When we first got chickens we thought pure-bred chickens were the best option. We soon found out that they don't lay as many eggs as they used to (thanks to being bred for looks rather than egg-laying abilities) and so we got some hybrid hens. The hybrids lay well, too well, and are not great for eating as they don't get very big. Now we have a bit of a mixture of Rhode Island Reds, White Leghorns and commercial laying hens, which we cross-breed to create our own breed of dual purpose (laying and table birds) for eggs and eating.
We breed crazy chickens that like to roost on their tractor
If you're wondering what breed of chickens you should get, I've developed a fun flow chart to help you decide.
double click to see full size image
Of course there is more to the equation than just eggs/meat or both. Some chickens are better suited to different climates or to being kept in smaller cages versus foraging. You can find a more comprehensive list of all the breeds here. I see on some sites that sussex are listed as laying hens. I am surprised by this (and maybe the breed is different in other countries). Generally you can tell by the shape of the bird. The good layers are small and skinny hens, they put their energy into egg laying. The bigger, plumper birds don't lay so many eggs, but put more energy into their bodies, so they are better table or meat birds. The dual purpose birds are in between. All the sussex hens I've ever seen were little fatties and not great layers.
Today I have a guest post from a new blog-friend, Sarah from Say! Little Hen. Sarah is based in QLD and keeps chickens, grows a garden, knits wonderful creations and shares her baking recipes. I was delighted to find out about Sarah's blog when she emailed me to offer a guest post, so you should pop over and see her blog to find out more, when you finish reading this post about reasons to keep chickens - aside from eggs of course!
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We all know that chickens lay eggs, and this is of course the main reason people keep them. I never enjoyed eating eggs until we had our own fresh, home-grown ones. The difference is incredible, and having some chooks to tend is really a joyful experience.
There are, however, many reasons to keep chickens - egg laying aside. Today I'd like to share my top five reasons to keep chickens. I hope one (or all!) of these inspire you to start your own flock.
1. Chickens provide a relaxing form of entertainment
There's really nothing more peaceful than letting the chickens out for a wander around the yard of an afternoon. You can potter around the yard yourself, or just immerse yourself into watching them go about their business. With their complex social structure, they really are interesting little animals to observe.
2. Chickens provide a reliable source of manure
If you're interested in keeping chickens, I'm just going to assume that you've also got a small interest in gardening. Even if it's just a few perennial shrubs or trees in your yard, your chickens will provide you with a reliable supply of fertiliser. Put hay down under their night perch, as this makes it easy to collect the manure. Your plants will be mulched and fertilised all at once!
3. The third reason for keeping chickens also has to do with gardening - chickens are wonderful at it
There's a reason you don't want them breaking into your veggie patch - chickens are expert excavators, and unlike us, they dig over the soil in the most beneficial way, and without grumbling about it. When a patch is finished and ready to be sown-over, letting your chickens in for a week or two (depending on the size of the area) is a really good thing to do. They'll gobble up the remaining plants, and any bugs that are on them too; they'll turn over the soil, aerating it and helping mulch and plant matter break down more quickly, and they'll fertilise as they go. The chickens will also enjoy good heath from this improved diet.
4. Chickens reduce household waste
I remember the thrill of getting out a container and putting our vegetable scraps into it the night before we picked up our first trio of layers. It was really exciting!
Now keeping a scrap bucket on the bench has become part of the norm. Every vegetable and fruit scrap goes into it, from the potato and carrot peelings to the wrinkled forgotten apple at the bottom of the fruit bowl. The chickens also gladly consume unwanted leftovers from the fridge (I always seem to have more left over rice than I need), mixed up into a bubble-and-squeak type of mash for breakfast. They enjoy leftover stew, curry, rice, potato, pasta, gravy - you name and they'll eat it. When I make vegetable stock, I strain it through a sieve and the cooked down veggies go straight into the scrap bucket. The chickens go a little crazy for soft cooked vegetables!
5. Chickens make wonderful pets
They really do. If you have a child that is an animal lover, chickens are one of the easiest care and most budget-friendly pets you can buy. They are not fragile like guinea pigs or budgies, and unlike rabbits it's legal to keep chickens anywhere in Australia. They are easy to care for, needing only clean water and proper feeding.
