Your Chickens in September [2014 Newsletter]

Baby Chicks in September? Seriously? And Lights for Hens

Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter, Sept 2014

News From the Farm

Baby chicks drinking near brooderWe’re in the busiest time of the year, but things are moving along pretty well. Our pastured pigs haven’t escaped for a while. Egg production is holding steady. The local predators seem to be finding their food elsewhere. The weather is hot and dry, and the grass is browning off, but this brief excursion from Western Oregon’s trademark “cool, damp, and green” is normal.

Baby Chicks in September? Seriously?

Everyone thinks of springtime when they think of brooding baby chicks, but fall is my personal favorite. It’s warmer and drier, and while things get colder and wetter as fall turns into winter, the baby chicks get older and hardier before the weather has time to get bad. September and October are both good times for brooding in most climates.

Why brood chicks in the fall?

If you normally brood only in the spring, it’s a way to brood twice as many chicks, or twice as many kinds of poultry, using the same equipment. If you raise egg-type chickens in the spring, you can raise broilers in the fall. Or ducks in the spring and chickens in the fall.

What kinds of chicks to brood

What kind of day-old chicks can you get in September and October? Commercial hybrids, mostly, though you never known until you contact the hatchery and see what they have available. That’s why we order ducklings, poults, and heritage-breed chicks in the spring; they’re available then. The rest of the year, we order commercial broiler and layer chicks.

This year, we’ll start our last batch of broiler chicks around October 1, so we can have fresh broilers at the Corvallis Farmers’ Market till it ends in late November. These pastured broilers always do great in the increasingly chilly late-fall weather, because they get big fast and their high metabolism keeps them comfortable even in pasture shelters.

We’ve raised pastured broilers right through the winter a couple of times, and it works fine if it doesn’t snow. If it does snow, it’s a real headache just getting feed out to them. We get meaningful amounts of snow about every other year, and that’s enough to take the shine off. We keep our broilers on a hill that’s always well-drained. On your bottom land, it would be too wet for broilers in the off-season.

For egg-type pullets, we’ll start them as late as Halloween. We keep them in the brooder house for as long as eight weeks, and by then they can withstand Oregon winters.

How to brood the chicks

I’ve written an entire book on brooding chicks (Success With Baby Chicks), with extensive chapters on off-season brooding, but the process is basically the same as spring brooding.

Some main points to keep in mind are:

  • Buy your chicks from a hatchery that’s been around a while and has a good reputation. We buy our pullets from Privett Hatchery in New Mexico and our broilers from Jenks Hatchery in Oregon.
  • Have the brooder area completely ready for the chicks before they arrive, and turn on the heat 24 hours in advance Don’t place baby chicks on cold, damp shavings.
  • Have a fresh bag of chick starter on hand. Baby chicks are too delicate for old feed, which may have lost vital nutrients or become musty.
  • Don’t try to mix chicks with older poultry. They need their own space until they’re mostly grown. (That’s why you need not one chicken coop, but at least two.

Lights for Hens

Why use artificial lighting for hens? It helps even out their egg production, so they lay pretty well over the winter. In years when we didn’t use lights, we’d often run out of eggs at the Farmer’s Market at 10:00 AM, sometimes even earlier, and that meant we disappointed more customers than we satisfied. That’s not a happy feeling!

The lights only increase the total number of eggs per year slightly, by less than 15%. The main effect is to encourage the hens to lay more eggs year-round. They’ll lay fewer in the spring to compensate.

Some people will try to convince you that using artificial lights on hens is like giving them 63 cups of coffee a day, not letting them sleep, and making them nervous and stressed all the time. That’s not hens, that’s us! When I go out to the chicken coops at night, when the lights are on, most of the hens are sleeping soundly on their perches. Makes me a little envious.

September 1 is the traditional time to start using lights, and April 1 is the traditional time to stop. Fourteen hours of light a day is the traditional amount. The big commercial guys use fancier algorithms than this, but if you don’t have thousands of hens, I doubt you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Last year we started using the new LED lamps, which I like better than the compact fluorescent bulbs because they’re not as fragile. We basically run many hundreds of feet of outdoor extension cords across the hen pasture, with lamps in every roosting house. Where cords connect together, we wrap the joint with electrical tape, and if necessary use a chunk of wood to keep the cord out of a puddle. This sounds pretty casual, but the connections are just as bright and clean at the end of the lighting season as they were at the beginning. In theory, we’d be okay with a 25-watt equivalent bulb for each 8×8-foot chicken coop, but we use 40-watt equivalent bulbs, just to be sure.

For more details about lighting, see this article I wrote way back when, in my March 2003 newsletter.

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

These are my top-selling books from July:

  1. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout
  2. Genetics of the Fowl by Frederick B. Hutt
  3. Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers’ Handbook by Robert Plamondon
  4. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
  5. Company Coming by Ruth Stout

All of these are fine books (I publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get rave reviews from readers.

I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print — techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1950. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles at the bottom of this newsletter.

Recent Blog Posts

Posts on my farm blog since my last newsletter:

September To-Do List

September is one of the easiest months in the poultry calendar.

