Chickens for 10-20 years or more? Pull up a rockin' chair and lay some wisdom on us!

[Beekissed]

After seeing Nifty's poll on years of flock management, it seems there are enough old timers here to compile some good, old-fashioned and time-honored tricks of the trade....anyone care to share their philosophy on chickens and all things pertaining?

Now then, I'd like to ask folks to be respectful of one another when the methods of husbandry aren't the same....naturally this is going to happen.

THREAD WARNING: The old-timers are just that, nothing more and nothing less. Their speech may be to the point, sassy, and no-nonsense~this does not mean they meant to offend you or each other. This is just how old farmers talk.

If you are very sensitive and offend easily, it may be time to turn your car around and head back to where the couches are soft and the music is soft and dreamy....this is where the rubber meets the road and only the strong survive.


****A suggestion has been made by a newbie that we all place our relative years of chicken husbandry next to our location on our profile....I think this is a good idea and will sort the wheat from the tares, so to speak. Get yer years up there and show yer ages in doing so....we won't laugh...much. ********

 

[Fred's Hens]

OK..... I just dip my toe in the water.... and see how this goes.

Brood chicks out in the garage, in a shed, or in the barn, or least in your mud room or back porch for goodness sakes. Chicks do not have to be brooded indoors, giving everyone cast iron lungs, sinus allergies and rooms that must look like someone shook out a flour sack. The entire brooder does not need to be 95F. Stop putting so much sugary crap in the water and cooking chicks in little suffocating plastic totes where the temps are 95-100 degrees and 99% of the posts of "Oh No!! My chick has poop butt, what should I do?" would go away.


Now, Bee, if I've already been too plain spoken, I'll bow out. No problem.

 

[Fred's Hens]

One of my first flocks, circa 1959

 

[Beekissed]

I'll take a stab at it...but you know that 5 things are just a little limiting. We'll call it a wisdom snack, shall we?

1. You do not have an "egg-eater"...you have a whole flock of egg-eaters. For whatever reason, your egg shells are thin and becoming broken upon laying, other hens climbing over them, etc. Any chicken will eat any broken egg on any given day that ends in "Y"....do not start culling, isolating, or retraining a bird with hot sauce just yet. Give added calcium in the rations, maybe some added protein and wait a while...it all works out in the end.

2. An ounce of preventative health care is worth a pound of medicine mixed in their water...do yourself a favor and stop diseases before they start so you won't have to post with titles that start with "HELP!"

3. Regular chemical deworming just isn't necessary~IME~I've never done it, never needed to, have the healthy flocks to prove it. Try to look for natural ways to help your flock shed parasites, create living conditions that do not support heavy parasite loads and cull your birds to keep only those who thrive well with their existing parasite loads. There isn't an animal in the wild that doesn't have intestinal and other parasites and yet they thrive and....if you haven't dewormed yourself this year, your chickens don't need it either.

4. Bleach has never touched any surface in my coops....it isn't necessary as those surfaces will just have fecal matter within seconds a bird walks back into the coop. Save yourself the stress, work and worry of your chickens getting germs~news flash: They eat their own poop and the poop of others....get over it and let them live with their very healthy, germy environment.

5. Vinegar is a great health tonic for chickens and other livestock...if you don't believe that, at least you cannot prove that there has ever been a poultry-related death caused by apple cider vinegar overdosing or usage. Whattayagottolose here???

Use the darn ACV!

(No, it doesn't necessarily have to have the mother in it to be a good thing for your chickens...)

 

[al6517]

Here is my stab at 5.

1. Chickens do not need treats or warm mushy human food, served to them.

2. Chickens brains are not wired like a humans, they don't think about..... Gee that rooster sure is being mean to me. and they are not emotional like most prefer to think they are.

3. Chickens do not require names to survive, or diapers, or aprons.

4. News flash.......... chickens actually do much better outside not in the house lounging on your sofa leaving you a smelly little gift and scratching in the carpet for bug's.

5. Holding a chicken to your face WILL !!! get yer eye poked out.

 

[mississippifarmboy]

Quote:
5 points?

Humm..

I'm gonna start and get in trouble. But oh well, you asked.

1. Don't get too attached, they are chickens, not children.
2. Never put up with a mean rooster. Ever.
3. No matter if you are raising for eggs, meat or show... cull if needed. (If you are raising for pets I guess you can skip this one.

)
4. Realize, like BeeKissed said, most things you see are slanted to the USDA and commercial producers. As my grandfather once told me "Believe nothing you read and only half of what you see"
5. Remember I don't know much either.

 

[mississippifarmboy]

40 + years here and I know nothin'




The older I get, the less I know.

 

[mississippifarmboy]

Just catching up and reading all the responses and thought of something else about how very delicate and fragile chickens are.

When I was a kid "chick starter" was also called "corn meal"

I use store bought starter now just because it's quick and easy to buy, but for generations, the starter was plain old corn meal, usually home ground too. Ma had an open bottomed "cage" sorta thing with 2" X 4" wire inside one corner of the chicken house. She would put an old flat pan inside full of corn meal inside it and the chicks could get to it but the larger chickens couldn't. Our chicken house was just old barn lumber with a tin roof and dirt floor, not much different from my current one. There was a small run on one end that was only used when we wanted to breed a certain breed, we would put the rooster and the hens we wanted in there, after a few weeks would stop gathering the eggs and let a few broody hens sit the eggs, then open the door when they hatched and turn them loose. Other than breeding season, they all free ranged over the yard, patures, fields and woods. We did shut the coop door every night and open it again about daylight every morning. Feeders were galvanized store bought ones, home made wooden V type troughs with 2" X 4" wire over the top sitting on old bricks, old hubcaps and just thrown on the ground sometimes with grains. Waterers were cut down buckets, hot water heater tanks cut in half long ways, old bent up washpans and the ponds and creek.

