Karen has been after me to set up hen lights this year, after a hiatus of several years. Hens normally don't like to lay except when the day length is increasing or reasonably long or both, and neither holds true at the end of the year. Lights have been used since the 1880s to deal with this.

There's a lot of superstition about hen lights, ranging from the idea that it somehow uses up the hens, to the idea that hens are kept under brilliant 24-hour light as a form of torture.

Lights may have been hard on the hens in the 1880s, which was before anyone knew anything about nutrition, and flocks were generally malnourished during the winter. But the bright-light idea is just silly. Hens respond to very low levels of light, and electricity costs money. Light stimulation works at levels so dim that the hens can't see to move around. The real problem with traditional hen lights is that they're so dim that it's hard for the farmer to work by them. The hens have no difficulty sleeping with the lights on.

The main purpose of the lights is to shift some of the egg laying out of the spring and into the fall and winter. At best, it increases overall egg production by 15%, which is welcome but isn't really the point. The point is to get the kind of steady, year-round production that occurs naturally in the tropics, but not in regions as far north as I am. I'm at 45 degrees latitude, and daylight lasts only eight hours on Christmas week.

My lighting system is distinctly retro. Because I use portable pasture houses, the main feature of my lighting system is a thousand feet of outdoor extension cord going from house to house. I use a single 40-watt incandescent bulb per house. The whole thing is on a timer set to remain on from 6 AM to 8 PM, which is in series with a dusk-to-dawn sensor to turn the lights off when it's light out. This gives the hens 14 hours of light per day, which is the traditional amount to use. Traditionally, lights are used between September 1 and March 31. I'm off to a very late start.

I will post pictures later, after everything's up and running.

Fall brooding is at least as easy as spring brooding, and maybe easier. The weather is usually drier. The season is winding down, so there are fewer demands on your time. And there's plenty of time for the chickens to become fully feathered and completely winter-hardy before the nasty weather sets in.

Pullet chicks brooded in October will be in full lay by April.

Mostly, fall brooding is just like spring brooding. If you've been brooding all summer long, you'll need to drop your warm-weather habits and remember how you did things in early spring.

Some tips:

• Many hatcheries hatch year-round, but the off-season selection is smaller: mostly commercial strains. That's okay. Buy your high-producing hybrids in the fall, and your exotic breeds in the spring.
• When in doubt, buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. I buy all my chicks there. Mostly Red Sex-Links, but their Barred Rocks are very nice birds.
• Take a good look at your brooder before the chicks arrive. If you're using heat lamps, always use two or more, never just one. You can get heat lamps as small as 100W, or you can use floodlight bulbs instead of heat lamps, so you can use more bulbs without using more electricity. (I've stopped using 250w bulbs. Too hot. Two 125w heat lamps or 150w floodlights are better.)
• Remember to use a brooder guard this time, even if it was too hot in the summer.
• Beware of rats. Fall is a good time to replenish your bait stations (I like the big weatherproof Eaton Rat Fortress bait stations). Yes, I know poison isn't nice, but having rats eat your baby chicks is far worse.
• Have a plan for dealing with the chicks when they get big. Don't assume that you'll magically come up with a winter henhouse for a group of chicks once they outgrow the brooder house. Winter construction projects need advance planning. At a minimum, plan to keep the chicks in the brooder house, and allow two square feet per chick.
• If you need to bould a new henhouse for your new flock, read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the only book that gets the basics of chicken-house construction right.
• If the chicks are going to be confined most of the winter, buy a non-cannibalistic strain of chicken. Crowding tends to bring on outbreaks of cannibalism, while free range tends to cure them -- but range often isn't available in the winter unless you're in a mild or hot climate.
• Last but not least, buy a copy of my book, Success With Baby Chicks, which goes into all the considerations very thoroughly.

All of which makes a long and slightly intimidating list, but when you do things by the numbers, your fall brooding will go like clockwork. Try it and see!

We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We're replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

• We're using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even "once in a while" is way too often.
• We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
• The three windows wouldn't provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
• A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
• It's as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It's good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
• We'll be insulating the roof. This isn't strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here's a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]

In a recent post about electric fencing, I talked about one- and two-wire electric poultry fences, but not how to go about making or using them.

Plus, I found a funny video that features a simple electric fence (though with a high wire for horses rather than a low one for chickens).

