Robert Plamondon’s Poultry and Rural Living

beth_feeding_small_barred_rock_pulletsI began writing up practical poultry tips on this website in 1997. Somebody had to!

When we moved back to Oregon in 1995, we soon started raising free-range chickens. There was little information on free-range poultry back then, and most of it was wrong. I embarked on a literature survey of the past 100 years, to find out what ideas and techniques worked and what didn’t. We put the more likely ones into practice, and also wrote them up here on Plamondon.com.

Day-old Black Sex-Link chicks and an Ohio heat-lamp brooder.
Day-old Black Sex-Link chicks and an Ohio heat-lamp brooder.

We raised grass-fed chickens, eggs, turkey, and pork on the farm from 1996-2020, using the same techniques shown here. My sort-of monthly newsletter archives give some news about the what was going on and to-do lists for every month of the year.

We retired from the farming biz at the end of 2020: twenty-five years was a good, long run and we’d become distracted by other endeavors, including my fantasy adventure/romance fiction, which you should totally check out!

My Chicken Pages

In addition to egg farming, I’m a writer, publisher, and engineer. See My Other Sites.

How Coccidiosis Makes Your Chickens Sick [Infographic]

Life cycle of coccidiosis in chickensDo you need to protect your chickens against coccidiosis? And if so, how?

Coccidiosis, also called “bloody diarrhea” (eww!) is one of the few poultry diseases that give most chicken owners trouble, at least once in a while. It’s caused by coccidia, protozoan parasites with a complex life cycle: part of their life is spent inside the chicken and part of it is spent outside. The infographic shows the cycle and the danger points.

Oodles of Oocysts

In short, coccidia “oocysts” (think of them as eggs) are present in the droppings of infected chickens, and these droppings can infect other chickens, and also reinfect the same chicken. This last point is important, since coccidia can’t reproduce indefinitely inside the chicken: if the chicken stops ingesting oocysts, the infection stops.

This means that coccidiosis can be controlled by preventing chickens from coming into contact with their manure. Chicken pens with wire floors are the most common method.

Keeping manure out of feeders and waterers is also important. Properly designed and positioned feeders and waterers stay clean by design, so they don’t have to be cleaned by hand so often.

Sporulate or Bust

But your chickens can’t get coccidiosis from a fresh oocyst lurking in the droppings. The oocyst still in a non-infectious stage of the life cycle. It takes 2-4 days for the oocyst to advance to the next stage, the one that makes it dangerous. This is called “sporulation.” If eaten by a chicken, a single sporulated oocyst can multiply into millions of next-generation oocysts inside that one chicken.

This 2-4 day grace period allows additional methods of coccidiosis control, based on separating the chickens from their manure before the oocysts can sporulate. The most common methods are to remove the litter in the chicken house daily and to use outdoor pasture pens: floorless pens that are moved to a new patch of ground daily.

In addition, the oocysts do poorly on dry floors, so coccidiosis is more of a problem in damp houses than dry ones.

Finally, the microscopic ecosystem that develops in deep litter (litter that’s been in use for more than six months or so, and is at least six inches deep) seems to treat oocysts as a yummy snack, so chickens raised on old deep litter have less coccidiosis than ones on new or shallow litter. (Personally, I haven’t found this protection to be adequate.)

Other Control Methods

Medicated chick starter contains an ingredient that suppresses coccidiosis by killing coccidia or interfering with their reproduction inside the chicken. Such medications can also be added to the drinking water.

The old “milk flush” method deserves a mention here because it doesn’t work. At all.

Doing nothing and letting the disease run its course will result in some chickens becoming stunted or thin, and mortality can be as high as 30% before the disease is overcome, though many of the survivors suffer permanent internal damage to their digestive systems.

How Do Coccidia Reach My Farm?

In my experience, coccidiosis is hard to avoid because the parasite appears like magic, no matter what you do.

About the Infographic

I Leslie E Card, Poultry Breeding and Management. Norton Creek Pressmade the infographic by adding some color and a title to the “Coccidiosis Life Cycle” diagram in Leslie E. Card’s Poultry Production: The Practice and Science of Chickens. This is a very thorough book that no serious poultrykeeper should be without. Unlike more recent books, which tend to be either aimed at factory farming or casual backyarding, books published through the Sixties had the small commercial producers and serious hobbyists in mind. Poultry Production is a gold mine of information and techniques that are still valid for us because the book is an older work. Published in 1961, it dates from a time when all the techniques in use today had already been developed, but when small flocks were still common. This 414-page book was used both as a college textbook and as a reference book for ordinary farmers. I can’t recommend it too highly.

Your Chickens in May [Newsletter]

Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter

News from the Farm

The Corvallis outdoor farmers’ market is already in full swing, and sales are brisk! In addition to pasture-raised chicken and free-range duck and chicken eggs, we have frozen turkey. A while ago we offered poultry by the piece as well as whole, and this is all doing well.

