Oct. 30, 2023
From Beginner to Pro: Mastering Chicken Keeping Strategies (Part 1)
Join poultry experts Rip Stalvey, Mandelyn Royal, and John Gunterman in this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast as they delve into essential chicken-keeping strategies. They discuss the pros and cons of pastured versus cooped birds, addressing predator threats and weather considerations. The conversation also covers effective breeding strategies, the use of electric fencing, and training birds to avoid potential dangers. As colder weather approaches, the hosts provide insights on cold-weather chicken care, including proper ventilation, insulation, breed tolerance to cold, heating systems, feed intake adjustments, brooding boxes, and predator protection. Whether you're a seasoned chicken keeper or just starting out, this episode offers valuable information to keep your flock happy, healthy, and productive.
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00:00 - Coop and Pasture Considerations for Chickens
10:52 - Considerations for Cold Weather Chicken Care
22:14 - Chicken Keeping Tips and Strategies
WEBVTT
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Hi, welcome to the Poetry Keepers podcast.
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I'm Rip Stalvi and, together with Mandolin Royle and John Gunnerman, we're your co-host for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy and productive flock.
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Block management can't be a one-size-fits-all thing.
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A single approach never leads to good success for you.
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We're going to share with you some things to think about and to practice to ensure that your flock is happy, healthy and productive.
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Okay, folks, so what's best for your situation?
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Pastured or cooped, john, what's your thought?
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I have a pretty decent pasture arrangement so I can let them out onto a half acre here, but they still have a hard coop and a fenced run that they collapse back to in the winter.
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Mandolin.
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What's your thoughts?
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Pastured or cooped?
00:01:06.120 --> 00:01:13.165
I go for cooped because of our predator load and our weather concerns, plus keeping the birds organized.
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I do have the luxury of a barn that came with the property, instead of several small coops I'm working out of 1600 square foot and then I still managed to overflow that.
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Once I realized what's really needed for effective breeding, that I just kept growing what we were doing inside of that barn until it all made sense.
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Now it does.
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So as we get down through this topic I can explain a little bit more about what's been working.
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But as far as pasturing, if I want to lose them to coyote and fox and hawks and owls and all that, then I should free range, but I don't want that thing.
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Just this morning I realized the cow panels we have around our pig area is the perfect size for a bird to pop through and I've got a male bird that has found a way out and he's taken his girls way out into the pig field and I've got to decide if I'm going to do anything about that or watch that unfold and see how much I can trust my pigs.
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And it's crazy because this is one thing we forget about, I think is that chickens, I think, spend some of their spare time scheming ways to get out of the tent.
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Oh, if they can find a way out, they absolutely can help yeah but then they act like they can't get back in, which is always fun, even though they can.
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Oh yeah, I would place one hand for you.
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Hold a hand for a food on the other side.
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They know how to get back in.
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Sometimes, or they're just going to hover against that fence and run back and forth, and back and forth until you go, okay.
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But you're not under electric.
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Up there are you.
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No.
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See, that really helps in my situation, but it adds to the infrastructure and the maintenance as well which we're going to get to.
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Well, don't you have to worry about even black bear up where you are in Phermo.
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Yeah, the electric pretty much once you introduce the animals to the electric fence and occasionally refresh it by shutting it off and smearing some peanut butter or some anchovies on one of the hot wires and then turning it back on overnight.
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Nobody's coming back after the first encounter.
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You're essentially draining your wild blood.
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Yes, I'm training them to be in mortal terror of the very hot thing that is surrounding all of my chickens.
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They're getting a very small dose, but on the most sensitive part of their body, either their nose or their tongue.
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So it's just, and I've got a smart charger which, just it gives the.
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I've held it for the full three.
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It gives a little warning and then a hey and then a bam, and I've held it to the hey and it lit me up.
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We have about three layers of fencing as our perimeter and so far we haven't had to electrify it, but I have the stuff hanging around just in case we need it Like.
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Madeleine, I follow the same basic practices of you.
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I wish I was in an area where I could put them out on pasture.
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I know they would benefit greatly from them, but there's just too many people around.
00:04:11.932 --> 00:04:14.967
There's just too many birds of prey around.
00:04:14.967 --> 00:04:25.704
We don't have as many stray dogs as we used to, but there's a lot of stray cats in the neighborhood, and so when my birds are young I don't want them out where the cats can have access to them either.
