How were flocks of poultry maintained hundreds of years ago?

[U_Stormcrow]

Because it isn't said enough. Chicken math includes Addition AND Subtraction. (this coming weekend, for me).

 

[saysfaa]

...

As a result, any bird over 200 eggs a year was considered to be incredibly productive! Now 320-356 is the industry standard, mostly as a result of breeding but also improved feed.

Sort of.

One of the issues was that people usually didn't know how many eggs a given hen laid until trap nests were invented by people who published studies. Some inventive farmers may have invented them also but they didn't spread the idea much.

Anyway, once researchers could tell which hens laid which eggs, they realized that most flocks had some hens laying 150-200 or more eggs per year even though the average for the flock was 40-50 or so.

The researchers started systematically breeding for more eggs. They also started systematically differentiating the physical signs of hens who laid more eggs - body shape, rate of molting, ect. And publishing the info. Then most people could also systematically breed for more eggs even if they didn't use trap nests. They could do it with a few minutes of checking body condition done a few times a year.

 

[NatJ]

Don't forget the most obvious way to save on feed: have fewer chickens. For example, feeding 6 good layers is cheaper than feeding 8-10 poor layers for the same number of eggs.

Oops, I should have clarified: this is true if you are providing all the food they eat (which includes wintertime in many climates.)

In situations where the chickens can forage for much of their own food, a hen may be able to find enough food to stay alive and lay a few eggs but not enough extra food to lay a large number of eggs. That would make it cheaper to have poor layers and not provide food for them, instead of having good layers and giving them some food, up to the point where they eat all the available food and you have to provide food anyway. Then the balance starts to swing back toward the good layers again.

Two hens can probably find & eat twice as many bugs & plants as one hen (two hens' worth of bug-hunting and plant-eating labor), but a dozen hens might eat all the bugs and plants and still be hungry.

So there are several different ways to balance the number & productivity of hens with the amount of food they can forage and what you provide, but in every case there is some number of chickens that give you the best cost-per-chicken or cost-per-egg, and adding more chickens will raise that cost.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Chicken and egg until the turn of the century wet actually a rich persons food. It wasn’t prevalent food like it is today.

According to the census, at the start of the 20th century (1900) about 40% of the US population was considered Urban. I did not see what the population of the city had to be for it to be considered Urban, probably in the low thousands. 39% was considered Farm. The remaining 21% was considered Non-Farm. I'd assume that was small towns and villages and some people that commuted to work in a city or town. This is to give a perspective. Life was different then than it is now. Some people in small towns or villages kept chicken flocks for eggs. Some meat also.

I grew up on a small farm in Appalachia in the 1950's and 1960's. We were in no way considered rich though Dad did own the farm. Like many of our neighbors and relatives we had a flock of free ranging chicken that pretty much fed themselves. We ate chicken meat but the majority of our meat was from pigs that we raised. We ate chicken a little less than once a week, more in the fall as we were butchering them to get down to our winter flock.

Eggs were a breakfast staple. We depended on eggs. We could not afford to buy "breakfast foods" or much else of what we ate, we mostly ate what we could produce ourselves. Deviled eggs were a nice side dish for other meals though we did not have them often.

For an urban person chicken meat and eggs were considered an expensive food back then. You could take a dozen hen eggs to the local grocery store and trade them in for other foods we could not produce. Eggs were valuable. But from my perspective, growing up dirt poor, eggs were not a rich person's food, they were a staple. And we ate a fair amount of cockerels and old hens.

 

[rockethoe]

According to the census, at the start of the 20th century (1900) about 40% of the US population was considered Urban. I did not see what the population of the city had to be for it to be considered Urban, probably in the low thousands. 39% was considered Farm. The remaining 21% was considered Non-Farm. I'd assume that was small towns and villages and some people that commuted to work in a city or town. This is to give a perspective. Life was different then than it is now. Some people in small towns or villages kept chicken flocks for eggs. Some meat also.

I grew up on a small farm in Appalachia in the 1950's and 1960's. We were in no way considered rich though Dad did own the farm. Like many of our neighbors and relatives we had a flock of free ranging chicken that pretty much fed themselves. We ate chicken meat but the majority of our meat was from pigs that we raised. We ate chicken a little less than once a week, more in the fall as we were butchering them to get down to our winter flock.

Eggs were a breakfast staple. We depended on eggs. We could not afford to buy "breakfast foods" or much else of what we ate, we mostly ate what we could produce ourselves. Deviled eggs were a nice side dish for other meals though we did not have them often.

For an urban person chicken meat and eggs were considered an expensive food back then. You could take a dozen hen eggs to the local grocery store and trade them in for other foods we could not produce. Eggs were valuable. But from my perspective, growing up dirt poor, eggs were not a rich person's food, they were a staple. And we ate a fair amount of cockerels and old hens.

Sure I should have clarified, I didn’t mean the turn of this century, but last.

 

[Down Under]

Lots of great answers in this thread that I enjoyed reading but I have to ask don't the Amish still farm the same way they did hundreds of years ago ?

 

[K0k0shka]

My grandparents were subsistence farmers in zone 6 (cold, snowy winters) and I spent a lot of my youth helping out on the farm. The layers were replaced every year with a fresh crop of pullets. The older layers were culled heavily in the fall after they started to molt and stopped laying, so we had a minimal number of chickens left going into winter. In the winter, they were fed leftovers plus grain that was harvested in the fall and stored in silos. The milk animals (cows, goats, sheep) were fed hay and grain that was stored for winter. In the warm months they were out in the hills grazing, and got a supplement of grain when they came home every night for milking. A large fraction of the labor put in in the summer was to grow, harvest, and store animal feed to last them the winter, as nobody could forage anything on the frozen, barren land.