Other farmers have early strawberries, asparagus, all kinds of greens, potted plants, and all kinds of meat and cheese products.

Our early pullets and broilers are doing well on pasture, and we just got six weaner pigs, cute as buttons!

Publishing News

Plotto Instruction Booklet. I’ve published one new book since last time: William Wallace Cook’s Plotto Instruction Booklet. This is a course in using Cook’s own Plotto plot-generation system. Plotto has been the constant companion of fiction writers for screen and print since it came out in 1928, but the system is quite hard to learn without the Plotto Instruction Booklet, which is quite hard to find. So I’ve republished it, both in print form and for the Kindle. (On the Kindle, it’s $4.99, or just $0.99 if you buy the paperback from Amazon, or free if you’re a member of Kindle Unlimited.)

Success With Baby Chicks. I’ve also created a Kindle version of my own book, Success With Baby Chicks. I’ve priced it at just $3.99 (or just $0.99 if you’ve bought the paperback from Amazon, or free if you’re a member of Kindle Unlimited).

May Poultry Notes

If you started most of your baby chicks in March and April, the amount of labor your chickens require is lower in May. The labor requirement will reach a minimum in the summer months (“Summertime, when the living is easy”), and picks up again as your pullets start to lay and you need to prepare for winter.

  • Market surplus cockerels (unless you buy only pullets!) Check Craigslist to see what unwanted roosters of various ages are going for in your neck of the woods: people who want live, old-timey chickens for traditional dishes can rarely find enough, so you can sell them as easily as you can give them away. Just bother with “free to good home” ads. No one wants your roosters more than you do.
  • Treat for roost mites (painting roosts and nest boxes with oil or spraying with lime-sulfur spray, malathion, or pyrethrins). Pick your poison, but don’t let a small mite problem turn into a big one: it’s not fair to the chickens.
  • Brood late chicks. Many people brood chicks as early as possible, but in most climates May brooding is easier than earlier brooding.
  • Gather eggs more often in warm weather.
  • Give range stock adequate feeding space. Chicks grow fast, and a set of feeders that was fine for your young chickens on range may be inadequate later on.
  • Move range utensils (feeders, waterers, maybe nest boxes) weekly. This prevents the area from becoming too muddy and prevents rats from taking up residence undernea th.
  • Hatch baby chicks. The mild weather of May (in most climates) makes it a good time for incubation.
  • Remove wet or soiled litter.

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

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

These are my top-selling books from last month:

  1. Plotto by William Wallace Cook.
  2. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout.
  3. Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon.
  4. Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser.
  5. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.

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

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, t o 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.

Recent Blog Posts

Here are some posts since last time, from my various blogs:

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 monthly by Robert Plamondon to anyone who asks for it. Robert runs Norton Creek Press.

Norton Creek Press
36475 Norton Creek Road
Blodgett, Oregon 97326
robert@plamondon.com
http://www.plamondon.com

Put Your Eggs in the Right Basket

Let’s quickly review the three basic types of containers used for collecting eggs: wire egg baskets, galvanized buckets, and plastic buckets, and why you’re probably using the wrong one.

Plastic Buckets

don't use plastic buckets when collecting eggs
Don’t collect eggs in plastic buckets.

You could probably find something worse than a plastic bucket, but I don’t know what it would be.

Plastic buckets have flat bottoms, allowing the eggs to roll around freely, cracking each other. The bottoms are solid, so if you acquire some rainwater, or some eggs break, you get a yucky pool at the bottom of the bucket, dirtying up all the eggs on the bottom row. This is especially bad if the eggs sit in the bucket for hours or overnight before being washed or packed.

Finally, plastic buckets don’t transmit heat well, so warm eggs don’t cool down very quickly.

Avoid plastic buckets. If you must use one, put a little straw or wood shavings in the bottom to help prevent the eggs from rolling around so much.

Whatever you do, don’t try to fill up a five-gallon bucket with eggs. The eggs on the bottom will be crushed.

Galvanized Buckets

Galvanized pail for eggs
Galvanized pails are an old standby for collecting eggs.

A much better choice is your basic ten-quart or twelve-quart galvanized bucket. The bottom of such a pail is dimpled, which prevents the eggs from rolling around so much. Being made of metal, they have better heat conductivity than a plastic bucket, so eggs cool down faster after collection.

The solid bottom still allows water, broken eggs, and crud to pool at the bottom, though.

My experience is that plastic buckets become brittle and break after a couple of years, while galvanized buckets seem to last forever.

Wire Egg Baskets

Wire Egg Baket
Wire egg baskets are superior to buckets. Tip: to prevent egg breakage, never fill a basket this full. Stop at two-thirds full.

Frankly, the classic wire egg basket is what you should be using. Why? The open construction means that crud, rainwater, and the contents of broken eggs exit the bottom of the basket instead of pooling there.

The wire construction allows airflow, so eggs that are warm or damp when collected can cool and dry easily.

