Read Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens Online
Authors: Gail Damerow
If your chickens don’t seem to be eating enough, perk up their appetites. Begin by feeding more frequently, even though the trough may already be full. Offer variety — chickens are particularly fond of milk, cottage cheese, yogurt, tomatoes, salad greens, and sprouts. Moistening the feed may also increase appetite: for each dozen birds, stir a little water into ¼ pound (0.1 kg) of ration fed daily. If your appetite-stimulating attempts fail, the issue may not be the ration but poor health.
Feed that disappears too fast is a sure sign something is wrong. Your chickens may be infested with worms. Take a sample of droppings to your vet for a fecal test, and worm your chickens as necessary. In winter rapidly disappearing feed may mean your chickens are too cold. Eliminate indoor drafts, and increase the carbohydrates in their ration. Disappearing feed may not be your chickens’ fault at all — make sure rodents, opossums, wild birds, and other creatures are not dipping their snouts into the trough.
Two different methods are used to feed rations to chickens — free-choice feeding and restricted feeding. In choosing which method you prefer, decide whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Free-choice
feeding involves leaving rations out at all times so chickens can eat whenever they wish. The obvious advantages of free-choice feeding are that it saves time and ensures no chicken goes hungry. On the down side, feed is
always available where rodents, wild birds, and other livestock (notably goats) may gobble it down; feed can get dirty, wet, or moldy between feedings; and some breeds, especially the heavier ones, tend to get fat when fed free choice.
MIXED GREENS |
If you don’t have pasture but do have at least a little garden space, a mixture of greens grown just for your chickens will keep them healthy, as well as ensure richer-tasting deep yellow yolks. You can either cut and feed the greens or turn the chickens into the plot for a limited time each day to peck and scratch. Any mixture of lettuces, spinach, and other greens will delight your chickens. |
Nichols Garden Nursery offers a Chicken Greens mix that regrows as a cut-and-cut-again crop. The Sand Hill Preservation Center offers two blends of Brooder Yard Greens, one for spring growth and the other for fall. |
Restricted feeding
entails feeding chickens often but giving them only small amounts at a time. Show birds may be kept on a restricted regime so they’ll look forward to human visits, in which case they’re usually fed as much as they’ll eat in a 15-minute period twice daily.
Cornish-cross broilers are often restricted so they don’t grow so fast their little legs can’t carry them. Pullets of the heavier breeds may be fed limited amounts to keep them from maturing too rapidly, because early laying results in fewer eggs of smaller size. Older, lightweight hens and breeders in the dual-purpose or meat categories may be put on a restricted diet to keep them from getting fat and lazy.
A restricted-feeding program is time-consuming and can cause chickens lowest in the peck order not to get enough to eat. This type of feeding program works only if you have enough feeders to allow all birds to eat at the same time. Because birds eat quickly and then have plenty of time to get bored, restricted feeding may lead to cannibalism.
Chickens housed on pasture may be fed their ration either as free choice or restricted, in addition to having access to natural forage. How much of their diet they obtain by foraging depends on the quality of the pasture and the number of chickens competing for it. Chickens on pasture eat seeds and insects, in addition to tender greens, but under normal conditions whatever nutrition they derive from the pasture is unlikely to replace a significant percentage of their ration.
The chief benefits of pasturing are to increase dietary variety, provide healthful exercise and fresh air, and dilute parasitic worms.
Unlike cows and sheep, chickens are not primarily grazers and cannot digest large amounts of tough fiber. Short pasture perennials are therefore more suitable for chickens than taller plants.
Among warm-season greens, alfalfa is a good choice where adequate rainfall or irrigation is available. Lespedeza has a similar nutritional value and grows well in southern regions, although in the colder north it must be seeded as an annual. Ladino and alsike clover are other popular warm-season choices. Add a little plantain, both narrow and broad leaf, as well as chicory, and the chickens will love you for it. And don’t worry about dandelions; the chickens will take care of them for you.
