University Place

cc >> Okay, I'd like to introduce to you Twain Lockhart, and he is from Nutrena. Thank you and we welcome you. >> Thank you. Good morning, everybody. We're going to talk a little bit about getting started with chickens. Obviously, in the next 45 minutes I'm not going to make you experts, but I may answer a lot of your basic questions. Once again, can you kind of give me a show of hands of how many people have actually got chickens as we speak? Okay, pretty low percentage. How many have had them in the past and are revisiting? Okay, so we have a few more. Okay, well, we're going to get started. I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes talking about me. No, just kidding.

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I'm not a vet, I'm not a PhD, I'm not a nutritionalist, but a picture is worth a thousand words. I have been raising chickens for a long, long time. With the exception of my four years in the Coast Guard, I've pretty much had chickens my entire life. So we're going to talk about getting going with backyard chickens. We're mostly going to talk about laying hens. Meat chickens are almost a seminar unto themselves, so we probably won't deal too much with that. If anybody has questions about those, catch me after we're done and I'll talk to you about it. People ask me all the time, why is backyard chickens such a big deal? In the last 10 years it has really grown in popularity. They say 94% of cities over 100,000 allow chickens. So cities you would never ever dream allow chickens. Chicago, New York, LA, Milwaukee, Madison. Madison, we are on the forefront. People from all over the country when they're trying to legalize chickens will contact Mad City Chickens, that's our local chicken group, because they kind of set the standard of how you get chickens legalized in your city. They have a great website, by the way. So, but you know what? Why? Why do people want to do chickens? A lot of people want to get back to knowing where your food comes from. If you know what goes in the chicken in one end, you know what's coming out the other end that you're feeding to your family. So they say we're three generations removed from the farm. So there's a lot of people now that can't even say, hey, I had chickens on my grandma's farm. You don't even have that. So people are brand new to this again. We're kind of starting over again. Chickens are a good gateway livestock to see if you want to try to be sustainable. Bees, chickens, there's a lot of things going on. Goats, rabbits. But chickens seem to be the most popular. But you know what? You take that all aside, the number one reason people are

getting into chickens

they're fun. Do you have fun with you chickens? I know you said you had some chickens. They are fun. You will find yourself watching your chickens more than you watch TV. They are more entertaining than most of what is on TV now, except Wisconsin Public TV of course.

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getting into chickens

But there's more drama in your chicken coop than the Kardashians. They're a bunch of teenage schoolgirls in a coop, and they're just a lot of fun. You will find yourself naming your chickens. People always say, oh, yeah, when they quit laying we're going to eat them. Yeah, that doesn't happen too often.

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getting into chickens

The chickens end up with names. They don't end up in the crock-pot. They end up having a funeral when they die. They really become pets, and they're a lot of fun. We have found that chickens bring communities together. A lot of communities were afraid that there'd be a lot of complaints when people brought in chickens. What we find is you'll have one neighbor get them, and pretty soon a whole bunch of people in the neighborhood get chickens. Do you ever just set outside and watch your chickens? I have an adult beverage and a cigar and I'm sitting in the lawn chair and before I know it I've got two or three neighbors, neighbors that I had never talked to before have come over and they hang out and we watch the stupid chickens.

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getting into chickens

And before you know it, they're getting chickens. So they kind of bring communities together, which is a lot of fun. They're very relaxing. You know when you go to the dentist office and they have the fish tank? Chickens have the same effect. I call it a redneck aquarium. You have a bad day at work, you come home, you just have a cigar and an adult beverage and watch your chickens and it will relax you.

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getting into chickens

They're very educational. It is the fastest growing segment of 4H, is poultry. Fresh eggs. You're buckeyes. Could you ever go back to store-bought eggs after having fresh eggs? It's pretty tough. Those fresh eggs taste so much better. There's a lot of conjecture on how old the eggs are when you buy them in the market. I've heard up to a minimum of 45 days. So you get an egg that the hen laid yesterday, oh my god, it tastes so much better. They're healthier for you. They've done a lot of tests that there's more good cholesterol and less bad cholesterol on your chickens that you let run around and eat bugs and grass and weeds. They also eat insects. You ever seen your chickens kill a mouse and eat it? Oh, that's a lot of fun.

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getting into chickens

That's entertainment. That's a lot of fun. They say chickens are the closest living relative to the dinosaur, actually, the T Rex, and you may not believe me but when you get chickens and you watch you chickens stalk, hunt, and kill a mouse, you can almost see the little arms pop out.