Although chickens don't have to be allowed to free range, they'll certainly appreciate it and it's an easy task for your child to let them out to forage after school.
They don't need walking or vet checkups like dogs, and aren't going to harass the local wildlife like a cat. If you buy the right breed, they'll be just a cuddly as a dog and certainly very interactive. I've known pet chickens that have been patient enough to endure their nails being painted.
Chickens naturally stop laying eggs in winter. Actually when you think about it, the fact that they lay an egg a day for so much of the year is completely unnatural. Birds in the wild will only lay a few eggs until they have a clutch to hatch, but we have bred chickens to just keep laying every day, no wonder they need a break!
Part of the reason we keep so many chickens (usually around twenty hens), as I wrote about back here, is that we get just enough eggs through winter to have one or two each a day. In spring we will get up to twenty eggs a day and in winter it will be two or three eggs (so we have to eat some bacon with breakfast!). You can use some tricks to encourage chickens to lay through winter, however we prefer to give the hens a break.
There are a few reasons for the decrease in egg production. For the most part it is triggered by the day length, apparently when day length is less than 14 hours egg production will decrease. See this article for more details. For this reason, lights in the hen house can be used to simulate longer days. We are near the equator, so our day length only varies from 10 and a bit hours at winter solstice to just under 14 hours at summer solstice (its a wonder our hens lay at all!), so we don't experience the complete lack of eggs that may occur with very short days further from the equator. Here's some more information from another blogger who uses lights.
We also try to keep young hens in our flock by hatching more chicks each year and culling older hens. We find that pullets who just started to lay in spring will lay better through the subsequent winter compared to older birds. Its a good idea to have a rotation plan before you get chickens.
In autumn chickens go through a moult where they lose all their feathers. They typically don't lay during this period as their body is regenerating and growing new feathers. Each individual chicken will moult at different times with different severity, so we usually get a few eggs during this time as each hen takes a break.
Its important to feed chickens plenty of high energy feed during the colder months, from when they are moulting until spring, as they will be using lots of energy to regrow feathers and to keep warm in the cooler months. If I was more organised I would make sure they had lots of meal worms.
Lately we've had a fox hanging around. I'm sure we never had a problem with foxes before we got the guinea fowl. We used to forget to close the chicken tractors sometimes, and the worst that would happen was being woken at dawn by a large rooster crowing outside our bedroom window. The thing with chickens is that they go into their tractor and sleep there whether you close the door or not, which does not attract foxy attention if you're lucky.
The guinea fowl would refuse to go in and opt to sleep in the grass instead, and the fox caught on to the easy meal. I think we lost about six guineas in total over several nights and the fox obviously added our place to its nightly rounds. We had a few accidents where chicken tractors were left open overnight. We also saw the fox in the day as well, in the early winter morning (I assume there is only one regular fox, but there could be several).
Anyway, we knew the fox was around and had thought that the chickens were safe in their chicken tractors, as we had become very disciplined about remembering to shut them at night, until one night Taz got Pete up and he found that a fox had actually dug under the chicken tractor. It had taken one chicken and killed another. If Taz hadn't alerted Pete we would probably have lost the whole lot of them. The fox had dug a hole about 10cm deep, it would have struggled to get the fat old hen out of the hole. We were really shocked because this tractor was INSIDE our dog fenced house yard. It keeps Taz IN but clearly does not keep foxes out.
The next night Pete put planks of wood around the tractors to prevent more digging and everything was fine until a few days later when we moved the chicken tractors and didn't move the planks. What do they say about complacency? We lost another two chickens. So after that we were on a mission to outfox the fox.
We had two options: 1) kill the fox 2) stop the fox taking chickens.
Kill the fox?
Option 1 is more difficult than it sounds.... and not because the fox was cute. Let's get the cute fox image out of the way now. Here's a cute fox video. Everyone say oooooh, and then remember that this cute clever agile little animal will KILL ALL YOUR CHICKENS. It will jump and dig and squeeze into small spaces and it will KILL ALL YOUR CHICKENS.
Foxes are not native to Australia, they are a pest and a problem for our self-sufficient lifestyle, so I would have been very happy to kill our fox if I had the opportunity. However, I could not figure out how I would get a chance to shoot it, other than stay up all night and wait. I did try putting "Country Fried Chicken" in our animal trap, as per the video below, which seemed very encouraging, but all we caught (and released) was an angry goana :( so we were stuck with option 2 - deter the fox.