Orchard grass is a cool-season pasture grass with a broad leaf that chickens like, and it gives them an early start on spring greens. A mixture of grasses extends the season and might include perennial ryegrass, fescue, Kentucky blue-grass, Canada bluegrass, and timothy.
Any of the cereal grasses make good cool-season pasture. Oats seeded in spring grow quickly; seeded in midsummer they offer late-summer and fall forage. Rye, wheat, and barley seeded in the fall may be grazed all winter into spring. Since chickens pluck rather than graze, the pruning action causes these plants to tiller, or grow more stems, and consequently more grain if you let the cereal grasses go to seed. Alternatively, plant them as a garden cover crop for your chickens to graze, and turn them under before they go to seed. Spelt makes another good winter cover crop that furnishes greens in early spring when little else is growing.
Plants that are in the vegetative, or growing, stage are more nutritious than tough, stemmy plants, which chickens won’t eat anyway except if they’re half starved. Unless your flock follows some other kind of livestock in a grazing rotation, during times of rapid vegetative growth — when plants grow faster than the chickens can eat them — you will have to get out the mower or Bush Hog to keep the pasture mowed down. Cutting plants short not only keeps them growing but also lets in sunlight to help minimize the buildup of infectious organisms.
Chickens tend to stay close to their shelter and can quickly overgraze an area, trample the pasture, and destroy plants by digging holes for dust baths. They are more inclined to forage widely where trees give them a sense of security, not to mention shade. Another way to encourage birds to venture forth is to space watering stations some distance from their shelter.
You might also scatter scratch grains on the ground, choosing a different place each day so the chickens don’t keep scratching up one area. Since foraging
causes chickens to burn off extra energy, you can safely feed ranged chickens up to ¾ pound (0.3 kg) of scratch per two dozen birds.
When the area has been grazed down, or if bare spots appear, move the chickens to new ground. You’ll be doing nothing more than imitating the natural conditions under which plants evolved and under which they grow best. In nature a flock moves together to avoid predation, quickly grazes down an area (during which it scratches up the ground and deposits large amounts of manure), then moves on.
How long a flock takes to graze down a given area depends on a number of factors, including the size of the flock, the kind and condition of the pasture, temperature, and rainfall. When sun, rain, and warm weather combine to help plants grow quickly, a small flock might graze a given area for 2 weeks or more. In cool, hot, or dry weather, when plants grow slowly, the same flock may graze down the same area to nothing in a matter of days. Chickens that are confined within a range house need to be moved to new ground daily. Exactly how small an area
you can confine your flock to, and how long you can keep them there, may be determined only through watchful experimentation within these parameters:
MOVING A RANGE SHELTER
For a fenced-range flock, move the shelter when pasture has been grazed down to 1 inch (2.5 cm) or when bare spots appear.
Let chickens in when plants are no more than 5 inches (12.5 cm) tall.
Move the chickens when the plants have been grazed down to 1 inch (2.5 cm) or when bare spots appear.
Do not return chickens to the same piece of ground twice within the same year.
The longer a range shelter stays in one place, the more time the pasture requires for restoration once the shelter is moved.
Over the years pasture soil will increase in acidity. When soil pH drops below 5.5 as determined by a soil test, spread lime at the rate of 2 tons per acre (2 metric tons per 0.5 hectare). Then let the pasture rest to give plants time to rejuvenate and to break the cycle of parasitic worms and infectious diseases. For a complete discussion on pasture management, consult Bill Murphy’s comprehensive book
Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence
(see Recommended Reading on
page 422
).
Some weeds found in pasture may be toxic but should not be a problem if your flock has plenty of other food choices. Most toxic plants don’t taste good and therefore are not tempting to eat, except to a starving bird. Birds nibble here and there to get a variety in their diet, but a bite or two of a toxic leaf or seed is unlikely to create a problem. (The greater danger is to a house chicken, which may be tempted to eat toxic house-plants if they are the only available greens.)