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getting into chickens

They are real reptilian. This is my most commonly asked question, and so nobody embarrasses themselves I started putting it in the slides. You do not need a rooster to get eggs. I've had people want to argue with me on that, and I'll say, well, you paid attention in biology like I paid attention in math. You do not need a rooster to get eggs. You need a rooster to get baby chicks. If you can have a rooster, I like to have a rooster with the flock. They kind of protect the girls. They're sort of the voice of reason in the coop. Is your rooster the voice of reason in your coop? They kind of reduce the drama a little bit, the fighting and the squabbling. But mostly they protect the hens. But you don't have to have one. If you're going to have a problem with your neighbors, it's probably going to be because of a rooster. Those of you that have roosters, they just crow in the middle of the night, right in the morning just like on TV? No, they crow all the time. They'll go 24/7 sometimes. So your neighbors will probably not appreciate that. The hens cackle a little bit when they lay an egg, but it takes about 10 minutes. They tell you all about it. Remember, we're all about drama. Sometimes you think that egg has sharp edges and is as big as an asteroid by the noise they make, but they get over it in 10 minutes. And the neighbors generally don't complain about that. The rooster crowing they will. Do they cause rodents? This is a common mistake people make with their chickens. They overfeed them. Chickens at night are virtually blind. When it's dark, they can't see anything. So mice and rats that they would normally either run off from their food or even actually kill and eat, at night they won't. So if you have too much food out and you leave it on the ground, you will bring in the little beasties that will take up residence with your chickens. Once you get them they're kind of hard to get rid of. So it's much easier to prevent the problem. Only feed them as much as they'll eat. You may even want to take your feeder and put it in a metal trash can with a lid at night. I say metal because rats will chew through plastic. And keep your feed in a metal trash can as well. So if you do that, you probably won't get rodents. Flies, not so much. They really don't cause too much trouble with that. Any livestock, if you don't keep them clean, you can have a fly issue. We're at a garden show, so yes we're going to talk a little bit about this. The manure makes very good fertilizer. We recommend you compost it first. It's pretty hot. So you want to compost it. Will you catch Avian flu by bringing in chickens? I could do a whole seminar just on that. We're just going to touch on it. But the overwhelming evidence is that your backyard chickens are safe. Sunlight kills the Avian influenza virus. As a rule, you should never consume livestock that dies. That's just kind of livestock husbandry 101. Betsy the cow flops over dead, you don't go out and have steaks. Same things with your chickens and ducks. In China where they had the problem, they made a big deal about the avian flu because it was jumping species. It was going from birds to humans. But they were also eating birds that died. They were ducks, but it doesn't matter. They were eating birds that died. They didn't know why they were dying, and they would eat them. And even then it was a small percentage. How many eggs will your chickens lay? That's sort of a loaded question because some breeds don't lay very many. Your Frizzles and your Silkies don't lay a lot of eggs. Elvis' wife, Priscilla, doesn't lay a lot of eggs. I might get 20 a year out of her. Then you get into things like a White Leghorn, which is your commercial laying hens. Those will go roughly 300 eggs a year. They lay a lot of eggs. I don't really recommend them as a backyard chicken. They're kind of flighty and crazy, but beyond that, they lay a lot of eggs. So it's sort of a loaded question. It's kind of all over the map. So you want to do a little bit of research when you think about what breeds of chickens you're going to start out with. Are brown eggs healthier than white eggs? No. When I was a kid they used to say that. They used to say that green eggs were healthier too. All that is, is the breed of the chicken has no effect on the nutrition of the egg. It's just the shell color. They always lay the same color eggs. So you won't have a chicken lay a brown egg then a white egg. If she lays white eggs, she's going to lay white eggs. As I said earlier, the fresher the egg, the better it tastes. Regulations. I'm not going to get into that too deep because every city is a little different. I know here in Madison you can have four hens, no roosters. Most municipalities will not let you have a rooster because, as I said, that is where most of your problems come from. If you're not sure where you live, I don't recommend you call the city just because it's almost guaranteed whoever answers the phone will give you an automatic no. I see a few people nodding their heads. If you call your local 4H, even if you don't know who your poultry people are, if you know somebody in 4H at all, they all know each other. So if you found a horse 4H person, they could tell you who handles chickens. The 4H people will almost guaranteed to know what the ordinances are. If that still doesn't work, you can call your local Ag Extension agent and they'll tell you. How many should you get? Chickens are flock animals. By the way, they're the most plentiful bird on the face of the Earth. They estimate between three and four chickens for every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth. There's a lot of them. So we need to be nice to them. If they ever decide to take over, we're in trouble. But anyway, there's a lot of chickens. They're flock animals. You don't want to do just one. Do we have any teachers, any science teachers? Do you hatch eggs in your classroom? >> I used to. >> Okay, I love teachers for getting kids started in school. Tell your friends if they're doing that, please send home two chicks, not one. When you send home one baby chick, that baby chick bonds with you. It imprints on the humans, and while that sounds cute like a Disney film, it isn't. They're not happy when you leave. They don't ever lay very well. You're not doing that chicken any favor because eventually you're going to get tired of it and give it to the guy down the road that has chickens, Billy Joe Ray Bob, or whatever his name is. That chicken will never assimilate and fit in with the other chickens. It's like they don't know how to speak chicken. So if you send home two, they interact and they are like a flock animal. But a minimum, two is kind of the minimum you want to do with chickens. I would say if your ordinance says four, get four chickens. That way if something happens to one or two, you still have more than one. One chicken by itself is not a happy camper. Should you start off with baby chicks or adults? Do we have any horse people here? Okay, if you went to an auction and you didn't know how old a horse was, is there some way you could tell? >> Their teeth. >> Yeah, you can look at their teeth and tell how old they are. A little problematic with a chicken. Once a chicken gets to be about nine months old, it's pretty hard to tell how old they are. If you go on Craigslist right now, I guarantee you there will be somebody selling chickens, and they're always 11 months old. Just like with horses, they're always nine years old. With a chicken they're always 11 months old. That's like the prime laying age. They might be three years and 11 months old, and you're going to spend premium dollar, 15-20 bucks for a chicken that's pretty much at the end of its laying life cycle. So that being said, if you start with baby chicks you know where they've been, you know how old they are, and they bond with you, more likely to become a pet. Did you start with, with your Buckeyes, did you start with chicks or did you get adults? >> No, they were young. They weren't laying yet. >> Okay, that's a good age too. If you can find young pullets.

