ChickensJanuary/February 2020的目錄

Egg-laying chicken breeds tend to fall into two categories: heritage and hybrid. Heritage-breed chickens have been around since your grandparents’ time and often have multipurpose qualities, while hybrid chickens are commercially developed for a specific purpose. Some layers have both a heritage strain and a variety that has been commercially bred for production — not necessarily hybrid, but commercialized — so be sure to ask your source which you’re getting if this distinction matters to you. Heritage Chickens “[Heritage] breeds were carefully selected and bred over time to develop traits that made them well-adapted to the local environment, and they thrived under farming practices and cultural conditions that are very different from those found in modern agriculture,” according to The Livestock Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to protect livestock and…

An efficient, sustainable homestead — whether in the country or the city — makes use of surplus resources that are close at hand. And what better qualifies as a surplus resource close at hand than bugs? And what do your chickens like more than eating bugs? Nothing. So turn your outdoor — or indoor — bounty of bugs into a supplement to that organic chicken feed. You’ll make fewer trips to the feed-supply store once you have a few systems set up. Just be sure to avoid using pesticides, because you are what you eat. If your hens eat nasty chemicals in those bugs, then you could become a walking superfund site. This means you must forgo insecticides and turn your problem into a poultry food source by spending your…

There are hundreds of chicken-housing designs available today, so choosing a new chicken coop model to build or buy can be a challenging task. However, by carefully considering each of the design elements that go into great housing, it’s possible to select a coop that’s perfect for you and your chickens. The important housing elements to evaluate include size, storage, ventilation, predator protection, human access, cleaning, egg boxes and roosting bars. In addition to the coop design itself, chicken-keeping factors such as location and access to electricity and water should be considered. How Big The best coop size for your chickens depends on how many birds you intend to keep, what breeds you’ll be housing and whether they have outside access. It’s generally recommended that each bird have 2 to…

As anyone who has ever owned chickens for at least, oh, 5 minutes knows, baby chicks have quite an addictive quality to them. Cup one in your hands for even 10 seconds and, next thing you know, you’ll be toting 20 of them home in perforated carry boxes. Chicken math is a very common condition amongst backyard flock owners, but it’s not the only affliction affecting poultry farmers. “Incubatoritis” — the insatiable need to hatch endless clutches of darling chicks — is just as acute. The only difference is that, unlike buying chicks from somewhere, you can control (or not control) how many chicks you hatch at home. Because the side effects of incubatoritis — continual coop building and a high feed budget — are not necessarily desirable, the best…

With thousands of years of genetic tinkering, humans have created a wide range of options when bringing home baby … chicks, that is. Given the large number of breeds to choose from, it’s no wonder first-time chicken-keepers (or even those that are experienced in “all-things-chicken”) can become overwhelmed with the decision-making process. It’s best to define your goals before heading to your local feed-supply store or visiting a chicken hatchery’s website. Is egg production your main purpose for owning chickens? Some breeds lay more than others. Do you have a small backyard in the city with zoning considerations? Certain breeds will adapt to smaller spaces better than others. So, when making the decision to start (or grow) your flock, make sure these eight characteristics are at the top of your…

If you’re planning a new coop and it’s going to be constructed from wood, consider painting the interior wooden surfaces before adding chickens. The paint will protect the wood, help prevent parasite infestations and make the coop easier to clean. When we got our first wooden coop, we investigated several products and concluded that spar urethane was a product that was safe for use and that would protect the wood. So, we coated the entire inside of the new coop with several coats of a “clear gloss” version of the product, let it dry thoroughly and added the chickens. That was over 10 years ago, and the coop doesn’t look new inside anymore. But the chickens thrived, the coop still has a nice protective coating of urethane on its surfaces,…

During chicken training, we are going to use positive reinforcement. It’s unlikely that a chicken would learn anything from negative reinforcement or negative punishment — more likely, she would just shake a tail feather and walk away. Plus, we don’t want to train our chickens — or any animals — through punishment. Studies show that chickens have good memories and will avoid situations that they remember as negative or dangerous. So, positive training it is! This term is used rather broadly, so I’m going to break it down to relate to our chicken training. Reinforcement Trainers use reinforcement to help increase the probability that a specific behavior will occur in the future by delivering or removing a stimulus immediately after the behavior. More simply put, reinforcement, if done correctly, results…

My first trip to Alaska was in 2001. After landing in the state’s most populous city, Anchorage (population 294,000), we needed one more flight to reach our son’s house in Bethel, 400 miles west. On the flight to our destination, we had a surreal sense of wilderness and frontier as we passed over massive mountain ranges and glaciers. The next morning, as I lay half-awake with a cool breeze drifting through the window, something didn’t fit. I heard a rooster crowing! Four hundred miles from the road system, in a small town on the edge of the wilderness, it was certainly a rooster crowing. Later, down the dusty street, I found the rooster and his brood scratching the tundra in their makeshift coop behind a small-frame house. A bit farther,…

The most expensive part of animal feed is the protein faction. In the early 1900s, farmers supplemented their animals with fishmeal or certain organ meats such as liver. These were expensive but worth the price given the gains in efficiency. Then, soy was discovered and adopted as one of the backbones of modern animal nutrition, along with the introduction of antibiotics and other changes to animal husbandry and science. These advancements caused those earlier expensive feed fortifiers to fall by the wayside. As they say in Brazil, chicken is “walking corn” with a fair bit of soy tossed in. Given the massive productivity gains in chickens — for meat birds, quadrupling their weight gain and cutting the time to butcher by more than half; for egg layers, going from 100…

Because we began raising chickens in 2010, my wife, Elaine (pictured), and I have understood the necessity of positioning netting over our two chicken runs. And the type of netting, it seems, that we — and many chicken-keepers — buy is the so-called “lightweight bird” variety. This kind is often placed over fruit trees ripe with berries in order to ward off avian visitors. This is the netting our local feed-supply store carries, so that was the kind we stretched across our runs. Over the years, it performed reasonably well, keeping at bay the great-horned, barred and screech owls that are native to where we live in southwest Virginia, as well as the red-tailed, broad-winged, sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks. In recent years, however, two wintertime events caused us to drastically…

One of the most common, practical reasons we keep chickens is because we like the eggs they make. We basically have a deal with our hens: If we raise them well, they’ll make nutritious, healthy eggs for us. In order for them to make those “farm-fresh” eggs, though, hens require a few things: • GOOD NUTRITION Layer diets contain optimal protein, energy and proper amounts of calcium and phosphorus among other nutrients. • GOOD WELFARE Stressed birds don’t produce eggs. • ADEQUATE LIGHT Hens need approximately 12 to 16 hours of light everyday while “in lay.” Lighting can be somewhat of a tricky subject because the amount of natural light you get depends on where you live relative to the equator of the earth. For example, if you live at…