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

[bj taylor]

i'm using deep litter. i have it on plywood w/linoleum. no moisture, good ventilation. i'm not having any problems with it at all.

 

[HappyHenMama]

What y'all been up to whilst I was away? Still culling the English language, I see.....

I don't normally use the word cull unless I'm on this forum, as it seems to be the euphemistic term for killing and a lot of folks really shudder when you say you actually kill the chicken, even if they kill theirs also.

At my place, cull and kill are synonymous~when I cull a bird it generally follows that I immediately kill it for food, so six of one, half dozen of the other at the end of the day.

I assume that serious breeders do the same as they wouldn't want a cull running around in the community claiming ties to their prestigious bloodlines, would they? I know I wouldn't if I were a breeder and my bloodlines were the result of years of hard work and dedication. Every bird with a foot on the ground is an advertisement for your work and judgement of good stock, so leaving a cull around to showcase that could be a bad call, IMO.

As for the rest of the less serious chicken owners, I'd say that cull isn't really in their vocabulary...probably more apt to say "re-home" or plain ol' kill as they probably aren't breeding or trying to develop certain traits in their flock.

I could very well be wrong on that but that's how I see it from this neck of the woods.

Carry on!

Good to see you back here on this thread Beekissed!

 

[ldutch123]

I will keep it up then! So I just stir it up every once in a while and top with new litter? I have a ton of ventilation and it didn't smell but it looks like a bunch of poop lol straw and pine chips

 

[HappyHenMama]

Originally Posted by loanwizard

Does cut its head off still mean to separate its head from its shoulders with a sharp implement?

Does plucking still mean pull its feathers out?

I wonder about the word butcher..... To me it means to really mess something up.... Like when I butcher the English language..... I suppose you could butcher a butcher job if you were a really bad butcher....

"Technical or hobby specific" terms are not always the same as what one would find in the dictionary. While they are fighting about it can you find me a Nissan GT-R for around $50K? lol

Walt

LMAO

 

[Achickenwrangler#1]

OK, sigh..just to make me clear, and that would be bastardizing the English language, not butchering it (sorry, my mother had her masters in English so i have been disciplined to a fault) and now I know what page y'all are on, culling doesn't always imply an inferior animal, although it may mean that to most, I may cull a rooster simply because he's not the color I am breeding for, he however may be superior in other abilities and more suited to someone else's needs..it can be a close call and a gamble to either buy or sell any animal, caveat emptor, I wouldn't sell my best bird or expect a breeder to either...the traits I want won't be the traits you want. I thought it was made clear earlier that the word 'process' was to mean the act of killing,plucking,freezing etc. Excuse me.
As for deep litter, wouldn't linoleum or a tarp protect the floor/wood and work the same?

 

[Ridgerunner]

I keep hearing about the deep litter system. What is it exactly?

That's another questionable term. Some folks think of deep litter as just that....someone using a deep layer of bedding in their coop so that waste is lost in the thickness of the wood shavings/straw/hay until it just can't hold anymore without stinking and then they rake it all out and start again.

Some add a few inches when it it gets saturated, lets it get around 6-8 in. deep using this method and then cleans it out and starts again.

Others add new bedding now and again, keep the old bedding turned, letting it decompose and settle over time and rarely ever remove the bedding from the coop for many months or years. This takes really good ventilation and an understanding of what healthy bedding should smell like, look like, feel like. Deep litter purists subscribe to this method as being a true deep litter system as opposed to cleaning it out more often and before it has composted properly.

True deep litter that is well managed provides an environment for good bacterial/microbial growth that will prevent an overgrowth of more harmful pathogens in the coop environment...but it's easy to let that get out of balance if you don't know what you are doing and it can become a petri dish of harmful bacteria or excessive ammonia build-up when too moist, no ventilation, etc.

Good answer, Bee, and welcome back. Your absence was noted. You were missed.

I’m certainly not a purist about much of anything but it has been three years since I cleaned mine out. I don’t worry about trying to compost it in the coop. It’ll have time for composting when I get off my butt and put it in the garden some fall, probably this coming fall. The garden needs it.

It depends on what you want out of it. Like a lot of other things you can get as complicated and technical as you wish, or you can keep it fairly simple. A lot of what is possible for you depends on your specific conditions. You need the coop built to accommodate it, otherwise the bedding spills out doors and pop door, if your door opens inward the bedding will block the door, or if your nests are too low, they may partially disappear. Things like that.

The bedding needs to stay fairly dry. Mine gets damp from a rain or snow out of the north, but the ventilation is good enough that it dries out pretty quickly, especially with a little raking. I don’t do it, but some people scatter scratch in the bedding so the chickens rake it for them. I don’t worry about trying to keep a perfect moisture level to support a specific microbe level. I just don’t want it to stink or go bad. Mine does smell just a tad when I get weather out of the north, but that smell goes away pretty quickly.

How well it works will depend on the poop load. If your chickens spend a lot of time in the coop or if you have a relatively small coop for the number of chickens, the poop will build up a faster. The faster it builds up, the more often you have to change it. You can reduce that poop build-up by using droppings boards or just shoveling out the stuff that builds up under the roost. I finally got around to building in a permanent brooder under the roosts so the top can be used as a droppings board. I scrape it about once every week or two. That was to get the poop for my compost heap more than trying to extend the life of the bedding, but mainly because I got tired of moving my brooder in and out of the coop. The older I got, the harder that became. Before that brooder/droppings board, I just cleaned out the poop build-up under my roosts when it became noticeable and I thought it was time.

I don’t have an elevated coop, just a plain dirt floor. I’d really be concerned with many types of flooring (especially wood) if the bedding was damp enough to support a microbe population. Microbes will eat wood too, especially if it is damp. It’s called rot by some of us. (After that “cull” outbreak, I’m trying to be careful how I use certain words.) But if wood stays dry, it will last a long time.

 

[therapydoglady]

When we had the broiler houses (I was pretty young, but I remember "Pilgrim's Pride" on the side of the trucks), we put fresh straw down between each batch. When those chickens grew off, they'd raise the feeders and waters to the ceiling and roll up what was on the floor with a front end loader. It rolled up like a strip of carpet it was so packed. My Grandfather had to put it through a shreader and spread it on the hay fields...others, I remember just had huge mountains of chicken poop and straw piled up. I suppose they just didn't have anywhere to put it...who knows?

But when we changed to the hens, we started off with about a foot deep layer of straw. Nest boxes the full length of the buildings, feeders and waterers in the middle. We turned the straw every week with pitchforks (well, someone did. I wasn't big enough in the britches for that chore. I gathered eggs!). Aeration was great in those buildings. I don't ever remember a bad smell. ( I do remember a few mean roosters, tho.) We changed the liter twice a year - Spring and Late Fall. Probably because the buildings were closed up more in the winter months. Again with the front end loader, but it was not packed down, and loaded easily by the bucket fulls onto a trailer to be spread on the fields. So I guess this was "deep litter."
.
BTW. We had the most beautiful hay fields for miles around! and NEVER had to buy feed for our dairy cows! Chicken poop is wunnerful fertilizer.

 

[ajlynco]

I'm going to band my 11 chooks with the plastic splitring type bands. I'm thinking I'll need to do this after dark when they're roosting. Do I just pick them off of the roost one at a time, band em , and then replace her on the roost and go to the next one? I've never disturbed them after dark. Any advice would be appreciated and if there is a better way, lay it on me.

 

[Ridgerunner]

That sounds perfect to me. Just use as little light as possible. If they can see pretty well, they may be hard to pick off the roost or they may just hop down on their own.

 

[stonykill]

broody's, the only way to raise smart, healthy chicks.