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Well, let's dig into the infrastructure requirement.
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The first thing I want to talk about is that infrastructure is breed dependent.
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I think sometimes these big, heavy breeds get large, require more space.
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Birds that are active, I think, do better with more space Birds, obviously.
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Well, they get by with a lot less space, less space and other types of poultry as size driven to some extent.
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I think one thing that I did early on was I didn't take into account how many birds I was hatching and how big they would eventually become, and so I suffered crowding issues, and it's an old truism here in poultry world, but that gum, you never have enough pens.
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Never.
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It's absolutely impossible to have the perfect amount of space.
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But I think one thing we should talk about is the space requirements for the size of the bird and actually get a little bit specific about it, because when you hop onto Google and you ask how much space per hens, you're going to get kicked back a couple of different responses to that and some of what people seem to take as fact and then repeat it to others.
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To follow is some of the commercial methods and you might see a laying hen that requires two square foot of space.
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That's more for, like your commercial caged sort of environments and that's usually not what we're after, and I actually go more for like six square foot of space per female, and that's just the indoor space.
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That's not counting for outdoor space.
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Loosely, there's a lot of information online that says four square foot of indoor cooped space and 10 square foot of outdoor run space, but that's that.
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10 square foot of space outside is not enough to keep grass and some people do want to keep grass inside of their runs and to actually have that be a year round sustainable amount.
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You actually need something more like 50 square foot per bird if you want to keep it green.
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So minimum I would like to say it's the four square foot per bird and the 10 square foot outdoor If you do have them outside ranging.
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But more is always, always better.
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I also think that the more space and just general activity even if they're not actually foraging, just taking some leafs of hay and sprinkling them around, just keeping them mentally engaged and keeping them from getting bored and trying to find a way out which they're always going to do Especially if you give them some alfalfa hay, because then they're going to get some really nice nutrients.
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One thing that I used to do when I didn't have access to as much room as I did now, I used grazing frames in my pen.
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I just took some two by fours and made a little frame they were probably two by four feet dimensions covered it with a welded wire and I would sprinkle annual ryegrass inside that grazing frame to water it in.
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It would come up and the birds could pick off the tops of it.
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But it couldn't pull it up by the roots, couldn't scratch it up.
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That's one way I provided green feed for my birds pretty much year round.
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Do that too.
00:08:00.002 --> 00:08:06.966
You can use a two by four to make just a basic wood frame and have it fit the 1020 growing trays.
00:08:06.966 --> 00:08:12.487
You can actually start a rotation of fodder trays and use whatever seed you want.
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As far as the rye or oats.
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Oh yeah, so you have your frame that sets down on the ground and just pop a new tray in and it'll grow up through that wire covering and when they've eaten it down you can swap it out for another one.
00:08:26.475 --> 00:08:41.054
Well, we do some microgreen production for our own health benefits, and so after I come through and harvest the microgreens, I just take that 1020 tray, like you were describing, and bring it out to the chick and let the soil and the roots and the plants and they will just make that thing go away instantly.
00:08:41.054 --> 00:08:43.186
But you know, jeff's not here.
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He's saying never more than 10% of your diet.
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I'm glad you're here to speak for Jeff.
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There you go.
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Keep us straight, john, keep us straight, I think, when it comes to pin construction, one thing and I don't have as much concern with it as John and Mandolin do I don't deal with the cold weather, so your pin construction is going to be pretty much climate driven.
00:09:07.934 --> 00:09:24.335
Now I don't recommend that anybody build something that's airtight, because you've got to have ventilation in there, because poultry will generate a lot of moisture, and I certainly don't recommend you heat your coop during the winter in most instances.
00:09:24.335 --> 00:09:31.283
Now I know some folks up in Alaska wouldn't have birds if they didn't have some sort of heating device.
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But certainly don't recommend hanging a bunch of those red broover lamps inside your coop because those things can bust and shatter down.
00:09:41.434 --> 00:09:47.828
Honestly, more coop fires have resulted from hanging heat lamps during the winter.
00:09:47.828 --> 00:09:54.634
Got a good friend up in up, pretty close to you, mandy, but they lost.
