So, let’s talk about chickens and cold weather and egg production. Recent comments on a friend’s blog (The Farmer’s Marketer) suggest that people who don’t have chickens of their own have a lot of questions about chickens. In particular, there are a lot of questions about raising happy healthy chickens and how their egg production changes with the seasons. I’m no expert on this… have only been raising happy chickens for 18 months now, but I can tell you what our experience is so far.
Today is cold out… only 8 deg F this morning. Tippy the cat and I went out to feed and water our hens this morning. 
Well, I went out to do that, and Tippy rode my shoulder the way he always does to protect me from misstep and keep my cheek warm. The West Flock out back in the new coop was happy to see us, ready for unfrozen water and some cracked corn. We toss out a couple cups of cracked grains every morning for them, which they go after like kids after pinata candy. Thus occupied, I refilled their regular grain feeder and gave them a gallon of drinking water without them under foot. The West Flock arrived as new chicks in May, and only a dozen or two came into laying before the winter came on in earnest, but they give us about 8-10 eggs per day. This morning their were nine waiting for us, and there will probably be a few more this afternoon. They have four wooden nesting boxes in the coop with straw in the bottom, and they left five eggs in one box and four in another — typically, they take turns using one or two favored nest boxes instead of spreading out and putting two eggs in each box.
Until this heavy snow hit (9″ on the ground now), we’ve been letting them out every day to try and forage… currently we open the door and they show no interest whatsoever in going out, so they’re staying in. Most days we give them a couple pounds of kitchen greens or squash that we’ve saved over from the summer, in supplement to their regular layer feed. And they go out and scratch around looking for whatever they might find.
Now where the West Flock is all youngsters (save one year-old Barred Rock, “Mike”), the East Flock saw winter last year as chicks, came into laying last spring and all summer and fall produced about 20 or so eggs a day (from 24 hens). In November they all started losing their feathers and molting… it looked like they lost weight and got all scruffy looking. Along with the feathers dropping, so did the egg production. We went from as many as two dozen a day to roughly 3-5 eggs a day from these hens, an 80% fall in production. Fortunately though, this happened just as the West Flock ladies were starting to lay, so overall production hasn’t dropped horribly (just by half).
From what we understand, the molting and egg production drop comes to most flocks right at this time, as the length of the days shortens and temperatures plummet. Many (most? all?) factory egg farms and a number of smaller farms try to minimize this production drop by using electric lights and timers to artificially lengthen the apparent day and fool the chickens into producing eggs “normally” thoughout the year, or at least with a shortened winter slow season. We’re not doing that here. We’ll consider giving them a little light in the early evenings (heck it would help keep the coop a little warmer) but we’re not going to try and engineer their laying patterns significantly. At Dragonwood we simply like chickens; they’re “working pets” for us more than anything else. So we decide what to do for the chickens based on what seems best for them, and most manageable for us.
Tippy and I had a nice walk in the blowing snow… not snowing but the wind is gusting strongly enough to fill in my footprints during the 15 minutes it took to trudge over to the East Flock and come back. So today as of 10am we got 9 eggs from the West Flock youngsters and 1 egg from the East Flock veterans. We’ll go back out to visit them in a while, freshen the water against the cold and collect any eggs to keep them from freezing and cracking before we can get them inside the house. It’s now too cold outside to use the refrigerator in the garage… everything just freezes in there at this time of year. We need a fridge with a heater inside to keep it from freezing! But such is life.
Oh, and the East Flock chickens are starting to get their feathers back. We’ll add some pictures soon I hope, but a few of the Black Stars (in particular) and one or two of the Barred Rocks are getting their feathers grown back in and are looking glossy again. Crazy time to shed your insulation, it seems to me! But we’re glad to see them coming back.
Update 3:30pm: We took out squash and tomatoes for both flocks, and got another 3 eggs from the East Flock veterans, for 13 total today… not expecting any more. A good day. Spread out a new bale of straw for the West Flock kiddies too.
