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

[fowlman01]

Mine seem to do well eating whatever unprepared part of an eggshell I throw out to them. I had never heard of "preparing" them.

Walt

 

[Fred's Hens]

Geography plays a big part in flock management. In regards to whether or not you winter over a bird, for example, it makes a huge difference. Between us brothers, we have two farms in KY and my place here in the north woods. The bugs/growing season is 100 days in difference, just to point out one difference. Winter may mean the occasional snow in southern KY, but basically, the birds can be outside 360 out of 365 days.

Here deep snow pack will often the cover the ground for months on end. There is no range. Even in the summer, our range cannot provide what the lively grasses and bugs of KY can. A bird wintered over up here has to endure long periods of being in the barn pens. This limits how many birds you can winter over. It simply costs more to keep a bird here, on an annualized basis. Thus, I'm much quicker and more likely to cull than the guys in KY are. Also, each spring and again each fall, I am transporting a dozen or more birds back and forth. Sometimes it is breeding stock heading down, and pullets coming back. That kind of thing.

We've grown a bit weary of buying commercial chicks and having to flip them, basically, every 3 years. Boy do they lay like a house a-fire the first 15 months and you can sell a lot of eggs on very little feed. But ..... you likely know the rest. We have also had very mixed results in many of the DP lines, from various hatcheries. Through selective breeding, we are working on our own line of layer. We've got three years and ran hundreds of birds in those experiments. We're still crunching the financial productivity numbers on these layers. We're not there yet.

It is also helps explain why we are all growing in our interest with true bred, heritage birds.

 

[stonykill]

I see on other threads all the time people worming their flock. I have never had to worm as I've never had a chicken with worms. how about the OT's? Do you have to or do the good husbandry practices make it as rare as bumblefoot in my flock. Another thing I've never had happen.

 

[Erin~TheChickenLover]

I see on other threads all the time people worming their flock. I have never had to worm as I've never had a chicken with worms. how about the OT's? Do you have to or do the good husbandry practices make it as rare as bumblefoot in my flock. Another thing I've never had happen.

We have a lot of worm problems where I live. Mostly round worms. I'm not an OT, but I find it best to worm my laying flock. They free range all over our 20 acres and I don't want them dropping round worms that our dogs could pick up. (That would be gross) I just got done worming the layers, will wait 3 weeks to use the eggs again. I found a splat with some little...crawlies in it and said that was enough. All the wild life have round worm infestations. We killed a chicken snake and cut it open to see how many eggs that it had in it. No eggs but a stomach just full of round worms. I've never had bumblefoot in my flock, either.

 

[MoonAngel12]

Mine seem to do well eating whatever unprepared part of an eggshell I throw out to them. I had never heard of "preparing" them.

Walt

The reason they gave was to help kill off anything nasty in the, but that might be one of those overkill store vs. backyard eggs type things where, with a good, healthy flock it doesn't matter at all. Plus they just crush easier when they are dried and crispy. The one person I know that just tosses mostly formed egg shells did have an issue with an egg eater (and yes, she did see it lay an egg then turn around and eat it), but that could be because of other reasons like their diet... who knows. It was enough for me to take those couple extra easy steps to crisp them up and crush them.

 

[Beekissed]

Mine seem to do well eating whatever unprepared part of an eggshell I throw out to them. I had never heard of "preparing" them.

Walt

Same here and for all the other people I know with chickens....no prep needed, never had an "egg-eater". That story is much like the people-getting-penned-into-their-car-by-the-seatbelt story that one hears as justification for not wearing a seatbelt. The incidence of this actually happening and resulting in death is so rare but people still use it to justify something~laziness, defiance, etc., when it comes to wearing a safety belt.

I find that those using "egg-eaters" to justify elaborate treatment of eggshells or the thought they might "get something" from the eggshells is just that....an excuse to make drama where none exists. It doesn't have to be that way...it's fairly simple. Chickens eat eggs for various reasons in a natural setting...to clean up an infertile egg in a clutch they are brooding, a cracked or leaking egg in the nest, etc. This is natural and normal...it does not make them cannibalistic birds or there would never be another chicken hatched and they would have died out long ago.