To-do items:

  • Start using artificial lights for consistent egg production. A bare bulb, equivalent to 60 watts for every 100 square feet of floor space, is plenty.
  • Brood fall chicks.
  • Repair roofing (winter is coming!).
  • House pullets (if you raised them on range).
  • Avoid overcrowding.
  • Cull molting hens. (Hens that start molting this early probably won’t start laying until spring. It would be cheaper and better to make chicken and dumplings out of them and replace them with baby chicks.)
  • Begin artificial lighting. (Traditionally, providing a day length of 14 hours between September 1 andMarch 31.)
  • Cull any poor pullets.
  • Provide additional ventilation. (Always, always, always provide more ventilation than seems necessary.
  • Gather eggs more frequently in warm weather.
  • Remove soiled litter. (If using deep litter, shovel some of it out to make room for the additional litter you’ll add over the winter, but only if it looks like the litter will get so deep it will make things impractical. “More is better” with deep litter.)

List inspired by a similar one in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.

Adventures in Social Media

And if that’s not enough, you can use social media to stay up to date:

This newsletter is sent out occasionally by Robert Plamondon to anyone who asks for it. Robert runs Norton Creek Press.

Norton Creek Press Book List

Scratch Feed for Chickens

What is scratch feed, anyway?

feeding_poultry_scratch_feed_250Scratch feed is both a feeding method and a type of feed:

  • Scratch feed as a feeding method: It’s scratch feed if you feed it by scattering it on the ground (hens reveal morsels of feed and move it around by scratching at it with their feet).
  • Scratch feed as a type of feed: Whole grains and coarsely cracked grains are suited for feeding scattered on the ground, because they’re coarse enough for hens to find and pick up individual particles, won’t blow away in the wind, and won’t turn to paste or soup on wet ground. Appropriate grains are sometimes bagged up and labeled as “scratch feed” or “scratch grains.”

Why Feed Scratch Grains?

There are different reasons to feed scratch grains:

  • Taming the chickens. A one- or twice-daily feeding of scratch grains will be met with eagerness by the chickens, and if you make them come right up to you to get the grain, it will make them tame. (Chickens fed only out of bulk feeders may never get used to you.)
  • Getting a good look at the chickens. By running up to you, you’ll get a close-up look at the chickens, which helps you spot any problems they might be having.
  • Getting the hens out of the nest boxes. Hens like to laze around in nest boxes after laying their eggs, and egg collection is faster and more pleasant if the hens decamp of their own free will because you’ve just offered them a snack!
  • Encouraging and directing foraging. The chickens will pick up any other yummy edibles that are in the vicinity of the scratch grain, and a bribe of scratch grain will get them to forage when they otherwise don’t feel like it, such as during hot or cold weather.
  • Encouraging feed consumption. Similarly, if the chickens are unwell or unhappy, such as in the aftermath of being chased around by a dog, their appetite plummets and their production falls. But chickens are social eaters, even competitive eaters, and they’ll eat if other chickens are eating — especially if it looks like the food might be gone if they wait! Encouraging this kind of mini feeding frenzy helps keep the chickens going.

How Much Scratch Grain to Feed

The rule of thumb is to feed no more grain than the chickens will eat in twenty minutes. That maximizes competition, which means that even hens who are feeling under the weather will be motivated to eat something. And it doesn’t leave any feed on the ground to be eaten by wild birds and other critters you don’t want to be feeding.

If the hens are happy with their normal chicken feed, they may be satisfied with a small amount of scratch grain. My 400 hens are sometimes happy with only a couple of quarts of whole oats. But the benefit is real even if the quantities are small.

If the hens seem unusually happy to see you (and your feed bucket), they may have run out of their normal chicken feed, or (rarely) there might be something wrong with it.

Which Scratch Grains to Feed

Here are some pointers about what kinds of grains to feed:

  • Whole corn is fine for chickens older than about six weeks or so. It’s cheaper and keeps better than cracked corn. Normally, in the U.S., whole corn is the cheapest grain you can buy, and chickens like it.
  • Cracked corn gets moldy fairly quickly, so use it or lose it. Coarsely cracked corn is better than finely cracked corn, even for baby chicks.
  • Whole wheat is a wonderful scratch feed. Chickens get more excited by scratch grains that are different from what’s in their normal feed, and most feeds are corn-based, not wheat-based or oat-based, so that helps. Wheat grains are small enough that baby chicks can eat them when they’re a week old or so.
  • Cracked wheat is can be a good feed, though I’ve never seen cracked wheat that isn’t too dusty and floury to be a good scratch feed. I don’t like it when my feed blows away on the wind before it even reaches the ground! It also gets moldy far more quickly than whole wheat.
  • Whole oats contain compounds that stunt the growth of chicks, though they’re fine for chickens above six weeks or so. The high fiber content of whole wheat seems to inhibit feather-picking and cannibalism. Oats are often rather expensive, but I feed them anyway, in small quantities, for variety.
  • Rolled oats have the same objections as cracked grains: it raises the price, shortens the shelf life, and since chickens do fine on whole grain, why bother?
  • Commercial scratch grains. These are a mixture of different cracked and whole grains, usually not too dusty, but are typically too finely cracked for my purposes. (Let’s face it: I like feeding whole grains.) If that’s what you have available, use it.

