Month: October 2009

It’s Not Too Late For Fall Brooding

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!

Fancy New Brooder House, Almost Done

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.)

How to Have Grass-Fed Eggs in Winter

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.

The Heating Season is Upon Us

It’s been cold out for a few mornings in a row, so I’ve built fires in the wood stove.

We alternate between heating the house entirely with wood and heating it mostly with wood. We have access to free wood from the neighboring Starker Forest (one of the many elements of their good-neighbor policy), so wood heat is especially attractive for us.

If cheap cordwood isn’t an option, sometimes you can find very inexpensive scrap wood. Nail-free scraps, such as you get from a pallet factory, are better than construction or demolition scraps. We used to get pallet scraps for $60 a cord. These were bone-dry and were really useful if our cordwood wasn’t well-aged.

One thing I’ve learned in my research is that starting fires in wood stoves is a lot easier if you use some cardboard along with the newspaper and kindling. Turns the whole thing from an iffy proposition into a slam-dunk. I learned this from this extension publication. Your tax dollars at work.

Spammers are getting clever

I’ve been seeing a new kind of spam recently: blog-comment spam. Actually, this has been around for a long time, but it has recently become much less stupid.

Before, spammers would try to leave comments on my blog that had some kind of explicit “buy our worthless junk” message, plus a link to their site. The spammers hoped to find unmoderated blogs where these comments would be approved automatically, and would stay up until the blogger noticed them and deleted them.

Now, the actual message consists of nothing but unfocused, non-specific praise for the blog. No ad at all. But there’s still a link back to the spammer’s site.

The goal here is not so much that readers of the blog will click on the link, since they probably won’t, but to fool Google into thinking that the spammer’s site must be important, since so many other sites link to it!

So now I delete all comments that contain nothing but empty praise and a link. I wonder how many bloggers are so starved for attention that they let such comments stand? Probably a lot. Might make an interesting research paper, if you’re in the psychology biz.

By the way, this blog uses the b2evolution package, which is great, but in the future I’m just going to go with blogger.com, and let Google do all my maintenance and updates and backups for me. The price is right (free!), and, frankly, they’re better at it than I am.