Finally, the first eggs you put in the basket have little tendency to roll around, because the wire bottom tends to hold the eggs in place somewhat.

 

Bottom line: Use wire egg baskets.

But What About Egg Flats?

Collecting

Fiber egg trays
Egg flats.

directly into egg flats is okay if you’re set up for it. Caged layer operations often have a cart that you push down the aisle, collecting eggs directly onto flats and putting the flats into egg crates. This is less practical in less controlled environments.

Egg flats are tempting if you aren’t hand-carrying the eggs after collection, because they’re designed as part of a shipping system. Once you’ve boxed up crates of egg flats, you can put the crates in your truck and drive them home. But filling up the flats in a small-flock situation is a recipe for dropped flats and broken eggs.

Your Chickens in April [Newsletter]

We’re into the best time of year … spring! The weather’s getting nicer and our outdoor farmers’ market opens in less than two weeks, so we’re busy as can be, and loving it.

News from the Farm

At this time of year, our brooder houses are are full to capacity, with three batches of chicks in the brooder houses at the same time (one batch of pullets, two of broilers). And we’ll soon have to make room for goslings and turkey poults. Our first batches of broilers and pullets are headed out to pasture, and we’re refurbishing houses for them, and even building a new nesting house in anticipation of record egg production.

For the first time ever, we have chicks flying out of one of the sections of our brooder house, which has wire partitions that don’t quite go up to the ceiling. These are, of course, a Leghorn-type breed: California Whites: light, active, and surprisingly good fliers. They’ll have plenty of room to be active in when we get them out onto pasture later this week.

We’ve also entered the period of unbelievably rapid grass growth, where the pasture attempts not just to short out the electric fencing, but to eat the fences like Charlie Brown’s kite-eating tree. Separating the fence from the greedy pasture plants can be surprisingly difficult once the plants have really taken hold, but so far we’re doing a good job staying on top of things, mowing the area next to the fence and shifting the fence onto the mowed area. This is where step-in fence posts really shine.

Spring also renews the hens’ interest in foraging far and wide. They were staying closer to the chicken houses until a couple of weeks ago.

And, thankfully, we seem to have exited the mud season. Given Oregon’s dry summers, we shouldn’t have to worry about mud or standing water until mid-October or even November.

Publishing News: eBooks!

On the publishing front, I’m (finally?) offering some of my Norton Creek Press books as eBooks!

Amazon Kindle

  • Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout, with a retail price of $12.49, or just $2.99 for those who bought the paperback from Amazon.
  • My science fiction novel, One Survivor, with a retail price of $5.99, or $0.99 for those who bought the paperback from Amazon, or free for subscribers to Kindle Unlimited.

Google Play Books

Unlike my Kindle books, my eBooks on Google Play Books are reproductions of the paperback: that is, they’re PDF files and are best read on devices that are tablet-size and up.

Fun fact: Search engines don’t index the contents of books on Amazon.com anymore, so it’s hard for readers to discover books that contain specialized phrases. If you search for “I lay there on my couch and suffered,” a caption from Gardening Without Work, you won’t find Amazon.com’s entry, but you’ll find Google Play Books’. Which is why I’m putting books onto the otherwise lackluster Google Play platform first. Once on the Google Play Books site, you can click through to the bookstore of your choice, so this works even if you never buy books from Google Play.

My Google Play Books are:

April Notes

Spring is here, and it feels great! For most of us, the worst problem is our tendency to bite off more than we can chew. So as you plunge joyously into far too many projects, remember to do your chores in a “youngest-first” order—that is, take care of baby chicks first, then your older birds, and the same for your other livestock. The tenderest critters need to be squared away completely, every day, without fail. The rest can put up with a few not-enough-hours-in-the-day delays.

The standard to-do list for April is:

  • Brood chicks! (In the old days, April and May were the big baby-chick months. Here in Oregon, this has switched to March for some reason, but it’s easier in April and May.)
  • Hatch baby chicks. (If you incubate chicks, now’s the time.)
  • Spread winter poultry manure. Don’t let manure accumulate until the end of the growing season: put it where it can do some good. (Poultry manure works great if you spread it directly on pasture. Composting is often unnecessary.)
  • Replace winter litter, which may be pretty nasty by now. (If you’re using the deep litter method, skim off a fraction of the litter if it’s getting too deep, and add some fresh litter.)
  • Give growing birds more room. They grow fast, and crowding leads to every kind of problem, often several at once.
  • Stop using lights on hens. (April 1 is the traditional date to turn off the lights; September 1 is the traditional date to turn them back on)
  • Provide more ventilation for comfort.
  • Remove wet or soiled litter.

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

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

These are my top-selling books from last month:

  1. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout.
  2. Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon.
  3. Genetics of the Fowl by F. B. Hutt.
  4. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
  5. Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser.

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 good reviews.

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.

Recent Blog Posts

Here are some posts since last time, from my various blogs:

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.