A Sad Sight Indeed

Why is this sight sad, you might ask?  It looks like a dozen eggs.

Store Bought Eggs

Well, it is a dozen eggs purchased from the grocery store (gasp!).  When we have 60 + chickens roaming around in the pasture and we're not gathering enough eggs to feed our family, you know there's problems. Tricia did save the "good eggs" from our hens to feed to Russ since he's in from college.   Why is egg production down?  Let's find out what the problem could be and find some solutions.

1. Short days:  Hens are very particular about light.  Declining daylight hours will always equate to declining egg production.  You can avoid this by putting a light bulb in the hen house, but we don't want to go with that option.  For now we'll wait on nature.  The days start getting longer after the winter solstice, which is December 22nd.  This problem will take care of itself.
2. Age of bird: A hen is similar to a human female in that they are born with a finite number of eggs. Once they are laid, they are all gone.  We do have a number of older hens, but we replace them each year with pullets.  I don't think this is our problem.
3. Molting: Chickens will at some point stop laying eggs, and shed their feathers and grow new ones.  The body can't lay eggs and grow feathers efficiently at the same time, so they stop laying eggs to divert energy to re-growing their plumage.  You ought to see how ugly they are when they are molting.  We have a couple in this stage right now, but not enough to diminish production to the level it has.
4. Nutrition: I think we've found our problem.  Our hens are rugged individualists.  They roam around the 3 acre pasture, foraging for bugs, worms, grass, seeds, mice, and other such delectable morsels. We also throw them a few gallons of rice everyday.  This is fine during the growing season.  However, during the Fall/Winter months, the amount of natural forage is in short supply.  Think of a hen like an exotic race car.  She needs proper fuel (nutrition) to race (lay her eggs).  Calcium is a biggie, since she's depleting her body's calcium stores with each eggs she lays.  If the hen isn't getting what she needs, her body will put her egg laying on hiatus.  So what will we do?

Ground Oyster Shells

We will begin supplementing with a little bit of laying pellets which provide a nutrient balance that the hens need.  We're also giving them whey, a by-product of our cheese-making, which is high in protein.  Once Spring arrives, we can diminish the feed a little bit since they'll be getting nutrients off the land. For calcium, I've put a pan of ground oyster shells for the gals to eat on free-choice.   I think this will help. We'll wait and see.

My big question is this:  In the old days when there weren't feed stores providing a mix of nutrients in pellet form, how did the old timers manage poultry nutrition?  In reading, I learned a couple of things.  First, people fed their chickens scraps off the table.  We don't do that.  Most of our scraps get put in the compost pile to build our garden soil.

Secondly, and more interestingly, to give the chickens the protein they need in winter months, people would kill critters (possums, raccoons, etc), split the critter in half with an ax and throw it to the chickens.  Chickens are omnivores and will happily eat meat.  This meat provides nutrients that they need.  We currently do this with the rats we kill in the barn, but maybe we need to think about feeding the hens larger critters.

Image Credit

I wonder what people would think if they'd see me picking up roadkill on the side of the road and putting the carcasses in the trunk of my car?  Ha ha.

We'll let you know if we're able to get the egg production back up again soon.  It might take a while to get their stores of nutrition back balanced, but we need to get there so we can stop purchasing eggs from the grocery store.