 

[Ridgerunner]

A large fraction of the labor put in in the summer was to grow, harvest, and store animal feed to last them the winter

Ah, memories. Two acres of corn. The land was turned and harrowed with plow horses, planted with a horse drawn corn planter. The rows were plowed using a horse drawn double shovel or triple foot plow until the corn got too high for plowing. We used hoes to hand weed the entire two acres. Harvest was by hand, tossing the ears into a horse-drawn wagon, and loaded by shovel into a corn crib. Some of the corn stalks were made into shocks to feed during winter.

I don't know how many acres of hay Dad raised, enough to fill a large barn. Every few years dad would have to reseed the hay fields but once seeded it would last several years. The hay was cut by a horse-drawn mower and raked with a horse-drawn rake. We'd load it onto a horse-drawn special hay wagon with pitchforks. Dad installed a horse-drawn hay fork to help move most of it from the wagon to the hay loft.

Then in the 1960's a neighbor got a tractor. He's cut the hay and bail it for us which made it a lot easier to harvest. He'd take half the hay bales as payment but Dad felt it was worth it. The bales would weigh between 40 pounds and 80 pounds or even more, depending in what type of hay it was. We'd help the guy that cut and baled it load his hay and he's help us get ours in the barn. Loading the truck was by hand. We usually had a device, I'll call it a hay escalator, to get the hay into the loft but it still had to be loaded by hand and people had to carry and stack it in the barn loft.
So yes, a lot of labor and time went into raising and storing animal food. Some people think of those times as romantic and idealistic. Boy, would they have liked to live then. I enjoyed it but also remember a lot of blisters on my hands.

 

[K0k0shka]

Ah, memories. Two acres of corn. The land was turned and harrowed with plow horses, planted with a horse drawn corn planter. The rows were plowed using a horse drawn double shovel or triple foot plow until the corn got too high for plowing. We used hoes to hand weed the entire two acres. Harvest was by hand, tossing the ears into a horse-drawn wagon, and loaded by shovel into a corn crib. Some of the corn stalks were made into shocks to feed during winter.

I don't know how many acres of hay Dad raised, enough to fill a large barn. Every few years dad would have to reseed the hay fields but once seeded it would last several years. The hay was cut by a horse-drawn mower and raked with a horse-drawn rake. We'd load it onto a horse-drawn special hay wagon with pitchforks. Dad installed a horse-drawn hay fork to help move most of it from the wagon to the hay loft.

Then in the 1960's a neighbor got a tractor. He's cut the hay and bail it for us which made it a lot easier to harvest. He'd take half the hay bales as payment but Dad felt it was worth it. The bales would weigh between 40 pounds and 80 pounds or even more, depending in what type of hay it was. We'd help the guy that cut and baled it load his hay and he's help us get ours in the barn. Loading the truck was by hand. We usually had a device, I'll call it a hay escalator, to get the hay into the loft but it still had to be loaded by hand and people had to carry and stack it in the barn loft.
So yes, a lot of labor and time went into raising and storing animal food. Some people think of those times as romantic and idealistic. Boy, would they have liked to live then. I enjoyed it but also remember a lot of blisters on my hands.

Memories, indeed. Our setup was similar, but with more manual labor and no tractor. We only had one donkey (horse-sized work donkey), for plowing, transportation, and hauling the harvest back from the field. Everything else was manual labor. Seeding, weeding, picking, husking, etc. The hay was cut manually via scythe, grim reaper style, then left to dry, then flipped manually with pitchforks so it could dry on the underside as well. Then collected with pitchforks and tossed onto an open donkey-drawn wagon, piled high and tied down with ropes. I loved taking a nap on top of it on the way back from the field, exhausted. The real hayride! Then we'd park it by the opening of the barn loft and make a chain of people - one person stands in the wagon and tosses hay in through the opening with a pitchfork, one stands just inside the opening and tosses it to the next person in, who then tosses it to the one who stacks the hay in the back of the loft (or whatever area is being filled). No masks, clouds of fine hay particles and dust flying everywhere, everybody coughing... My mom and grandma developed chronic bronchitis from this plus the soot from the wood stove (that was our only means of heating the house, cooking, and heating water for bathing). The rest of us develop coughs easily now, with every cold. Multigenerational lung damage. Harvesting corn in large sacks that were carried on our backs, back to the wagon. At least we had a machine to cut the stalks into small pieces. Those were fermented into silage for winter feeding. Those "happy days" were extremely hard on the body and people broke down young. I have happy memories, because I was young and enjoyed time spent with family, cute animals, tasty food. But I would NOT want to live that life full time. Hurray for technology!

 

[Al Gerhart]

Chickens were quite small back in the day and as already mentioned several times, laid way fewer eggs so they could get by free range.

Back in the sixties I remember going over to Aunt Evy's house on Sunday a few times a year. Guests meant chicken for lunch, stump and hatchet, boiling water plucking feathers and eviscerating. Great fun for a kid. But that one chicken fed four adults and three or four kids. One piece of chicken, dumplings and corn bread was what filled you up.

They were subsistence farmers pretty much. Uncle Andy had to be in his sixties or older so didn't work a full time job. They had a feed patch to feed the mule, no tractor, no car, one or two electrical outlets in the entire house and that was used sparingly. Outhouse of course.

We would always go over and help slaughter the hogs each fall. They ate everything but the squeal. The old people were wiry and tough but also bent over from decades of hard work. Few lived past their sixties.

People romanticize the old days but it was tough. People died much younger, a lot of kids never made it to adulthood. The work was back breaking, long, and never ending. In the late eighties my family tried off the grid living with minimal income and raising food on forty acres. Even with some money, a tractor, chainsaws, it was a hard life. We lasted four years before moving back to civilization.