Foxlights
We took three approaches to deterring the fox, and so far the combination is working. First we got foxlights on the recommendation of a friend who swears by them for protecting his sheep. This is a battery operated LED light that flashes white and blue at random. We got two of them. They are well-constructed, water-proof, robust and seem to confuse the fox as long as we move them around. Pete made a stand from a piece of C-Section and a cut-off star picket. I made a video of our place at night so you can see the random flashing. They have a light sensor and come on automatically as soon as its dark enough. Its taken a while to get used to the random flashing outside!
We have had one fox attack about six weeks after we got the foxlights, but we hadn't been moving them. Now we move them a few metres every night. The foxlights are around $90 each, which is not cheap, but neither is replacing chickens, so far I think they have been worth the investment (although I can't be sure as we changed a couple of other things after that attack).
Chicken Tractor Modifications
When we had the fox attack after we got the foxlights, we decided to also modify the chicken tractors a little to make digging under more difficult. We (Pete) welded a frame and more mesh onto the floor of the tractors. We previously had an open floor, and I wanted to keep as much open as possible so that the chickens can scratch, so we just added mesh around the back where the tractors sit higher off the ground due to the wheels. With 500mm of extra mesh around the base it would be a bigger task to dig under in one night, so we just have to check for digging each day.
I actually forgot to take a photo of the finished work, just the chickens inspecting their tractor turned on its side! Just imagine extra mesh welded around the inside edge at the back and sides. A few people commented on this photo on facebook that they put mesh on the outside around the bottom to stop digging, that would work too, but it would have made our tractors too wide and impractical. Something else to consider when designing a chicken tractor!
Guard Dog on Duty
Poor Taz thinks of herself as a lap dog these days and had started sleeping curled up at the end of our bed (now that is cute). So it was a bit of a shock to her when we decided she would have to sleep outside on the veranda. She does get Pete up every time she hears a chicken get attacked, but that is one chicken too late, we need her to notice the fox in our yard. I have read that dogs just get used to foxes, but I don't know about Taz, she gets pretty mad if she sees the fox in daylight and she's very protective of the chickens. I told her she's doing a very important job and she can have lots of eggs for breakfast.
Poor Taz thinks she belongs inside at night
Do you have a fox problem? What have you done about it?
If you haven't seen it already, I've written an article for FarmStyle with six reasons why you should consider chicken tractors. This includes:
No more cleaning coops
Better eggs
Protection from predators
Less likely to attract rodents (and snakes!)
Simpler and cheaper to build
Take it with you when you move
Find out more on this link. FarmStyle has a range of useful farm articles and a forum for small farm discussions.
By the way, my chicken tractor ebook is now available if you want to know more about designing and using chicken tractors. More information over at the chicken tractor blog. Or you can get it directly from my shop on Etsy (.pdf format), or Amazon Kindle or just send me an email eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com.
What's the eBook about?
Chickens in a confined coop can end up living in an unpleasant dust-bowl, but allowing chickens to free-range can result in chickens getting into gardens and expose them to predators.
A movable cage or “chicken tractor” is the best of both options – the chickens are safe, have access to clean grass, fresh air and bugs. Feed costs are reduced, chickens are happier, and egg production increases.
But how do you build a chicken tractor? What aspects should be considered in designing and using a chicken tractor effectively? In this eBook I aim to explain how to make a chicken tractor work for you in your environment to meet your goals for keeping chickens.
I also list what I have learnt over 10 years of keeping chickens in tractors of various designs and sizes, from hatching chicks, through to butchering roosters.
Every year I like to do a round up of all the posts I've done of various topics, so that everyone can catch up on what they've missed. Here's all my chicken posts.... and a couple of memes I've whipped up to help advertise my chicken tractor ebook.
Please ask all your chicken tractor questions here.... And tell your chicken tractor success stories too!
Thanks for following my blog. I love to read your comments and share and fun and challenges of chickens (and everything else on the farm). See you next year!