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getting into chickens

Yeah, yeah. She's saying she prefers to go younger on them. It's just you know where they've been and what they've been around and you can kind of bond with them and they bond with you. Buying online or local? I'm not going to press this issue one way or the other. The downside, well, the upside to buying online is you're probably going to save $.25 a chick, maybe $.50 a chick. The downside is they usually require you to buy 25. Anybody in here want to do 25 chicks? Yeah, there's a couple. Okay, so online might be an option. But for the most part, most people want to do four to six chicks. So if that's the case, if you buy local, you can get as many or as few as you like. Madison has some odd ordinances. I think you have to buy six. Which is weird because you can only have four. But that's much easier than buying 25 and trying to do something with the other 21. Okay, anybody know, oh, wait a minute. You know what that is. You've seen that before. I put that picture up because that's a very unique type of chicken. That is called a frizzle. Okay? Basically, it is a chicken that was a genetic mutation. The feathers came in upside down and somebody said let's breed for that. That's a good idea. They're cute. They're fun. They're dumber than a bag of rocks, but they're cute, they're fun. I don't recommend this as a beginners chicken. This is where I was going with this whole thing. I would start with an egg chicken. Your laying hens, they can be just as friendly. Elvis, by the way, is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier either. Not a great beginners chicken. Your meat chickens...

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getting into chickens

Oh, yeah. Did I insult you, Elvis? I'm sorry. I don't recommend starting with meat chickens either. Definitely master, at least do one set of laying hens. Kind of get your feet on the ground, know where you're going with this, and then do your meat chickens. Meat chickens are almost not a chicken. They're just really odd. Your laying hens, you can kind of break that down into two

categories

white eggs or brown eggs. Most of your commercial egg-layers are white eggs just because the White Leghorn or the offshoots of the White Leghorn lay so well. You've got a small bodied chicken that lays a lot of eggs. But you also, if you're going to do backyard chickens, you want to get something that has a nice temperament, friendly, lays eggs. Again, brown or white, doesn't matter, but you want that good temperament. You also up here want something called hardy. When you see a chicken with a great big comb, that comb is a radiator. That is for heat. They were probably developed in the Mediterranean somewhere. White Leghorns came from the Mediterranean somewhere. So they don't do really well up here in the Wisconsin winters. That big comb will freeze. It's not deadly, but it's uncomfortable for the chickens. You generally need to watch the temperature in the wintertime with them. So you get a big bodied, you'll

hear this term all the time

dual purpose. That's a big bodied chicken that in theory when she's done laying you throw her in the stew pot. Okay? As I said, most of you probably won't do that. At my house we don't do that typically. That is your standard 1A White Leghorn. These are great laying chickens. I don't think anybody even approaches the number of eggs, your investment, feed versus output is awesome.

Downside

they're crazy. Does anybody have Leghorns? Has anybody ever had them before? Every time, are yours nuts? Yeah. Every time you go out to feed them, it's like first contact. The first time they've ever seen a human.

