in the amount of labor it took to keep a flock of chickens. It also gave an early example of how biodiversity works to our advantage, even with confined livestock.

People these days think they know what “deep litter” is, but mostly they don’t. Here’s a quick checklist:

  • Deep litter is not about compost. It’s about healthier chickens. Do your serious composting on a compost pile.
  • More is better. It’s not deep litter unless it’s at least six inches deep.
  • Compost as a clean-up tool.If the top of the litter gets caked over with manure, skim off the caked part and toss it into a corner. Within a few days, natural composting will cause
    it to turn back into litter again.

  • Litter is a probiotic. Deep litter has anti-coccidiosis properties (it develops a population of microbes that eat coccidia), but only after it’s been around for a few months, so never remove it all. When you start bumping your head on the rafters, remove part of it, but not all.
  • Lime helps. Stirring in hydrated lime at about ten pounds per hundred square feet will keep the litter more friable.
  • Chickens don’t wear gas masks. If you can smell ammonia in the chicken house, you don’t have enough ventilation. Open the windows, even if it’s twenty below outside. Ammonia is a poison gas; cold weather is just a nuisance to grown chickens.
  • Don’t break a sweat. If you’re spending a significant amount of time messing with the litter, you’re doing it wrong.

Check out my Deep Litter FAQ for more information.


Deep Litter for Healthier Chickens

Why We Don’t Eat Eggs at Thanksgiving

Chickens have a natural laying cycle that peaks in the spring and troughs in the fall. The typical flock is at its worst in November, and actually lays better in the depths of winter.

By early spring, long before the weather is nice or the supply of natural food has increased much, the hens start laying like crazy. It’s not about temperature and it’s not about food: it’s about natural cycles. The hens lay their eggs before the food supply is very good because it’s the growing chicks who need easy pickings, not the broody hen, who hardly eats anything when she’s incubating her eggs, anyway. So the natural egg-laying season has to happen before the time of plenty.

In the fall, the pickings are still pretty easy, but what would baby chicks eat during the upcoming season of scarcity? So the natural tendency is for egg-laying to cease.

This means that Thanksgiving is an unlikely time to feature egg-based dishes, while Easter is a great time. Similarly, farm flocks are thinned in the fall so that only the most valuable animals are kept over the winter, so it’s a good time for a turkey dinner. At Easter, it would be madness to slaughter turkeys, because the whole point of keeping your remaining turkeys over the winter was so they’d lay hatching eggs in the spring, and Easter happens before this is truly under way.

I get emails from people every November, wondering why their hens stopped laying, and what they can do about it. This is one of those problems where anything you do will work, because the rate of lay will pick up in a couple of months even if you don’t do anything. But giving the hens all the chicken feed they want, housing them in an area that’s reasonably dry and more or less out of the wind, and preventing predators, pets, and children from hassling them will help.

The natural tendency for the number of eggs to increase right through the winter is another piece of evidence that, whatever their origins, chickens aren’t tropical birds anymore. They’re far more winter-hardy than most people give them credit for.

Keep Your Chickens Healthy This Winter in a Fresh-Air Coop

Recently, I was shocked to learn that tightly closed, Nineteenth-century-style chicken coops are back in fashion, in spite of being unhealthy for your birds and foul-smelling, besides! I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, since there’s something about Nineteenth-century superstitions that makes them immortal, but this one is particularly bad for your chickens.

The fallacy goes like this: “Chickens are delicate, hothouse creatures who can’t stand the cold. So we will coop them up in tightly shut houses, so they won’t catch cold from drafts, and will stay warm. Maybe adding a lot of glass windows will help keep the house warmer.”

It’s hard to decide which piece of nonsense to attack first. Chickens aren’t delicate! They tolerate cold very well, snuggled under a warm coat of feathers and kept toasty by a high metabolism. Lots of people have had their chickens decide that they’d rather roost in pine trees instead of chicken houses, and such chickens usually are perfectly healthy all winter, even in harsh climates — often healthier than their brethren back at the chicken coop. They don’t lay well if exposed to so much weather, and it’s hard to protect them from predators, but the outdoor lifestyle is good for them.

Like all birds, though, chickens have a secret weakness: bad lungs. Miners used to use canaries to detect bad air quality, and chickens are just the same. They’ll be hurt by poor air quality long before we are. That means that tightly shut houses are unhealthy for chickens, because they have terrible air quality (with high levels of ammonia, for one thing). Such houses are also too damp, and may be too dark as well. Like humans, chickens don’t “catch cold from drafts” — that’s a superstition.

Also, you can’t keep chickens warm by keeping them in an unheated shed. It’s going to be just as cold in an unheated chicken house as it is outside. (Okay, that’s not quite true: In an insulated, crowded house, the chickens’ own body heat can keep it warm. But for this to work, it takes a much larger flock than most of us have.)

All this was debunked a hundred years ago. The commercial poultry industry moved permanently to highly ventilated poultry houses. First they used open-sided houses, and now they use forced-air ventilation with giant fans to provide even more air movement. The small-scale poultrykeepers adopted fresh-air poultry houses at first, but recently people seem to have lost their way, and are building dank, dark chicken dungeons again. Some of these houses are very expensive. I’d hate to see you make the same mistake, putting your best work into something that won’t work out, and harming your chickens when you’re trying to help them!

On my farm, I have always used open-front chicken houses in all weather. The hens like these well enough, though many prefer to roost on the roofs rather than inside. It rains 60-90 inches a year here, and snows sometimes, and bad weather never seems to bother the chickens. Other people tell me that their chickens get sick in the winter, but this has never happened to me. Like the folks whose chickens roost in trees, my chickens are in robust health year-round.

On the other hand, If you stuff your flock into an under-ventilated coop, the ammonia will stunt, sicken, or blind them. If it’s dark, they won’t be able to eat properly. The lack of air movement means that the water in your chickens’ manure can’t escape, but new water is being added all the time from their breath and manure. Of course, your house gets wetter and wetter, promoting disease and frostbite, since wet combs get frostbitten but dry ones don’t. This is how housing mistakes can suck all the joy out of poultrykeeping and cause you to abandon it forever. Don’t let it happen to you!

The bible of the fresh-air housing movement is Dr. Prince T. Woods’ Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, which I have just brought back into print. It’s an oldie but a goodie. There’s nothing else like it. For caring chickens owners like you, it’s something you have to have. Check out the sample chapter on my Web site and you’ll see what I mean.You’ll see that the book is a gold mine of information.