More about Feeding

G. F. Heuser’s classic poultry nutrition book, Feeding Poultry, tells you everything you need to know about the nuts and bolts of feeding your chickens. Written long enough ago that free range and scratch feeding were still practiced commercially, it’s a wealth of otherwise forgotten information, useful to anyone who farms chickens on a non-industrial scale. I liked this book so much that I republished it myself, under my Norton Creek label. Check it out!

 

Ruth Stout’s Gardening Without Work Still Going Strong

 

Ruth Stout
Ruth Stout

I keep running across blog posts praising how well Ruth Stout’s “no-work gardening” methods work, like this post on The Messy Shepherdess.

I first ran across Ruth Stout’s writing when I became interested in gardening as a child, and got a subscription to Organic Gardening.

This was around 1970, and Organic Gardening was very much an end-of-the-world prophet of doom back then. Even articles about how to grow nice tomatoes with a trellis against your house would take time out to explain how you’d better hurry up, because we’d all be dead by 1975!

Gardening Without Work by Ruth StoutBut towards the back of every issue was a column by  Ruth Stout. Ruth was a life-long eccentric, a proponent of simple living, and thus wasn’t very impressed by the way most people insist on making life way harder than it has to be.

For example, she and her husband liked having friends drop by and hang out in their general vicinity, but didn’t much like being combination restaurant/maid service/entertainment. So they remodeled their barn to provide simple guest quarters, with its own kitchen, and invited people to come and stay more as neighbors than guests. This worked well, and Ruth writes about it, along with much else, in her book, Company Coming: Six Decades of Hospitality, which I’ve reprinted under my Norton Creek Press label. (Among other things, she describes the time that, when she was a teen, she helped Carry Nation smash up a saloon.)

Company Coming: Six Decades of Entertainment by Ruth StoutSo in her Organic Gardening column, Ruth ignored conventional wisdom, as always. She ignored conventional gardening wisdom. She ignored the writing conventions of Organic Gardnening. She acted as if politics didn’t exist. She assumed that what you did in your own garden was up to you. She talked about gardening. In particular, she talked about what she was doing in her garden, since she didn’t consider herself to be an expert about gardens in general.

So as a reader interested in gardens, her stuff was cool, because it was focused and clear and was all about doing stuff: without wandering off into theory and politics and never coming back. So, there I was, a ten-year-old gardening enthusiast, and I always opened up a new issue of Organic Gardening to the column by that eccentric octegenarian, Ruth Stout, because it spoke to me.

When I discovered that Ruth’s book, Gardening Without Work, had been out of print for years, I was amazed! I was also quick to correct this lapse, and reprinted it. It’s been one of the most popular Norton Creek Press books ever since.

This is a fun book to read. Her deep-mulch system is so simple that the step-by-step instructions only take a few pages. The rest of the book provides stories, anecdotes, and experiences that expand on the ideas and help them sink in. Which is just as well, because some readers take a bit of convincing that something so simple can work so well. In any case, Ruth Stout is a delightful writer.

 

U.S. Patent 38

Some of Robert Plamondon's U.S. patentsOkay, I’ll be the first to admit that this is getting a little ridiculous! My early warning system went off (that is, I got a piece of junk mail from Professional Awards of America), offering to sell me a patent plaque for U.S. Patent #8786473, “Systems and methods for sharing compression histories between multiple devices,” which is one of the fruits of my day job at Citrix Systems, as part of their CloudBridge network accelerator line, where I’m a principal technical writer and all-around expert. If you’re a masochist, you can read the full text online (the patent lawyers took my clear-ish original description and made it really hard to follow). Citrix sends me a plaque for every patent (sorry, Junk Mail Guys), and I long ago ran out of ideas for what to do with them! This patent was originally filed in 2007, and spent seven years slowly grinding through the patent office’s process. And you thought you procrastinated!

More on the Blog and Newsletter Migration

Migrating the Blog

Converting my blog from its old format (b2evolution) into WordPress was not something I cared to do by hand, so I paid http://www.cms2cms.com/ to do it for me.

The automatic conversion failed, but they stepped in and got it to work manually. I like the way the results came out. The whole thing set me back 48 bucks.

I’m toying with the idea of converting my old plain-HTML Web pages as well, since they don’t play nice on smartphones.

Migrating the Newsletter

Around the same time, I gave up on my old, Nineties-style Majordomo mailing list software for my newsletter, and signed up with Sendy. Sendy is a lot like Mailchimp, which I also like, but I have way too many newsletter subscribers for Mailchimp’s free service (which tops out at 2,000 subscribers). Sendy costs $59 up front, and hooks up with Amazon.com’s SES service, which costs $1 per 10,000 emails sent, where Mailchimp costs about $100 per 10,000 emails.

Yay! I’m in the right century now!