Uh-oh someone keeps flying into my vege garden and scuffing up all the mulch..... Doesn't she look innocent! I caught her twice, so it was time to trim her wing feathers to stop her flying over the fence.
Step 1: chase the chicken around the garden until you finally catch her
Step 2: go into the house and find your best sharp sewing scissors. Do not put the chicken down, otherwise you have to do step 1 again. If necessary take the chicken into the house with you.
Step 3: extend one wing and trim all the longer feathers. I usually just trim one wing, that makes the chicken unstable. If you trim both wings, sometimes they can still fly high enough to get into mischief.
Step 4: release the chicken and hope you don't find her in the garden again....
After months and months of procrastination, I have finally published "Design and Use a Chicken Tractor"! It is available on Etsy and I will add it to other platforms soon (ran out of internet!).
What's the eBook about?
Chickens in a confined coop can end up living in an unpleasant dust-bowl, but allowing chickens to free-range can result in chickens getting into gardens and expose them to predators.
A movable cage or “chicken tractor” is the best of both options – the chickens are safe, have access to clean grass, fresh air and bugs. Feed costs are reduced, chickens are happier, and egg production increases.
But how do you build a chicken tractor? What aspects should be considered in designing and using a chicken tractor effectively? In this eBook I aim to explain how to make a chicken tractor work for you in your environment to meet your goals for keeping chickens.
I also list what I have learnt over 10 years of keeping chickens in tractors of various designs and sizes, from hatching chicks, through to butchering roosters.
Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. About us
1.2. About this
book
1.3. Conversion
of units
1.4. Chicken
tractor terminology
2. Chicken
tractor basics
2.1. What is a
chicken tractor?
2.2. Advantages
2.3. Disadvantages
3. Examples
of chicken tractors
3.1. How we use
chicken tractors at Eight Acres
3.2. Joel Salatin
– Pastured Poultry Profits
3.3. Linda
Woodrow – Permaculture Home Garden
3.4. Chicken
Tractor - The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil
3.5. Toby
Hemenway - Gaia’s Garden
4. Design and
construction considerations
4.1. Construction
materials
4.2. Mobility
and weight
4.3. Climate
4.4. Size
4.5. Nesting
boxes for laying hens
4.6. Predators
and pests
4.7. Mesh size
4.8. Provision
of food and water in the tractor
4.9. Putting it
all together
5. How to
use a chicken tractor
5.1. How to
accustom chickens to a chicken tractor
There are many options for feeding your chickens. For a while we thought the solution was chicken layer pellets, they are uniform, so the chickens don't pick through them, but you never really know what's in them, and they are usually a relatively expensive option.
We then started buying a nice mixed grain produced by our local stock feed store. Unfortunately our chickens are very picky, they don't seem to like wheat or sorghum, so these seeds were picked out while they ate the corn and the sunflowers. Seems like a waste when half the feed ends up on the ground, and just attracts mice. The chickens also tend to leave the fines in the bottom of the feeder, creating even more waste.
Then we decided that if they like corn and sunflowers so much, we should just feed them cracked corn and sunflower seeds. The guy at the stock feed store was worried that this would not be a complete food, however with the chickens free ranging, they should be picking up a lot of what they need out in the paddock, ideally we should only be supplementing the feed that they can find for themselves.
Its quite difficult to find information on chicken feed that's not targeted to industrial producers, or just too vague to make any decisions (like "use a layer mash"). Most industrial advice is about what you can get away with, the main strategy for increasing protein content (and pump out maximum eggs) is to add either animal products or soy. I have also seen a domestic chicken pellet with "yolk pigmenter" included, this is just a food colouring to make the yolks darker - a chicken with a healthy diet should lay eggs with naturally dark yellow yolks.
Cracked corn has a protein content of 6%, and typically an energy content of 13900 kJ/kg. Sunflower seeds can have protein up to 24%, with energy content of 23850 kJ/kg. Sunflower seeds are more expensive that cracked corn, and are deficient in the amino acid lysine, so its good to feed some cracked corn to ensure a balance of amino acids and to reduce feed costs, even though sunflower seeds are the higher energy and protein feed.