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Downside

They freak out. And it's just after a while you get kind of tired of that. They will fly over a fence. Who talked about wing clipping? You can clip their wings, they get enough RPMs it don't matter. They'll still get airborne. So not a great choice for backyard chickens. I really don't recommend these, especially for a beginner. And we talked about that. Most of you guys will probably end up with a brown egg laying chicken. I'm not going to go through all the breeds. The American Poultry Association recognizes 167, I think is what they recognize, and there's at least twice that many they don't recognize. So there's a lot of breeds of chickens. These are just some good choices. If you notice, she's got a great, big body. She probably weighs about six pounds as an adult. Nice, small comb. The things that hang down on the face are the waddles. She's got small waddles. There's not that much to freeze. Nice temperament. Big, brown egg. Not broody. Broody means they want to be mom. They want to hatch the eggs. Do your Silkies want to hatch all the eggs? Golf balls, rocks, whatever. Yes. That's not a desirable trait for your laying hens. So they've bred that out of most of them. That's not to say you won't get one go broody once in a while. This is another brown egg layer. It's called a Production Red. It is what they call a sex linked chicken. You'll hear that term a lot. What that means is it's a hybrid, and when they hatch out of the incubator, the roosters are one color, the hens are another color. So if having a rooster is the end of the world, you have little kids, they name them, four months down the road Henrietta becomes Henry, this isn't a good thing. And let me tell you, there's not many outlets for a good home for a rooster. Okay? So if getting a rooster is a big deal, you may want to do something that's sex linked. And they'll tell you when you're looking at your baby chicks, there's a lot of different kinds of sex links. The downside is a lot of 4H clubs will not let you show these. If you're going to be showing birds, it may not work. Well, I'll tell you. The way they sex birds at a hatchery, actually Mike Rowe did an episode on Dirty Jobs, but the way they do it is they flip them over and they squeeze them and a little jet of poop comes out of the vent. The vent is kind of like, on a mammal it would be the anus. On a bird, it's a vent because you have eggs and waste come out of that same opening. So you squeeze them, a little jet of poop comes out of that, and they can tell by the shape of the vent if it's a hen or a rooster. And the people that do that are very well paid, believe it or not. You go to school for six months, and then you do a two-year apprenticeship. And a lot of those people make like six figures. They make a lot of money doing that, and they're very good at it. I don't know, it'd be really monotonous. How was your day at work today? Just looking at, and that's about how fast they go. Looking at these chickens. So that being said, even at 95% accuracy, if you buy a box of 100 chicks, there are probably going to be a couple of roosters in there. So that may not be a good thing. If getting a rooster is the end of the world, I recommend the sex link. And they're good layers, good temperament. They're not broody. Again, I could go through, we could do a weekend seminar on chicken breeds and probably not even touch them all. Okay, getting started. One of the things, you guys are kind of doing this right. You're doing this early. You're thinking about it, doing your homework. You want to try and get everything set up before you get the chickens. The chickens are not the first thing you get, and a lot of people make that mistake. They go down, buy a few baby chicks, then try to figure out what to do with them now. So you want to have your brooder system. And that's basically a box that holds the heat in. Baby chicks can't regulate their own temperature so you want something that will hold that heat in. You can use a metal stock tank. You can use an old aquarium. I've done a lot in a cardboard box. Keeping in mind, a cardboard box, wood shavings, and a heat lamp, you kind of have the perfect recipe for a fire. But I've brooded thousands of baby chicks and never had an issue. Just going to throw that out there though. You want to use pine shavings. They're not expensive, but they're basically benign. If they get in the chicken's eye or they eat them, it won't hurt them. You want to cover that for the first few days with a burlap bag or cheesecloth. And what that does is give them traction. If you just put them on newspaper, it works but you may have a percentage or so that get what they call spraddle legs, and it's where they kind of do the splits and it tears a muscle in their shoulders. It's usually pretty much fatal. You can correct it, but it's a lot of work. So it's much easier to use shavings. I don't know, that's not that great a picture, but somebody took an old aquarium, or a couple of old aquariums, and turned that into a brooding system. You can see the heat lamp hanging down, baby chicks underneath. Your heat lamp, you can pick those up. Any of your farm stores have them. They're not expensive. Usually less than 10 bucks. If you're really exact, you're shooting for 90 to 95 degrees. To be honest with you, baby chicks self-regulate their temperature really well. If you put a heat source in, if they get too hot, they all get away from it. If they're too cold, they pile up underneath it. So, if they're all piled underneath it, you may need to lower it a little, you may need to go to a little bit bigger bulb. I like using a 60-watt bulb. And you have to use a regular light bulb. The little curly Q bulbs don't give off any heat so those don't work. You don't want to set up your system somewhere where every time you open the door a draft comes in, a gust of wind. For whatever reason, that is deadly to baby chicks. It just wreaks havoc with their immune system. So, no drafts. You want them ventilated but not drafty. If you keep them reasonably clean and if you clean them every day, it takes you like five minutes to clean the tank out, and the chickens get used to it real quick, they kind of move out of the way and let you do it, they don't smell bad. You won't even notice them. You don't want to let your pets get into them. Some dogs are worse than any others depending on the prey drive of the dog. And little kids, this is a slippery slope so I'll be careful, little guys, two-, three-year-olds, when you put a baby chick in their hands, if the chick moves their first instinct is to squeeze it.