Benefits of One-Wire Electric Fences

• You can step over them -- after all, they're just a single wire five inches off the ground -- no gates required!
• You can drive right over the fencewire without turning the fence off. The wire will spring back.
• If a predator gets inside the fence, the chickens can't be cornered by a one- or two-wire fence: they pop right through. Usually this means that the flock scatters and the predator kills only one. With a conventional fence, the chickens can't get away, and predators keep killing until they run out of targets. That's a tragedy waiting to happen.
• If a chicken ends up outside the fence, it will eventually work up the nerve to cross the fence to get home. Regular fencing leaves the chickens stranded outside.

One-Wire Electric Fences: Materials

• A fence charging unit. I use AC-powered units from Parmak. The bigger, the better. Chicken fencing shorts out easily against molehills and growing grass, so you need a lot of zap.
• Step-in fence posts. These are plastic fenceposts with an iron spike at the bottom. As the name implies, there's a little step on them so you can plant them in the ground with your foot. Get one for every 20-30 feet of fenceline.
• Aluminum fence wire. Aluminum fence wire is the good stuff. It stays bright and shiny forever, so the chickens (and other critters) can see it easily and avoid it. Galvanized wire becomes dull and invisible over time. Polywire sags too much for low-wire fences and is annoying to work with.
• Insulators to carry the zap from charger to fence. It's convenient to put the charger in a barn or shed and then run the high-voltage wire along a fenceline. At gates, some people use heavily insulated wire buried slightly underground, but I prefer to jump the fence on ten-foot poles (rot-resistant two-by-fours are okay). Use insulators anywhere the wire touches something.
That's about it. I used to use metal T-posts at the corners, but I don't do that anymore. Lay out the wire around the perimeter of your fenced area, and add fenceposts. Tension the wire by moving the fenceposts in or out until the wire goes tight. The wire should be 4-6 inches off the ground. A second wire at about 10 inches is a nice touch but isn't absolutely necessary. The fence works best if you enclose a large area and keep the chicken houses some distances away from it. My fence encloses several acres. If you want to fence chickens tightly, you need something more substantial.

Electric fencing has been around a long time, and has been used with chickens since at least 1960. The methods used then still work today.

The earliest mention I've seen of electric fencing with chickens was in a 1960 issue of "Egg Producer" magazine. The electric fence consisted of a single strand of wire 4-5" off the ground. That's it! This single low wire was enough to hold in the hens and discourage predators. Sometimes they added a second wire at 8-10" off the ground, but it was mostly just for show.

I've tried it, and it works! And I got independent verification by stumbling across a site that talked about keeping raccoons out of your sweet corn. Same deal.

I once watched a coyote chase a hen that was outside the fence, but come to an abrupt halt when the hen raced past the two wires. The coyote stopped so fast I almost expected to hear tire squeal! Clearly the fence intimidated it to the point where even the prospect of a certain meal didn't tempt it.

I cover this more fully in a follow-up post about electric fencing.

I also have an Electric Fencing FAQ with more details.

Okay, so someone has given you some exotic ingredient you've never heard of, like okra tofu, or banana seeds, or worm legs. Should you feed it to the chickens, and, if so, how?

The general rule for feeding miscellaneous stuff to chickens is to feed it in a separate feeder, while continuing to give them all the ordinary chicken feed they want. The chickens are pretty bored with the same old chicken feed and are sure to take an interest in anything new. They'll eat as much as they want.

The trick is to avoid trying to make them eat more. Chickens are quite good at figuring out whether feed is good or bad, and how much is good for them. In fact, they're better than you. So never starve them in order to make them finish off their yummy dish of politician's hearts. Just take away what they don't eat.

Try to feed them only what they'll clean up in a short time -- 20 minutes is traditional. In particular, don't let things that are capable of spoiling sit out to grow bacteria and mold, or attract flies and rats. The refrigerator is your friend. Use it to store the excess, rather than setting out too much.

You can also do it the hard way by looking up the foodstuff in question in a poultry nutrition reference. My favorite is Feeding Poultry by F. G. Heuser, which is one of the old poultry books that I brought back into print. It doesn't have an entry for politician's hearts, but it does list some pretty bizarre stuff, like whale meal (page 170) or silkworm chrysalis flour (page 173). The mind boggles. But you'll still want to use the "try it and see" technique with a new ingredient.

One thing that amazes me is how fast hens go through oystershell, even if you're feeding them a complete ration that theoretically has enough calcium in it. This is probably a good sign, meaning that they are getting some low-calcium nutrition off my pasture and eating less chicken feed.