Like most of the other OTs that have posted here, in our family it was the women who managed the flocks, feed, watered, done the breeding and such. Us boy kids done the butchering and cleaning and Pa took all the credit.

We fed a mix of cheap layer pellets, whole and cracked corn, whatever scraps and such the dogs and pigs didn't eat and they spent a lot of time digging through the "droppings" of the horses, pigs, cows and other animals. They also had run of the fields and gardens after we finished with them for the season.

I do not have, and no one I was ever around ever had electricity and running water in the coops or runs. I've never had a chicken freeze to death either, although I have had a few large combed roosters loose the points on their combs during a hard winter. The way I dealt with that was.... to ignore it. By spring they looked fine, the tips would turn black, eventually shed off and no harm done. And even this happend only a very few times during very severe weather.

We had a few that had names like "that red rooster" or "spotted hen", but nothing more personal. They were chickens, not pets. All were going to wind up in the cook pot at some point, when depended on when they quit being productive. Some never made it to a year, several would be 5 or 6 years old when dumpling day came. A rooster flogged us, he was dinner come Sunday. No exceptions.

I do worm if I see any sign that they have worms, but it is very rare. Growing up I didn't even know you COULD worm a chicken.

I remember just a few times that a chicken would have leg mites. Pa would catch it, dip a small rag in coal oil and tie around it's legs. After about a week or less they would pick it loose and the legs would be clean and clear of mites. He always coated the roost poles with burnt motor oil a couple of times a year too to keep mites away.

Culling was done anytime a chicken was hurt or wasn't growing right, and the culls we ate. We never even tried to "fix" a limping chicken, one that was a runt or such. Killing was quick and as humane as possible with any animal on the farm. It's not something you enjoy, but in my opinion, if you are going to raise chickens, you better be able to do it and do it right. Period.

Since I started trying to work with rare and heritage breeds, I admit I cull harder than ever. But on a working farm like ours, there is no waste, we just eat a lot of chickens.

I've always loved chickens. I love sitting out in the yard watching them, it relaxes me. I love the variety, the colors and just the individual personalities of them. I enjoy feeding, watering and taking care of them. I've got just a few I paid insane amounts of money for, just because I wanted them. But at the end of the day.....

They are still chickens.

 

[IvyMaeWilliams]

"How do I get some of these birds you ask ??? they are out there all over the place, you just have to look beyond your hatchery nose. Shoot !!! go down the road or out to the country for a Sunday drive and see flocks raised by people who don't even know Hatcheries exsist, that's where"

Al and others,
I think maybe y'all underestimate a little bit the difficulties us non-OTs face in trying to get into chickens or any small-ag enterprise or hobby these days. I'm 32, and though I am only 2 generations removed from my strawberry and tobacco farming ancestors, I was raised by a generation who scorned anything farming related. I grew up in a very rural area, where the prevailing mentality was to get out of there ASAP and never look back. Only the poor and uneducated were interested in farm stuff, people told me. Now, after pursuing academia and hating it, I'm back in my hometown, on the same 10 acres of land, and having an unbelievably hard time getting good information about how to raise animals and a garden. There are a lot of people my age that I know who want to learn these things--I was even at a party the other night where I heard a group of 20-something girls talking about canning (which is of course a little silly since they don't raise any food to put in the jars, but that's beside the point). There are farmers at my church, but they are the kind with 600 acres who only raise corn or cattle and nothing else. Then there are the small yuppie farms who show up at the farmer's market, which all have chickens but only hatchery stock. I try to talk to the old guys selling turnip greens out of the backs of their trucks, but it turns out they get their eggs from the store. And the feed store? Staffed almost completely by kids from the local high school. I did business with one lady with a backyard flock, and she knowingly sold me 6 chickens with CRD, then moved a few weeks later.
So here we are, no money and no information. No wonder we get sidetracked by what the internet offers!
Now I get it, a lot of people have a lot of superficial trendy interests and will never put in the effort to get better at any of them, but if someone's read 1200 pages of an OTs thread because there aren't any OTs living down the road willing to give them the time of day, they're probably at least trying. I ask where to get real DP birds that don't cost the $100 I saw on a breeder's website because I have literally combed the tri-county area with no luck.
So don't get frustrated with us. I bet there are a lot of others like me who feel like they are living in a time and place bankrupt of common sense, work ethic, and an appreciation for things that last. We can't learn in a vacuum!

I hope this doesn't sound disrespectful--I don't mean that at all!! I appreciate everything y'all say on here and I bet the questions newbies ask are frustrating as all get out. I guess I just wanted y'all to know that we're not always being stupid, we are just kind of floundering out here on our own.

 

[Michelle R]

I am NOT very happy with this thread.....I read all 4,084 posts, took notes, watched the incubation video got to know you folks just by reading your posts. Loved it because I like being around OT's, always have. But then I went to another thread and what did I see but a bunch of whiny chicken huggers talking about putting stuffed animals in their brooders and keeping their chickens in the living room. I kept thinking, 'what would Al say about this?' or 'Man, Fred would hate this'. My point is....you've all ruined me from reading other threads! I suppose I'll just have to pull up a chair and keep hanging out with you OTs and the other newbies that have discovered where the REAL information can be gathered! Thanks for all of your help and for sharing your coops with me. I'm brooding my first flock now and I've had all of my many, many questions answered here.