00:09:54.634 --> 00:10:10.465
They had hanging heater lamps in their chicken coop and it was attached to their horse barn and they lost all their chickens, all their horses, the barn, everything was a total loss because of those heat labs.
00:10:10.785 --> 00:10:16.187
Well, now's the time of year I see a lot of people jumping into the Facebook groups and asking about heating their coops.
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And you know I give them the dire warnings and say if you don't believe me, just use the search feature and look for the word fire, sometime around February and March, right here on this very group you just asked and you're going to see the inevitable results.
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I mean, you may go 30 years and never have a problem, but we get pretty cold here, Get down to negative 38.
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I've registered.
00:10:39.591 --> 00:10:43.408
I am trying out a heated water from Premier Juan.
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It's the insulated electric one with the drinker nipples on it.
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I had been using a heated base and a metal fountain in the winter.
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That gets costly to run.
00:10:52.400 --> 00:10:57.509
Well, it's not just the fire risk either because the birds themselves.
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If you heat one area but the rest of their space is unheated, like if they want to pop out that door, that temperature difference can shock their system.
00:11:07.572 --> 00:11:21.423
If they're going like, let's say, you're keeping it a nice ambient 38 degrees inside of their coop but it's about zero outside going in and out of that, chances are they're just going to hover by the heater and that's going to reduce their activity.
00:11:21.423 --> 00:11:26.221
It just doesn't make sense to heat the coop and I've never done it Well.
00:11:26.260 --> 00:11:29.115
I should clarify that the heated fountain was outside the coop.
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They had to go out for water.
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No food and water in the coop.
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I was going to ask you if you were heating the water and putting it outside or inside.
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It's just going to generate more heat and more steam and then we got to mitigate all that moisture, otherwise it's going to be a greater risk to frostbite to the combs and waddles and feet.
00:11:44.643 --> 00:11:46.809
It doesn't make sense.
00:11:46.809 --> 00:11:51.183
We need ventilation without draft, that's always a fun balance.
00:11:51.183 --> 00:11:53.486
I know my birds will eat snow.
00:11:53.486 --> 00:11:55.375
I don't have to provide them with water I do.
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They will eat snow, just fine.
00:11:58.799 --> 00:12:01.067
Some breeds are more cold tolerant than others.
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Loose feathered breeds, they can tolerate a lot more cold than tight feathered breeds like Cornish or Gaines.
00:12:09.852 --> 00:12:14.264
And also Coleman Waddlesize plays into it, john, I know that's.
00:12:14.264 --> 00:12:18.782
The reason you have Chanticleurs is because you found it to come.
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Large combs and large waddles don't cut it in real cold, freezing temperatures.
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Yeah, the waddles.
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Take a hammering with the open water feeders.
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They get wet when they're drinking and you could see the die back.
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Yeah, from them being able to dip their waddles down into a drinker.
00:12:35.774 --> 00:12:41.634
I've seen some pretty serious injuries from the way people have set up their winter water.
00:12:41.634 --> 00:12:46.207
I've seen people where they use a crock pot because they already have it.
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It's cheap, it's easy, it'll keep the water melted, but it also provides a pool for the waddles to get dipped into so that chicken will come up, take a drink, wet the waddles, walk away.
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If that air temperature is below freezing that water that's sitting on those waddles, it's going to cause frost bite right there.
00:13:03.929 --> 00:13:05.052
It will, it will.
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And then sometimes they'll say that they need to coat the combs and waddles and Vaseline.
00:13:09.269 --> 00:13:16.565
But you have to be careful with that too, because if there's water in the ingredients, they're causing the frost bite by doing that.
00:13:16.565 --> 00:13:21.985
There can be no water in anything that you coat combs and waddles with.
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Now too.
00:13:23.120 --> 00:13:25.225
Exactly Making the problems worse.
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You're not actually helping anything.
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The old practice of I want to say dubbing, but that's maybe not the correct word.
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Dubbing's the right word.
00:13:34.052 --> 00:13:34.880
Is it Okay, yeah, where?
00:13:34.921 --> 00:13:39.410
you trim waddles and combs purposefully to protect them.
00:13:40.340 --> 00:13:47.443
I haven't had to do that but I'm prepared to do it if I ever see damage bad enough, because that can accelerate healing.
00:13:47.443 --> 00:13:54.654
If they do get really bad frost bite, if you go ahead and take care of that, that can help the healing versus weeding it out.