They had run out of oystershell, and when I took a bucketful out to them today, they fought over it.

That's the thing about nutrition -- it's hard to tell what the chickens lack. You short them on something, and they'll be less productive, but you can't tell by looking.

I recommend providing hens oystershell 24/7, regardless of what else you're feeding them.

My cold turned into a sinus infection, so I went to my favorite doctor to cadge come antibiotics (Dr. Foley at Philomath Family Medicine, a clinic started by hippie doctors in the Seventies, and still a laid-back and mellow place). Given my chronic sinus conditions, I do all the usual stuff, with an air filter in my office and saline nasal rinses, but sometimes the bacteria get the upper hand anyway. When this happens, it's time to see the doctor and get some drugs. Most people do this, even people who love the idea of "natural remedies."

(And why isn't penicillin considered to be a natural remedy? It's harvested directly from the penicillium mold.)

It saddens me that so many people don't use the same approach with their livestock. The use of antibiotics sullies their political correctness and organic status, so people drag their feet and let their animals suffer before breaking out the drugs. I don't think they have their priorities straight.

Back before people had nutritional science figured out, the key to success was to let livestock (and people) pick and choose from a wide variety of foodstuffs. Confined animals (and people) fared poorly. Sailors suffered from scurvy at sea, and people in institutions suffered from pellagra, but the same people never had these problems when given a little freedom, even though they knew nothing about nutrition. They just listened to their cravings.

Nutritional science means that you can get away with giving livestock (and people) a balanced diet without any food choices, but that doesn't mean it's always the right thing to do.

The most time-honored method of feeding chickens a balanced diet is cafeteria-style feeding. The original method included "chicken mash" (a mix of grains, steamed beef scrap, and other ingredients) in one trough, grain in another trough, oyster shell in a third, and pasture or hand-fed green feed on the side. The chickens were left to figure out how much of each ingredient to eat. This works quite well.

You can take advantage of the fact that the chickens won't starve in the midst of plenty in the following way: always provide a feeder full of a quality, balanced chicken feed, and offer anything else you've got on the side. If the chickens like the side offering, great. If they don't, they'll just ignore it and eat the balanced ration. This method leverages the fact that the chickens are better judges of chicken feed than we are. Practically the only way to poison or starve your chickens is to force them to eat an inappropriate feed by offering them nothing else. If you give them at least one decent alternative, they'll be okay.

I feed a high-protein layer ration in one feeder and whatever grain is cheapest in another. I feed a second grain as scratch feed, scattering it in the grass. Hand-feeding keeps the hens friendly. Oyster shell goes into yet another feeder. Grain is usually cheaper than a balanced ration, so you can save a little money by feeding it on the side.

For some reason, lots of people don't like the idea of separate feeders, and want to mix everything up. Don't do that. It wastes your time and annoys the chickens. Other people prefer superstition to science, and go out of their way to find a hippie-dippy feed formula, or feed nothing but grain. Don't do that, either. When humans adopt ludicrous diets, they minimize the damage they do to themselves through the miracle of cheating. Your livestock have no such option, so their diets need to live up to a higher standard than ours.

So now you know the secret: a feeder full of high-quality chicken feed gives you the freedom to try anything else on the side and see what happens.

I like portable chicken houses. My henhouses are mostly simple little 8x8-foot houses that I move with a tractor. I don't put litter on the floor. The chickens don't spend much time on the floor anyway: they use the roosts.

I don't shovel manure, either. When the manure starts getting to be a bit much, I don't remove the manure from the houses, I remove the houses from the manure. I hook up a house to my tractor with a handy chain and drag it to a fresh patch of ground. Then I come back and use the rear scraper blade on my tractor to spread the manure over a long swath of grass. The grass soaks up the manure greedily.

We shuffled our houses around on Friday afternoon. Took about an hour.

For pastured broilers, we use lighter houses that are moved by hand, because the broilers are kept inside the houses at all times (broilers are so young and dumb that they don't know to come in out of the rain, so we keep them under a roof at all times). Hens are older and smarter, so they come and go as they please. In fact, only one of my houses has a door! They get out of the way when the tractor arrives and when their houses start to move around.

The big trick with henhouses is that, if you move them too far, the hens get confused and sleep on the ground where the house used to be. So don't move the houses too far. The first time you spring this on a group of chickens, ten or fifteen feet is plenty. Later you can move them as far as fifty feet or so.

The other trick is to move the houses as early in the day as you can manage, since that gives the chickens more time to get used to their changed landscape.