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Downside

That doesn't end well. After that chick gets to be about a week to 10 days old, let them have at it. They're not going to squeeze a chick hard enough to kill it. But the first few days are pretty delicate. So maybe you hold the chick, let the kids pet it. Water is more critical than the food, for the first couple days especially. You want to hydrate them before you feed them. So if you opt to get your chickens from a hatchery and they come directly to you, hydrate them for about six hours before you feed them. You want to use room temperature water. They say ideally 96-98 degrees. Okay, I'm going to tell you you need to measure that, but you don't want to put cold water in there. You put cold water in there, they don't weigh very much, you're talking grams, they double their weight when they drink. And then all the sudden they've drank all this cold water, it spikes their core temperature down, and you can actually kill them. Baby ducks are really bad about that. I like to use bottled water. You don't have to, but some city's tap water has a lot of chemicals in it. You put a goldfish in it and they die. So you have this very delicate little animal's digestive system, hey, take that variable out for the first few days. Give them some kind of a bottled water. It should be a drinking water though. Distilled water is not so good. Vitamins and electrolytes. Readily available at your farm stores, you want to get one that is poultry specific, avian specific, and it's basically like Gatorade for chickens. Any time you stress your chickens, it's a good idea to give them this. It's very inexpensive. It's a real cheap insurance policy. This is the commercial part of the presentation, and we won't dwell on this much. Whether you use my brand of feed or not, you want to use a good balanced chick ration. The first six weeks is critical. The first six weeks is when the baby chick's immune system and internal organs are developing. So if you aren't giving them a good balanced chick ration, that chicken may not lay as well as it could, and it may not live as long, and it may not be as healthy, all based on what you fed them for the first six weeks. Our Naturewise line is a natural line. It has no animal byproducts, for the most part no medications. We do have available a medicated feed for coccidiosis. If you went home and Googled chicken diseases, you would do a forehead slap and go, god, why am I even thinking of doing this because so much stuff will come up. Quite frankly, you probably won't see 99% of that. You might see coccidiosis if you do this any length of time. The medicated feed that you see in the feed aisle is Amprolium and it is only for coccidiosis. It doesn't do anything else. Coccidiosis is a microscopic parasite. It's a protozoa, and it is spread by wild birds into your flock and then from chicken to chicken. They get it from picking on the ground. Quite frankly they're eating poop. But that's a chicken thing. It just kind of happens. So the medicated feed helps prevent this. If you get an outbreak, it's not enough to cure it. It only prevents it. The classic signs or symptoms of coccidiosis, lethargy, they don't feel good, and then they start having bloody droppings. And when you see that, you need to go down to your farm store and get either Amprolium or Sulmet to put in the drinking water to knock it down. You can cure it pretty quick if you catch it fast. But you don't have to do medicated feed. There's not a right or wrong answer. My wife doesn't like giving medicate feed just because, as a preventative. It is not an antibiotic. It is a thiamine blocker, and there is no withdrawal. So it is safe but there again my wife doesn't like giving medication just because. So it's your choice on that. So we have both. It's got pre and probiotics. Basically think of yogurt. It helps the digestive system. A chicken's overall health is a link to its gut health. If they have good gut health, their overall immune system will be stronger, the chicken will be healthier. So it's kind of important that they have that. Not all chicken feeds have the pre and probiotics. Okay, that's it for the commercial. Back to the normally scheduled program. How long do you leave them inside before you take them out? Basically that depends on the weather, and it's not a set time. It is more are the chickens feathered out. When the chickens are fully feathered, if the weather is pretty nice outside, they can go outside. Usually three to four weeks. Three weeks is pretty early. Four to five weeks is probably more likely. What to expect with your baby chicks. When they first come in from the hatchery, they're going to be really loud. They've had a rough ride. Those guys come right out of the incubator into a box. They go on a truck to the post office. From there, they go on an airplane typically, into another truck, maybe to a hub, and then finally either you pick them up or your mail carrier brings them to you. So they've had a pretty rough ride. They're disoriented. They're not happy. But you know what? They're pretty resilient. In a couple hours they kind of snap out of it and they get quiet. Now they're making these contented peeping noises. Next time you're at a farm store that they have baby chicks, take note of the fact that they're really not that loud. They're kind of running around doing little chick things, and they're pretty contented. If they are loud, they're trying to tell you something, and it's usually I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I'm hot, I'm cold. Not in any kind of necessary order, but that's usually what they're trying to tell you. The other thing, they're babies, they'll sleep a lot. I don't care what it is, what kind of baby animal. They do tend to sleep a lot. They're very social. If a baby chick isolates itself, it may not feel good. You may need to get that chicken out of the tank, put it by itself in a separate unit with its own lamp, and let it rest for a few hours. They are flock animals. If you get a weak one, I hate to say it, they'll vote that one off the island. The flock is only as strong as the weakest link. So when you get a weak one, they'll go out of their way to walk on it, pick on it. They will ultimately kill it if you're not careful. So it may just be a matter of taking that chick out of that situation for a few hours, let it rest, and then put it back in. The feathers begin to replace the down in about a week. In a couple of weeks they start trying to fly. Three to four weeks they will be really trying to fly, and this is about as aerodynamic as a chicken ever gets is at about three to four weeks. And by that time you're kind of ready for them to go outside. One of the things I didn't have on there...

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Downside

Is you will get some dust with your chickens if you brood them in the house. We like to brood our chicks in the house. We don't brood a lot at a time. If you keep them clean, you don't smell them. But they do have dust. Every time a feather comes out, it pops a little piece of skin out and you do get a little bit of dust. So that's perfectly normal. Okay, this is that guy that we all have, the neighbor, maybe a family member, let's hope not, that lives down the street. You know, the guy that's gutting the deer in the front yard and waves to you with the bloody knife as you go by.