00:13:54.654 --> 00:14:07.832
Because when they do get frost bite, especially on like large single comb variety males, it'll tank their fertility for months and you might miss your spring breeding season if they were too badly damaged over winter.
00:14:08.942 --> 00:14:10.287
I'm all in paranoid about that.
00:14:10.366 --> 00:14:23.335
So we wrap our pens in plastic if we're anticipating zero conditions, like we had to do that last year because it was getting wind chills to 30 below, which is weird for us in our pocket of Ohio.
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We normally don't have to deal with that, but just by wrapping in plastic.
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No heat, not even heated waters.
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Just I added a bale of straw to every pen for a really deep insulated bedding and everyone was fine.
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We had no problems.
00:14:37.504 --> 00:14:44.405
And I do want to mention that I have a heated hatch room so I can take frozen drinkers, put them in that hatch room, let them thaw.
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So I have a water drinker rotation where I just grab the frozen one, stick it in the room and give them a new one, which is tedious and a little more time consuming, but I'm not adding and compounding onto the humidity, so it works.
00:15:00.331 --> 00:15:02.845
A warm room in a large operation is amazing.
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I do miss that from the college that I was previously at, because we would bring the waterers in in the morning, the frozen ones, and just set them over the floor drain and Take the thawed ones and top them off and bring them back out.
00:15:16.015 --> 00:15:21.245
But you need two of the three gallon waterers per pen per day.
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They got to go up the hill, back down the hill, or you know, from inside to outside.
00:15:26.514 --> 00:15:28.499
I don't have that many steps, thankfully.
00:15:29.551 --> 00:15:32.048
Well, luckily my well I think has shrunk quite a bit.
00:15:32.048 --> 00:15:35.076
So it's, you know it's now more manageable for just one person.
00:15:36.186 --> 00:15:38.312
And we're going to touch more on that in a little bit.
00:15:38.312 --> 00:15:52.332
But one thing I think folks need to consider when they're, when they're getting into this, is the cost factor, and we were talking before we came on air that we never have enough pants.
00:15:52.332 --> 00:16:01.916
You know, and it's it's always an ongoing expansion process and Building materials in this day and time are getting terribly, terribly expensive.
00:16:01.916 --> 00:16:06.634
So you know, bear that in mind when you're you're getting into this thing.
00:16:06.634 --> 00:16:10.412
Watering systems we kind of touched on down here in the south.
00:16:10.412 --> 00:16:13.879
I use drinker cups in my pens.
00:16:13.879 --> 00:16:17.236
Takes about one cup for every four to five birds.
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I love those cups.
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I have the self-filling variety and I use them on five gallon buckets.
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If we're not freezing temperatures, that's what I use the rest of the year, and now my hose is long enough to go pen to pens and I don't have to lug the bucket anymore.
00:16:31.486 --> 00:16:33.884
I like the design of any time I that you showed us.
00:16:33.884 --> 00:16:43.245
I think I want to try that in my quail pens, because I haven't been really happy with the design of the drinker that's in there now and I think that would be more appropriate for the quail.
00:16:44.207 --> 00:16:49.644
My birds couldn't figure out the toggle that some of the cups have, that they're supposed to peck that and it brings water out.
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They just stood there and stared at it.
00:16:51.971 --> 00:16:59.476
So I had to go automatic self-filling For them, where it's the weight of the cup, if it goes that's what I.
00:17:01.547 --> 00:17:08.907
It's kind of got a little white float that they can peck at and it'll make water come out, but it's also it's an automatic float adjustment mine.
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Mine is just Gravity takes over when there's so much water in the cup kind of falls down and cuts off the water flow until you come out one morning and you find a chicken has figured out that it wants to sit in your drinker cup and completely drain your watering system into your catch tray.
00:17:23.578 --> 00:17:34.507
Yeah well that luckily there wasn't a lot of water in the system and it didn't, and that was something else when I was designing, you know, the catch tray around the brooder Was.
00:17:34.507 --> 00:17:36.273
You know how much water did I have up here?
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And do I have the capacity to catch all this without flooding the birds in the process if there is a leak?
00:17:42.405 --> 00:17:48.797
seeing some neat bell style Drinkers that you can attach on to like a larger reservoir.