Last and final word to all newbies....feeding egg shells to your chickens "as is" will not make them "egg-eaters". You're thousands of years too late, you can't turn them into something they already are...they were designed to be opportunistic eaters and have been so since there ever were chickens on the earth.

 

[fowlman01]

The reason they gave was to help kill off anything nasty in the, but that might be one of those overkill store vs. backyard eggs type things where, with a good, healthy flock it doesn't matter at all. Plus they just crush easier when they are dried and crispy. The one person I know that just tosses mostly formed egg shells did have an issue with an egg eater (and yes, she did see it lay an egg then turn around and eat it), but that could be because of other reasons like their diet... who knows. It was enough for me to take those couple extra easy steps to crisp them up and crush them.

I could see that it may produce an egg eater, but I have never had a chicken eat an egg here ......ever. I don't worm, but I would if I had a problem.

I pretty much let these chickens do their thing with little intervention from me. I have 500 birds here at the moment, so I try to cut the maintenance where I can. It is a lot of work to keep these birds ready to show, so anywhere I can cut time I do. We have also had hot weather since June and I don't see any dead birds here, so I guess they are fine.

Walt

 

[MoonAngel12]

Quote:
Thanks for the reassurance. Thankfully my biggest source of information is a pretty level headed, laid back friend... Not sure who I talked to about the egg shells originally. As has been mentioned many times in this thread, it's tough to sort out fact from fiction, especially with so many different opinions on how things "should" be done. Really really glad I found this thread.

 

[Beekissed]

It's important that folks sift the information they read here and in books and other websites. One has to ask oneself if that is something that sounds reasonable. Chickens are around eggs on a daily basis for pretty much all their lives. You could say that eggs are pretty much in their face after they come out of their butt....the temptation is there at all times. At any given time an egg is laid soft shelled, weak shelled, laid while on the roost, stepped on by a big hen in a nest full of eggs.....you name it, broken eggs happen. When they do, chickens eat them...every last bit.

The fact is that out of all the eggs they lay, the broken ones aren't very frequent~if they are it's a flock management problem, not a bird problem. Now, if you were feeding raw eggs to your chickens on a daily basis~just throwing eggs onto the floor of the coop and watching them gobble them down~you might condition your chickens to see eggs as a food source that they would seek out or forage for.

Neither is feeding egg shells back to your chickens very frequent. We might have one or two eggs per day, or not, or we may have half a dozen at a time but maybe only once in awhile. Egg shells themselves aren't the tasty portion of eggs.

Actually, if I have a colander full of dried out egg shells on my counter and go to throw it to the birds, a few will pick at them but mostly those shells will just lie there. I have to actually crush them with my hands and place them in the feeder in the feed to get them to eat them at all. If an egg shell is fresh with some good juice still in evidence I have better luck and they will fight for that fresh shell because it still has some flavorful content clinging to the inner walls.

It's all in watching chickens and how they actually behave on a daily basis...not just watching them for a few minutes in the evening when you throw down some treats or put them on your lap. The best education on chickens comes from watching them day in, day out over the years and seasons to see how they live out their chickeny lives. This is easier the more natural setting you provide...free range areas are excellent for watching birds interacting/living.

 

[thedragonlady]

I see on other threads all the time people worming their flock. I have never had to worm as I've never had a chicken with worms. how about the OT's? Do you have to or do the good husbandry practices make it as rare as bumblefoot in my flock. Another thing I've never had happen.

Rarely you might spot a few roundworms in chicken droppings, but most chickens have worms.You don't see the worms; you see the effects. Birds with a soft clearing the throat cough pretty much signals gape worms, which they pick up from eating garden worms. Round worms are spread by all sorts of birds, as are tapeworms. The severity of the worms' effects on the birds depends on age, degree of immunity, and living conditions .I'll bet if you run a flock fecal; you will find worms of some kind. The more crowded the flock; the higher the potential worm load. That goes for coccidia too.