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Billy Joe Ray Bob usually has three or four first names. Okay, the reason he's in here is because he can come in handy. A lot of you guys may get chickens and the ugly part of chicken ownership that nobody talks about is you may get a chicken that's sick that needs to be euthanized, you may get a chicken that's attacked by predator and her insides are on the outside now but she's not dead. If you talk to that neighbor, and we all have one of these, he'll probably euthanize the chicken for you. He'd probably enjoy it. But anyway, a lot of people can't kill their own chickens. The other thing is these guys pass out a lot of information. You're going to get a lot of information about chickens. I am by no way saying I am the end all when it comes to chickens, but there's a lot of people out there passing out information that may not be all that accurate. Mostly meat birds. I hear a lot of stuff from these good old boys on meat birds. When they were raising meat birds 20 years ago, the genetics were very different than they are now. They used to be able free feed your meat birds as much food as they would eat. You do that now and you'll lose a bunch of them to heart attacks. So making you be aware that there is good use for these guys, but beware of some of the information they pass out. The lighting. Chickens lay based on lighting, not by heat or cold. It is the lighting. They need about 15 hours a day to get eggs. Now, a lot of people in the wintertime will artificially light their chickens. This is fine. It doesn't require anything special. LED lighting, the rule of thumb is enough light to read a newspaper by. Now, what we're seeing is first-year pullets, so let's say you get your chickens in April, at about five to six months when they start laying, you're going to be in the fall, the days are getting shorter so you start lighting them. Then you're kind of opening the door up, we've seen this this year, it's kind of the perfect storm. The hens, a young pullet just coming into lay and now you're playing with her lighting. You can actually cause them to what they call prolapse, and that's where when they lay the egg, her insides kind of come out on the outside and it's fatal. So you may not want to light your first-year pullets. That's where I'm going with this. You won't get eggs that first year, but it's pretty heartbreaking, especially if they're pets, and you artificially light them and you lose one or two. Actually, the percentage is still pretty low, but the first year you may not want to light your pullets. Molting, that's a normal occurrence with chickens. Every year they drop their feathers and replace them. It takes about two months to replace their feathers. While they're molting, they don't lay. Feathers are made of protein, eggs are made of protein. So the chicken's body tells it to transfer all that energy into replacing the feathers. They're not happy. They're crabby. You don't want to handle them if you can help it. They don't like it. This is normal. They all kind of do it at the same time too. Some molt harder than other chickens. What they have found is the ones that, I call them zombie chickens, they drop all their feathers at the same time, and they look horrible. Those are actually your better producers because they bring back their feathers all at once too, much faster anyway, and then they get back into production for you. We actually have a new product. I'll just touch on it briefly. It's called Feather Fixer. When your chickens go into molt, it is specially formulated to bring them back into production faster and form feathers. It is a high enough protein that you could feed this all year. It's got the right calcium level. It also has a natural feed through pest control that kills lice and mites on your chickens. So this is an alternative as well. Weather can be an issue. Your chickens, they deal with the cold. They may not like it, but they deal with it okay. Unlike a pheasant or a turkey, they're not real good at getting their moisture out of the snow. So you need to provide them with water in the wintertime. It may be a heater to melt that water. Otherwise they can actually die of dehydration, even standing in snow. Your coops, the sky is kind of the limit on your coops. You can really go crazy with this. Basic requirements is to keep them out of the elements and predator proof. We do have issues with predators up here. I think raccoons are probably the worst. That's the ones I've seen the most trouble with. A couple of issues with them. They can put their little hands up into things and open latches and pick locks and do all kinds of, you know, open safes. They're really talented.

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And a couple of things that are really insidious about them is once they find you, you may go years and never have a predator problem, once they find your coop, it's like they go on raccoon Facebook and tell all their friends because now you've got an issue. And about all you can do is either destroy them or catch them and do something with them. Okay? I don't know. It depends on your ordinances, but relocate them and that may or may not be legal depending on where you're at. So you want to try to prevent them from getting in. If you can keep them from getting in, they usually will leave you alone. And that just means make a nice, tight coop that they can't get their little hands in. The other thing is they don't just kill one chickens, they kill all the witnesses too. So you'll come out and you'll have a whole coop of dead chickens, and they ate the head off of one. Foxes can be pretty bad about killing the witnesses too. But get creative. A lot of people repurpose things on their coops. There's a lot of coops available commercially. There's a lot of plans available on the Internet, but remember, if a predator can get its head through a hole, they can get in there. So that's where your weasels, your martens, things like that come into play. You may even want to, on the wire siding, put some wire on the bottom and then bury it. That way they can't dig under. That's a coyote/dog thing. Coyotes, you'll just come out and where's Matilda? And you'll never see Matilda again because they came in, kidnapped, well they didn't kidnap her, they snatched and grabbed her and she's gone. Letting your chickens run amok. The chickens like this. Chickens love to free range. If you're not sure if your neighbors are going to appreciate your chickens, this may not be a good idea. You neighbor's garden, we're at a garden show, they will definitely be right in the middle of that. Especially if you've been feeding them veggies. You've kind of just trained them to go get their own veggies. If your neighbor has classic cars, I guarantee they'll walk on the hood and crap all over the car.

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Your neighbor's sidewalk acts like a laxative.