From one source I found out that a hen needs about 700 kJ of energy per day to produce eggs and to free-range, and about 18 g/day of protein. A hen can achieve most of her energy and protein needs just from eating cracked corn (about 300g per hen per day), but by adding sunflowers to the diet, the total feed requirement reduces. For example feeding 50/50 cracked corn and sunflowers reduces the feed requirements to about 120g per hen per day. The ideal ratio depends on the price of sunflower seeds relative to cracked corn. The more sunflower seeds consumed, the less overall feed and overall energy needs to be consumed to achieve enough protein, so I think we should feed as much sunflower seeds as we can afford. This system resulted in much less food wasted, so even though buying cracked corn is more expensive than mixed grain, it worked out cheaper as we don't have to use as many bags per week.
Lately we have come to an even simpler system in which we feed the chickens the same milled grain as the cattle. That way we only have to keep one type of feed in storage and its suitable for all the animals. The grain is milled to a size where the chickens can’t really pick through and chose their favourite grains. Also any food spilt is safe for the cattle to eat when the chicken tractor is moved over. We still feed sunflower seeds as a treat in the afternoon, I don’t think we could stop even if we wanted to, as you just about can’t walk to the feed bins without being mobbed by a gang of chickens waiting for their afternoon treats. We store the milled grain in 200 L metal drums, with a layer of diatomaceous earth to keep the insects out. This is also safe for the animals to eat.
Ideally, the grain should just be a supplement to all the food that the chickens can find while free-ranging. They eat grass, weeds and any bugs that they find. We also grow a few bugs for treats and to feed to baby chicks. Eventually I would like to grow all the chicken feed and not have to buy grain at all.
Chickens need to eat some form of living protein because they need the amino acid methionine, which is not found in significant proportions in grains or legumes. The theory is that chickens are descended from naturally free-ranging jungle-dwelling birds (gallus gallus), which tend to get their protein from bugs. It is argued that a chicken free-ranging on pasture does not pick up as many bugs as a bird living in the jungle might, and therefore does not get enough protein from bugs, and so needs to be fed a "complete ration" containing either meat meal or a synthetic form of methionine. In addition, while gallus gallus lays only a few eggs per year, our modern hens lay close to one per day and have higher protein requirements.
Mealworms are one source of protein that you can grow for your chickens. Mealworms live in grain (which doesn’t quite help us to avoid grain, but they don’t need much). Mealworms convert that grain to higher protein feed just by feeding and growing, so its a way to increase the nutritional value of the grain. They also need the occasional carrot or apple to provide moisture, just replace it when its all eaten or gone mouldy. Compost worms are another option, especially if you are keeping a worm farm anyway, its very easy to dig around in the worm farm and grab a few worms for the chickens. Black Soldier Fly larvae are another option that can be set up around the chicken tractors as self-serve protein systems. I can’t get into the detail here, but there is plenty of information on the net about all of these options. Harvey Ussery also suggests in his book that you could hang a bucket of roadkill meat in the chicken coop and let the maggots fall out to feed the chickens! He calls it free-food from thin-air. There are certainly some clever ideas out there and we do not need to be constrained to buying expensive bags of feed from the produce store.
What do you feed your chickens? Any clever ideas for free chicken food?
Over the years I've been writing Eight Acres - the blog, chickens have been a regular topic and there are a few themes that have been particularly popular.
Chicken tractors
Of course the inspiration for my Chicken Tractor eBook was the popularity of my posts about chicken tractors. People are obviously very interested in building and using chicken tractors with chickens and other poultry. Here's those posts again in case you missed them:
Gender of chicks
This question pops up all the time (and I had to word this carefully so I didn't get blocked by spam filters!), it seems like everyone who buys or hatches chicks eventually needs to know whether they got the hens they ordered, or a few roosters that might need to find another home. After nearly 10 years of hatching chicks, we are getting pretty good at picking the gender at around 6 weeks old. I put some photos in this post to help: Determining the gender of young chickens
pullets that we hatched
Guinea fowl
The guinea fowl were a brief experiment (we had them for about a year). We bought 10 keets and raised them. They lived in a chicken tractor, but never really fitted in to our farm. We hatched more keets and then sold the lot of them for more than the original keets cost me, so I guess at least I made a profit!
