Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (49 page)

Commercial lay ration is supposed to be a complete feed that provides all of a hen’s nutritional needs. It comes in either pelleted or crumbled form. Crumbles contain the same ingredients as pellets, since they are simply pellets crushed into smaller pieces. Hens fed pellets waste less feed than those fed crumbles, but they also eat faster and therefore have more time for mischief.

Supplementing rations with table scraps and surplus milk products will increase nutritional variety and may reduce the cost of egg production, but may also reduce egg production itself, unless you take care to maintain dietary balance. Above all, avoid feeding your hens too much scratch, or their energy-protein balance will be thrown way off, they’ll get fat, and they’ll lay poorly. A good rule of thumb is to feed hens no more grain each day than they can finish within 20 minutes. Pastured hens aren’t quite as touchy as confined hens when it comes to grain, since they burn off extra energy while foraging.

Pastured hens eat green plants, seeds, and insects, making their eggs more nutritious and giving the yolks a darker color. Hens with access to grass put more vitamins and omega-3 fatty acids into their eggs than hens without access to pasture, and hens on a pasture with legumes lay more nutritious eggs than hens on grass alone. At times when pasture growth is poor, flax seed in the ration also increases the eggs’ omega-3s.

Pasturing your layer flock requires a fair amount of land. Although you can range as many as a hundred chickens on a quarter acre (0.1 ha), you need to move them frequently, so the total amount of land required is much higher. Pastured layers are therefore best worked into a pasture-rotation scheme involving other livestock such as goats, sheep, or cattle.

The range house should provide at least 1 square foot (0.1 sq m) of space per hen and should have nests that are equally accessible to birds from the inside and to you from the outside. Move the shelter as often as necessary to keep the chickens on fresh greens and prevent them from grazing in their own droppings. To optimize feed-cost savings, move the shelter as soon as you notice the layer
ration starting to disappear faster. Avoid returning the flock to the same ground twice within a single year.

Pasture plant growth is generally poor during the heat of summer and coldest months of winter. To maintain your hens’ green forage level during these times, feed them
fines
(the bits of leaves that accumulate in a livestock hay feeder) from alfalfa or lespedeza hay. Sprouted grains are another source of good nutrition when pasture growth is poor.

Move the henhouse when you notice an increase in layer-ration consumption.

In the natural course of events, chicks hatch in spring, when daylight hours are increasing, and mature during summer and autumn, when daylight hours are decreasing. The following spring, when day length once again begins to increase, they start a new reproductive cycle. Hens continue to lay until either the number of light hours per day or the degree of light intensity signals the end of the reproductive cycle.

To get eggs during winter, you have to trick your hens into thinking the season remains right for reproduction, which you can do by using lights to compensate for decreasing amounts of natural daylight. The farther you live from the equator, where day length is constant, the bigger your seasonal swings in increasing and decreasing day length will be.

Start augmenting natural light when day length decreases to approach 15 hours, which in most parts of the United States occurs in September. Continue the lighting program throughout the winter and into spring, until natural daylight is back up to 15 hours per day.

If you forget to turn the lights on for just one day, your hens may go into a molt and stop laying. To protect yourself from your own forgetfulness, use a timer to turn lights on slightly overlapping natural light. By setting the timer to go on for a few hours at the same time every morning, and again for a few hours in the evening, you can bracket the changing daylight hours to create a constant 15-hour day inside the henhouse.

For convenience many people leave lights on all the time. Constant lighting has its down side, besides being wasteful — it encourages hens to spend more time indoors during the day stirring up litter dust, scratching in nests, and otherwise engaging in mischief. It also doesn’t give hens the 6 to 8 hours per 24 of darkness they need for rest to maintain their immune system.

In an effort to decrease the cost of lighting, you might be tempted to install fluorescent lights. Although fluorescent tubes are cheaper to run than incandescent bulbs, they’re more expensive to install, touchier to operate in the dusty henhouse environment, and more difficult to regulate. To adjust the light intensity of fluorescent lights, you have to change the entire fixture; with incandescent lights you just switch to a bulb of different wattage. However, in the face of ban-the-bulb realities, should you wind up using fluorescent fixtures, be sure to use warm-wavelength lights (that produce an orange or reddish light), since cool-wavelength lights (like those used in offices and households) do not stimulate the hens’ reproductive cycle.

If your coop is not outfitted with electricity, you can provide lighting with 12-volt bulbs designed for recreational vehicles, powered by a battery connected to a solar recharger. Since a timer would drain too much power from your battery, 12-volt lights must either be left on all the time or manually turned on and off.

One 60-watt bulb, 7 feet (0.2 m) above the floor, provides enough light for about 200 square feet (18.5 sq m) of living space. Place the bulb in the center of the area to be lighted, preferably over feeders and away from the nesting area. If your shelter is so large you need more than one fixture, the distance between them should be no more than 1.5 times their height above the birds. Arrange multiple fixtures to minimize shadows, except over the nesting area, which should remain darkened. Installing multiple lights has the advantage that if a bulb burns out, the hens won’t be left in the dark.

A reflector behind each light increases its intensity, allowing you to use less wattage than you would otherwise need. In the example above, reflectors would let you substitute 40-watt bulbs for the 60-watt bulbs. Dust and cobwebs accumulating on bulbs decrease their light intensity. To maintain the effectiveness of your controlled-lighting program, dust the bulbs weekly and replace any that burn out.

Light affects not only the production of hens but also the sexual maturity of pullets — the age at which they begin laying, the number of eggs they lay, and the size of their eggs. Under normal circumstances pullets mature during the season of decreasing day length. If you raise pullets in the off-season, increasing day length that normally triggers reproduction will speed up their maturity, more so the closer they get to laying age. Pullets that start laying before their bodies are ready will lay smaller eggs and fewer of them and are more likely to prolapse (described later in this chapter in
Pullet Problems
).