00:17:48.797 --> 00:17:55.729
But every time I think of coupe changes I have to take the cost of something and Multiply it by 12.
00:17:55.729 --> 00:18:06.005
So when I see something really cool that would help us that's 30 bucks a pop I have to take that 30 bucks and times it by 12 and figure out if it's worth the convenience.
00:18:07.126 --> 00:18:14.190
Oh, convenience factors are, or something I know I overlooked when I was first starting out.
00:18:14.971 --> 00:18:22.670
I had all these little pins scattered all over creation One gallon drinker in each of those, and now you're spending an hour on drinkers every day.
00:18:24.133 --> 00:18:25.214
Exactly so.
00:18:25.214 --> 00:18:28.883
Think about that when you're designing coupes or your pin spaces.
00:18:28.883 --> 00:18:33.352
Think about making it convenient for you, like I found.
00:18:33.492 --> 00:18:42.861
luckily, a three gallon drinker is what I can comfortably carry without straining my shoulders and wrists and lift up and in and out of a pen.
00:18:42.861 --> 00:18:51.259
A five gallon drinker is too heavy for me to safely handle without spilling all over myself and possibly causing bodily injury.
00:18:51.259 --> 00:18:53.334
One gallon is just a waste of time.
00:18:55.470 --> 00:19:01.241
And Mandy touched on something that I like to refer to as the multiplier effect.
00:19:01.241 --> 00:19:19.595
If you've got a breed and you have, say, three pins one for breeding and two for grow out OK, but so many people get multiple breeds Well you've got to multiply the number of pins by the number of breeds you got, because you can't combine them all.
00:19:19.595 --> 00:19:21.633
It's not just the pin.
00:19:21.633 --> 00:19:29.096
Building is, like Mandy said, is you got to have a water for every pin, you got to have feeders for every pin.
00:19:29.096 --> 00:19:31.174
That stuff adds up.
00:19:31.174 --> 00:19:32.494
It does in a hurry.
00:19:32.494 --> 00:19:38.798
The boys have experienced picking up and they've done that and got the t-shirt to prove A lot of times you mentioned feeders.
00:19:38.930 --> 00:19:45.715
The type of feeder that you use can have a really big impact on your ease of feeding, but also your overall cost.
00:19:45.715 --> 00:19:52.173
Some feeders are very wasteful and encourage birds to be wasteful, and some feeders are very efficient.
00:19:53.210 --> 00:19:56.659
There's a lot of designs online of the PVC pipe feeders.
00:19:56.659 --> 00:20:07.827
Yes, You're not careful on how they access it and the tilt and the angle of the bottom of that, like if you just pop a, was it like a 45 degree or a 90 degree piece of pipe?
00:20:07.827 --> 00:20:13.278
On the bottom and it's tilted towards the chicken they can spoon out more than they eat.
00:20:13.278 --> 00:20:24.859
You can play a whole row of these pipes that will hold a cumulative 50 pound bag of feed and they'll have 25 pounds of that feed on the floor in two days.
00:20:25.369 --> 00:20:32.413
The other thing that I dislike about those little vertical pipe feeders it doesn't provide adequate space.
00:20:32.794 --> 00:20:34.638
It's what One inch per chicken.
00:20:35.601 --> 00:20:36.571
Yes, well, what I'm getting at?
00:20:36.571 --> 00:20:38.577
It doesn't give my big males.
00:20:38.959 --> 00:20:42.871
Oh yes, on single comb varieties I've seen damage we had to take.
00:20:42.871 --> 00:20:45.921
We went through the time to install those into every pen.
00:20:45.921 --> 00:20:46.973
We put two per pen.
00:20:46.973 --> 00:20:57.521
We had our spacing right but I did not even account for the mature single comb male being able to have access until I started seeing blood spatter on the feeders from him trying to get his head in there.
00:20:57.521 --> 00:21:00.096
So we had to go back through and rework everything again.
00:21:01.390 --> 00:21:04.512
Somebody said we'll just use bigger pipe At these costs.
00:21:05.750 --> 00:21:12.737
So something I found construction sites renovations get old gutters off of houses that are kind of faded and weather worn.
00:21:12.970 --> 00:21:17.440
They make great open feeders but I never put out more than what my birds are going to eat in a day.
00:21:18.321 --> 00:21:23.480
Yeah, I use PVC pipe but I make a horizontal trough.