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And your neighbor's just really my not appreciate this. Not to mention, your neighbor's dogs may be really, really hard on chickens. Dogs can be a real big-time predator for chickens, and they kill them just for fun. So if you come out and you have a dead chicken and they didn't eat it, that was probably a dog. A scout chicken. I sit and I talked really bad about Leghorns, not all chickens have the same street smart level. Some of them are very docile. We're not very street smart, Elvis is not very street smart. Elvis would welcome a fox onto the farm. "Hi!" They have no clue. So if you have a flock of Buff Orpingtons, Silkies, Frizzles, some of these birds that don't have the natural instinct to run from a predator, if you have one what I call a scout chicken, now don't go and ask for a scout chicken, this is something we kind of made up, but if you have one smart chicken running with your flock, it will reduce your losses tremendously. I don't know if any of you have ever seen it, but you'll have your chickens out roaming around and one of them will make a noise and everybody dives for cover and then a hawk will buzz by. Now, had that chicken not said something, somebody was going to be lunch. So a good rooster will do that. A rooster may not be an option for you though. Leghorns make great scout chickens. And you can even get an old hen that's not even laying anymore and just have her as a scout chicken. Chicken tractor is an alternative. Chicken tractor is a mobile coop without a bottom. The downside to this is I don't recommend you leave the chickens in this without supervision. Meaning if you're not home, I wouldn't leave them in this because a dog can flip this over, a coyote can flip it over pretty easy. This is kind of like supervised play time for your chickens. They get to roam around. Anything you put that over the top of, like a locust, if it was green it won't be green after a day or two of them picking at it. They just will wipe it out. But that's kind of cool if you have weeds. Parasites. Part of your chicken ownership experience, every once in a while you should check your chickens for parasites. If you go out to your coop, hopefully your chickens are reasonably friendly, you pick one up. If you flip the wing open, you can see there's kind of a bald patch. I don't know if you can see that very well. If you watch that bald patch, you will see little creepy crawlies moving around. You may also see, if you flip the tail up, and you look at the vent area, at the base of the feathers you may see little clumps of stuff. It's like, god, what is that? Those are mites. So either one of those you're going to have to treat your chickens. The good news is typically you only have to check one chicken in the flock. The bad news is if one of them has it, they all have it. Or you should treat everybody anyway. Thank you, Elvis. So, to treat them...

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They make a product called poultry dust, garden dust. You can get it at your farm stores. That works real fast. You can also use food grade diatomaceous Earth. You can put that in their nest boxes. When chickens bathe, I don't know if you know this, they bathe in the dirt and they look like they're having a fit. But if you put some diatomaceous Earth or even the poultry dust, wood ashes works really well too, if you mix that in their dust bathing area, it helps keep the bugs off them as well. We also have the feed stuff with the Feather Fixer that works on your lice and mites as well. Internal parasites, most of you probably won't ever deal with that. When chickens eat bugs they can pick up parasites. Usually it's a worm. It will not pass onto you and the eggs or even in the meat. But if they get enough of them, if they get a really bad infestation, it can start to affect their health. I thought I had a picture. I guess I don't. What we do is every Halloween, well, after Halloween you can get pumpkins real cheap. You take a pumpkin, cut it in half, put it in the coop. They'll eat it. They eat the guts. They eat the seeds. The casing of the seed has an amino acid that paralyzes worms. If you do that once or twice a year in the fall, you probably won't ever have to use a commercial dewormer on your chickens. And they like it. Now, if you have little guys like him, you may need to take those pumpkins seeds and run them through a food processor because he may not be able to eat them whole. So with your Silkies and your Frizzles you may need to use a food processor. Table scraps are fine to give chickens. It's kind of one of the fun things about having chickens. If you'll eat it, they'll eat it. Chickens are omnivores. They are not vegetarians, contrary to popular belief. And believe it or not, chicken is pretty high on the list of things they like. I'm not saying to go do this, but they will eat chicken and they like it. But if you exceed about 10% of their diet with table scraps, you can throw them out of balance. It won't hurt the chicken, but it can throw your egg production off. Scratch is a grain mix that people give to their chickens as a treat, and it's fine. Again, if you exceed about 10% of their diet, you can start affecting your egg production. It's like a grain mix. She asked what Scratch was. Scratch is like a grain mix. It's usually cracked corn, wheat, milo, cracked corn, oats maybe. It's a grain mix. Natural supplements, diatomaceous Earth, everybody calls it DE because it's so hard to spell. I couldn't get my spell corrector thing to do it either. So it's DE. You want to use food grade because the chickens will consume a little bit of it. So you don't want to use a pool grade. It works mechanically. It's not a chemical like a poison. What it does is under a microscope it has jagged edges. So the little creepy crawlies crawl over it and it cuts open their exoskeleton and they die. Apple cider vinegar is a really good thing to have in your chicken kit. I like to use the good stuff that has the mother in it. It's not that much more expensive. It's basically an unpurified apple cider vinegar. What it does is it lowers the pH level of the water, and it makes it harder for things to grow in your water. So a lot of your waterborne illnesses your chickens can get, this will help prevent it. About a tablespoon per gallon, and do it maybe three times a week, will help with that. It also boosts their immune system. It helps them break down the starch in their diet. So it aids their digestion. If they have any kind of respiratory issues, it helps thin the mucous, makes it easier for them to expel that. The downside to it is if you're using a galvanized water system, it will cause it to rust. So this works really well in a plastic system. I don't know if any of you have ever taken the bottom off your plastic water vessel and it's slimy. That is a bio slime. It's a living organism. It itself is not harmful, but it's like a Petri dish. So when you have Mr. Starling comes into your coop and steals food, I don't know why little birds love to do this. They come in, they eat, and they turn around and they crap in the water dish. They just all seem to do that. So anything that little wild bird is carrying is now in your water system. This will definitely help prevent it from growing. Garlic, fresh garlic helps to boost the immune system. It helps with parasites. Some people put it in the water. Be careful with that. I have found sometimes the chickens don't like it in their water. If you start them young and you give them diced or chopped up garlic, a lot of times they kind of develop a taste for it and they'll eat it. If they don't like it, you can put it in olive oil and put it in the sun and let it steep in the sun for about a day in a mason jar. Just a little bit of olive oil and some crushed up garlic, and then drizzle that on some of the food they like, and you can kind of sneak it into them. And that helps with their immune system and the parasites as well. And you only have to do that about once a month. Okay, somebody was asking me about a mean rooster.