Feeding chickens
We have been through many iterations with feeding the chickens. At first we thought a cheap laying pellet was the best option, then we were worried about animal byproducts, so we bought a mixed grain ration. That got expensive, so we tried just feeding corn and sunflower seeds (Chicken feed). And now we just give the chickens the same milled grain that we buy for the cattle. And I started raising Meal worms for the chickens. Ultimately I'd like to grow enough in our (planned) food forest to let the chickens eat mainly greens and insects, with minimal grain, but that is a LONG term plan!
hens enjoying meal worms
Butchering and cooking chickens
If you do end up with unwanted roosters, or you really want to become self-sufficient, butchering chickens is easier that might think and a great option for people living on small properties to grow their own meat.
Recently I picked up one of our hens to check her for external parasites and found her to be crawling with them. So many that when I put her down, they were crawling on me too! In the past we have treated our chickens with Maldison when we found the chickens to have external parasites. We only found out that the chickens had parasites that time because a couple of them dropped dead. Since then, we check the chickens more regularly, any time I can catch a hen I will check her for parasites. Usually they are fine, we haven't had any issues for about two years, but now the bugs are back.
poor rooster, all the hens took off into the bushes and left him,
they really don't like being wet
As our chickens free-range most days, they have plenty of opportunity to have contact with wild birds and the parasites that they carry. They also have opportunity to dust bathe, which helps them to stay bug-free. I think moving the tractors regularly helps too. My theory is that we just got a big slack about cleaning out the nesting boxes and the bugs have managed to get established. This is a good reminder that is important to keep everything clean.
I didn't want to use Maldison to treat the parasites this time because its one of the chemicals that the WHO recently rated as "probably causing cancer" (also reported here). We have also used Pestene, but the active ingredient rotonone, while technically natural and allowed in organic farming, has also been linked to health problems. Other sites suggest dog or cat flea treatments, I don't even use them on the dogs, so I don't want them on the chickens either (we do use tick collar because we live in a paralysis tick area).
I wanted to try neem oil because I've found it so effective against other insects lately (more to come about neem oil in future posts, but check out what I wrote about neem oil back here). We made up a 5% solution of neem oil in water with a little detergent, in a large bucket, caught each chicken and dunked them in the liquid. We also cleaned out the nesting boxes and refreshed them with diatomaceous earth and wood shavings (diatomaceous earth is another excellent insect killer, see more details here).
bucket of neem solution for dunking infested chickens
We checked each chicken before we dunked it in the neem oil solution, just to get an idea of how many were infested, and we did notice that there were two types of bugs. I didn't find out until later that the chickens had both lice and mites. It turns out that this is an important detail. The lice just camp out on the chickens skin and feed on the feather follicles, they lay eggs in the feathers and you will see big balls of eggs around the feathers near the chicken's vent if it has a bad infestation.
While lice will just irritate the chickens and make them uncomfortable, mites actually suck the chicken's blood and can cause serious problems, even death. I suspect that's what we had the first time when the chickens died, although we only saw lice at the time (I remember those huge balls of eggs!). There are also several types of mites, some live on the chickens all the time and some live in the pen and jump on the chickens at night.
When I checked the chickens again a few days later, I didn't find any lice, so I can report that neem oil definitely works on lice. I did see mites though, but I am hoping that the diatomeceous earth and the longer term effects of the neem oil are going to take care of these mites (you went back and read my neem oil post where I explain all that, right?). In the meantime, we are regularly cleaning out the nesting boxes and not giving those mites anywhere to hide. A couple of weeks later, a spot check of the rooster just after dark revealed no mites, so this approach appears to have worked.
cleaning nesting boxes with diatomeceous earth and wood shavings
Tips for recognising and treating mites and lice in chickens:
Check your chickens regularly (pick them up at random when you can, turn them upside down (gently!) and inspect around their vents for insects)
Keep nest boxes and coops as clean as possible
Provide dust baths for the chickens (that's our whole property in a drought!)
If you find insects, plan to spray individual chickens, or dunk them if you have several to treat, with a solution of 5% neem oil in water
Do it early morning when you know its not going to be too cold or windy, so they have time to dry off before night
Catch each chicken, check it for mites and lice around the vent, then dunk or spray the chicken and try to cover as much skin as possible with the solution
Keep checking them and repeat if necessary
Have you found mites or lice on your chickens? What do you do about it?
or just send me an email eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com.