00:21:23.480 --> 00:21:25.193
I cut off about the top.
00:21:25.193 --> 00:21:30.339
Third, I use a four inch PVC for grow outs and my adult birds.
00:21:30.339 --> 00:21:32.556
That's perfect too, for they can get in there.
00:21:32.556 --> 00:21:33.117
They could eat.
00:21:33.117 --> 00:21:36.337
The big males can kind of turn their head sideways to get in there.
00:21:36.337 --> 00:21:45.479
But you know, I limit feed my adults and I start them off on about four ounces per bird per day.
00:21:45.479 --> 00:21:53.503
And if you're using a three or four foot long trough you can sort of scatter that out over the length of the trough.
00:21:53.503 --> 00:21:55.355
If you've got four birds, well, you just put it in.
00:21:56.509 --> 00:22:00.221
Or it just took me a couple of days and then I'll adjust as things go.
00:22:00.221 --> 00:22:08.271
I put out a set amount of feed and at the end of the day I see what they leave, and if it's just a little bit of dust down at the bottom, perfect, I scoop.
00:22:08.271 --> 00:22:13.978
I sweep that out because I don't want to encourage critters like chipmunks and possums and things to come eat their food.
00:22:14.309 --> 00:22:21.423
And, honestly, I found that my big reds don't need four ounces of feed per day.
00:22:21.423 --> 00:22:30.578
No, they're down to about three, three and a quarter, and if you let them they'll candy, pick and sort, so I very specifically make them finish.
00:22:31.049 --> 00:22:36.535
They'll give me the stink eye when I walk back and their feeders at like 10% and it's just the dust that they don't want to eat.
00:22:36.535 --> 00:22:46.340
But I leave them be for another hour and come back and it'll be pretty darn clean and I always make sure I give them a healthy refill right before bed.
00:22:46.340 --> 00:22:47.875
I let them candy pick before.
00:22:49.173 --> 00:22:55.785
Oh yeah, and I know for folks Kind of feel like they need to keep those feeders full.
00:22:56.247 --> 00:22:56.829
It's a disservice.
00:22:57.211 --> 00:23:14.642
Well, that ups your feed cost because some of it will get wasted and they will overeat, they'll get fat and then you'll start having birds die from fatty liver disease or or Other health problems brought on by care and all the excess body fat around with them.
00:23:14.642 --> 00:23:17.137
It affects fertility in your males.
00:23:17.137 --> 00:23:21.933
It affects egg production in your females, these big fat females that you know.
00:23:21.933 --> 00:23:42.394
I had barred rocks one time and they laid really good in their pull it year and then in their adult year I Got maybe 45 50% of the egg production I got in their pull it year and I saw something strong here, but that's when I was four feet.
00:23:42.394 --> 00:23:43.636
Feeders will pull all the time.
00:23:43.717 --> 00:23:47.673
Well, now that we've learned about the mole, and I picked a couple- we know what it's for.
00:23:47.673 --> 00:23:50.798
Make sure, logically world and how critical it is.
00:23:50.838 --> 00:24:06.855
Yeah, but I had a couple of them dialed in so I'd knee-cropped it up and they were full of Spats in the body cavity where it was wrapped around the liver, wrapped around the heart, wrapped around the gizzard that Everywhere it can.
00:24:06.875 --> 00:24:09.849
You can really get riddled through the inside of them if they're allowed to.
00:24:10.972 --> 00:24:21.569
Oh sure, if I'm getting to ready to retire a hen, I'll let her go ahead and build up a nice layer of fat, because that's schmaltz and it's delicious, but it's not healthy for the head right before processing.
00:24:21.589 --> 00:24:26.281
You kind of want it there, but if you're trying to have a longer productive life, you don't know how to do it.
00:24:26.790 --> 00:24:36.930
Well, but you don't want it to the point that this full of fat Inside the body cavity a little bit fine, too much, not so much.
00:24:36.930 --> 00:24:42.919
What about to ask you guys a loaded question, and how much pin space does it take?
00:24:42.919 --> 00:24:45.660
Like I said, we never have enough for.
00:24:45.700 --> 00:24:45.921
Which.
00:24:45.980 --> 00:24:50.474
I'm talking, and you talked about it a little bit many, but how many square feet do you allow per bird?
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