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As you know, they are related to the T Rex. They do have a recessive gene for teeth. I probably won't see it in my lifetime, but hopefully, I don't even know if hopefully, I'm sure some nutty scientist will probably bring this out someday. If you have a mean rooster, we always say there's four phases at our house. Phase four is the crock-pot. My wife will not deal with a mean rooster. He's done. If you have little kids, small children, I don't recommend you rehome your rooster. He's going to be somebody else's problem. Just put him in the crock-pot. Get rid of him. Phase one is when the chicken attacks you in the morning, you can pick him up. Obviously if Elvis was mean he would not be that big a deal. If we were dealing with something like a Rhode Island Red or a Buckeye, it's a little bit more interesting. He weighs eight ounces. A Buckeye is probably an eight pound rooster. So it's a little bit more dangerous. You restrain him. Make sure you hold him by the neck so he can't bite you. And he'll struggle and he won't like it. I'm just trying to stay by the mic. Okay, so you've got him by the neck, and you just kind of go about your business. And he will try to bite you. In his little pea brain, he doesn't consciously realize this but you've dominated him. When a predator kills a chicken, they pick him up. This may or may not work. Phase two, I'm not going to do to Elvis because I like Elvis. Phase two is you restrain him, you've got a hold of him, now flip him over and hold him by the feet, upside down. Make sure all the girls see this. Make sure you parade him in front of all the girls. You've dominated him in front of his harem. He is going to hate you until the day he dies. He will despise you. Okay?

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But usually that will do the trick. That will usually break him of it. Now, my friend who is from the Philippines and said phase three is you dunk him in a bucket of water and do the same thing. Don't do that in the wintertime up here. That won't end well. Now, just because you have broken him doesn't mean that any other family members or your neighbors can come in. He's been dominated by you. Now, it's not that the rooster is evil. He's doing his job. He's hardwired to protect his flock, and part of that is showing off. Little kids are just too tempting. They're just that right size. He can show off. If you have a three-year-old and a 12-pound Rhode Island Red rooster, all the sudden this gets pretty serious real fast. So just put him in the crock-pot. Get rid of him. It's genetic too. So if he's mean, his sons will probably be mean. Pecking order, adding new chickens to your flock, adding adult chickens. You're going to have drama. Chickens are all about drama. Actually having a rooster does help, because his whole purpose in life is to spread his DNA. He's not going to let the existing hens kill some young hens coming in. In the same breath, the easiest way to do it is take your young chickens, don't try to introduce one new chicken into the flock. It just doesn't end well. What we do is we'll introduce multiple, and your young hens, six weeks and up, put them in a cage, put that cage in the coop, let them see each other face to face for about a week but they can't get to each other, and then one evening, let them all wake up together in the coop together. Be home that morning though because even doing that you're going to have a bunch of drama. Have extra water and food stations because a lot of times what the older existing hens will do is they won't let the new ones eat and drink. So you want to put extra food and water stations. Meat birds, I think we're going to slip right past that. Ornamentals, he is what they call an ornamental. If you've never been to a chicken show, I recommend you go. We have a big one in Portage. We have a big one in Beaver Dam. They're usually free. Lots of kids. It's one thing to see chickens on the Internet, but when you're seeing them up close and personal and you can ask the kids about them, they'll tell you, chicken show people are generally really friendly. I don't recommend you start off with ornamentals because some of them require a lot of extra care. Like this one, he'll get a real long tail. You have to light him special. You'll have to have a special perch for him. So I really don't recommend those for a beginner. Start off with a nice, easy laying hen and then move into it. The learning curve is real fast. Once you master laying hens, then you can jump into some of your more exotics. And I think that's it. We have a few minutes for questions.