Robert Plamondon's Rural Life

What do you do when your chickens start to lose all their feathers? Nothing, if it’s fall. They’re molting and look revolting. Nothing you can do about it.

Chickens grow a new set of feathers every year, usually in the fall, so they’re ready for cold weather. They can also molt in response to stress.

My older hens are in various stages of molt. Many of them are missing the feathers on their necks, others are missing wing and tail feathers, and a few over-achievers are missing both. In most cases, unsightly pinfeathers (the stubs of the new, emerging feathers) are making them look even worse.

Hens generally stop laying during the molt, which is why the fall is the worst season of the year for egg production. Winter is actually better, so long as you keep the water flowing and the feeders full and the hens aren’t exposed to too much wind or rain.

In the commercial confinement industry, the hens tend to get seriously overweight, and they lack the environmental cues that outdoor hens get, so their bodies tend not to realize that it’s molting season. Getting them back into trim sometimes requires that their water be withheld for several days and always requires that they be given little or no feed for up to two weeks. But we’ve never had these problems on free range.

Some people think you should feed hens extra-high protein diets during the molt, but I’ve never seen the point (or any research supporting it). A diet that will support high egg production will support high feather production.

Our new brooder house, described in a previous post, is now close to completion. Its main architectural feature is a concrete floor and concrete pony wall to make it ratproof and rotproof. It’ll probably be standing 100 years from now with minimal maintenance. We put broad eaves front and back to keep the rain away from the building. We’ll add rigid foam insulation from a stash we discovered in the barn (thank you, previous owners!). In our climate, insulation is optional in a brooder house, but it’s nice to have.

A word about the siting of the brooder house: it’s facing north, with trees to the south of it. With a regular chicken house, in our cool climate, you’d want to spin the whole setup around 180 degrees — house facing south, with trees to the north — because it’s hardly ever too hot for chickens. But with a brooder house, you want to avoid wild temperature swings and exposure to storms. A northern exposure has steadier (though cooler) temperatures, and the storms in our neck of the woods come up mostly from the south, so the site is protected. The brooders themselves, heated by heat lamps, make up for any deficiencies the site provides in the way of temperature and light.

The roof is ordinary corrugated steel roofing over plywood. The roofing is thin and cheap but should last at least 30 years with no maintenance, and maybe twice that long.

The brooder house is big. We’d need a building permit, or at least an agricultural exemption, for anything bigger than 200 square feet. The house is 196 square feet. We can easily brood 200 pullet chicks for six weeks. This gives us a theoretical capacity of 1,600 chicks per year, far more than the 600 or so we actually plan on brooding. On the farm, over-capacity equates to freedom. It put you in charge of your schedule, rather than having it dictated by your equipment.

The door hasn’t been hung yet, but it’s a spiffy old beast with a lot of glass.

The three windows would not be enough on a henhouse, but will be fine for a brooder house, where the chicks need more shelter and less ventilation.

(If you haven’t already, you want to check out the sample chapters of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, to get the pitch for highly ventilated chicken coops for all seasons. The book has interesting things to say about brooder houses as well. Though it’s from 1924, it’s the best poultry housing book on the market, because it’s the only one that gets the fundamentals right.)

If you’re in a part of the country where the grass goes away or is buried under snow in the winter, how can you achieve your goal of grass-fed eggs? And if it’s twenty below and a gale is blowing, are free-range eggs really a good idea?

It’s easy to get hung up on definitions and take things too literally, but we ought to allow reality to intrude, at least a little bit. We don’t want our chickens going outside when it’s unhealthy for them to do so, and it would be stupid and irresponsible to do so just so we could cling to labels like “free-range” or “grass-fed.” Climate happens.

We are blessed with a wealth of practical information about such things if we know where to look. Back before scientists figured out about vitamins, everyone knew that poultry needed green feed year-round. They just didn’t know why. So they worked out a variety of ways to keep green feed in the picture, regardless of weather.

Some contenders were:

• Vegetables. Carrots, kale, and lettuce are good, cabbage less so. Kale was particularly popular in the Pacific states, since it can be left standing in the field all winter and nothing will happen to it. The others were stored in the usual ways. Of course, these days such vegetables are available fresh year-round, and maybe you can get them for free through the discards of your local supermarket.
• Lawn clippings are an obvious substitute for grass range, though of course they aren’t available except in weather where the chickens might just as easily go outdoors. In this modern age, maybe it’s practical to freeze lawn clippings if you only have a few hens. Grass clippings are also practical if your chickens can’t range widely (a lot of neighborhoods would tolerate chickens in the back yard but not the front, for example).
• Hay. Alfalfa meal, alfalfa hay, and clover hay are all good and can be stored indefinitely. Alfalfa products are easy to find, too.
• Sprouted grain. Greatly beloved by some people, there’s a lot of skepticism in the poultry literature. Not green and leafy enough to do much in the “green feed” line, and way too labor-intensive — that’s the verdict.

Feeding methods varied. Whole kale plants were often uprooted and hung upside down from a piece of twine, just above the floor, so the chickens could peck at the leaves. Similarly, farmers drove spikes into the chicken house walls and spiked cabbage and lettuce heads on them. Others thought that slicing the green feed made it more palatable, so they bought slicers or shredders and fed the cole-slaw-like shredded greens in troughs. Alfalfa pellets or cubes are probably more palatable if you soak them for a while first. Hay can be fed in troughs or hay nets. Tossing it on the ground is wasteful.

Basically, you give the chickens as much as they want, or, with wet feeds, as much as they can eat before it freezes. If they have green range available, they won’t like alfalfa hay, etc., but when the range becomes barren or inaccessible, their attitude will change.

Do it right, and your eggs will have a spring-like flavor year-round.