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Winter: Lay Ladies Lay keep you in moderate egg production (2- 4 per week) straight through the winter. Egg production falls to almost nothing as their bodies do the hard work of re-growing feathers. One by one as the weather gets colder and the days get shorter, they start to molt. Bennie and the Chicks are getting tired – they’ve been laying for over a year now! They need a freakin’ break. Meanwhile Bennie and the Chicks continue to lay.įall: Lay Ladies Lay are rocking out the egg production with 5-6 eggs per hen per week. Late Summer: Lay Ladies Lay start giving you eggs! It’s a little sporadic at first, but they get there, and soon each Lay Ladies Lay bird is producing 5-6 eggs per week too. Look for a consistent 5-6 eggs per week per each Bennie and the Chicks hen. No laying from them, but as the days of spring lengthen, Bennie and the Chicks are in their peak year of laying well. Spring: Bring home Lay Ladies Lay as chicks. 2 – 4 eggs per week, per hen November to February.5 – 6 eggs per week, per hen from August to October.Bennie and the Chicks will slow down a bit, but will continue to lay 2- 4 eggs per hen per week straight through winter, especially if a small amount of supplemental light is provided during the shortest days of the year. Winter: First year chickens typically don’t molt. Once they get going, expect 5-6 eggs per week per hen.įall: B ennie and the Chicks continue to lay very well. Late Summer: Bennie and the Chicks come into lay. Spring: Bring home Bennie and the Chicks as chicks. So, each of your chicken bands would contain four birds. That’s the number of members you can have in each chicken “band” We’re going to add one band a year for three years to get us up to our desired flock size. I never claimed to be a graphic illustrator.) Starting Outįigure out your ideal, stable, long-term flock size and divide that number by three.
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BROOMSTICK METHOD CHICKEN FREE
We’ll call them Bennie and the Chicks, Lay Ladies Lay, and, naturally, The Free Birds. To make this more clear, picture three bands of hard-rocking chickens. In order to make sure we get eggs as close to year-round as possible without resorting to evil industrial-style shenanigans, we need to make sure we have some birds coming into lay, some birds at their peak production, and some birds easing off of strong production to make room for the younger batch. Let’s Explain This With Classic Rock and Chicken Cartoons While natural egg production is much higher in the summer than the winter, the cycle we’ve developed for our hens gives us the best chance of some decent egg production year-round. If a backyard, small-flock chicken keeper wants to ensure a more steady supply of eggs, we need different tactics. Industrial egg producers get around this by selecting breeds which are early and heavy layers, then raising them in artificially lit enclosures so that low natural light levels never slow frequency of lay. They keep flocks of same-age hens together, and force the molt of all hens in the flock simultaneously by manipulating heat, light, water and feed (including, commonly, total removal of food to initiate molting).įorced molting keeps hens at the highest average rate of eggs production, but is ethically unbearable. After about two to three years of laying, a hen’s productivity starts to decline dramatically.New chicks take about 5 months to mature into reliable producers.Chickens must rest periodically, for reproductive health and when they are regrowing feathers after a molt.Hens stop (or dramatically slow) their laying during the short days of winter.Several things contribute to this natural production variability: Small-scale chicken keepers know all too well how egg supply can vacillate between nothing (and a shameful trip out to the store for commercially raised eggs) and enough to supply the props department at a Cool Hand Luke remake.Īs weird as it seems to folks used to those unchanging cartons of eggs at the market, eggs are a seasonal food. This post is not intended to specifically advocate culling your birds at the end of their productive laying lives, but if you choose to, or if you send them off to some other form of retirement off your property, the approach to flock management described here may help you get achieve more consistent egg production. While there is nothing graphic in this post, it assumes the reader is comfortable with the concept of slaughtering livestock. feed, then this may not be the post for you. Disclaimer: if you think of your chickens as pets, if you let them live out their full, natural lives regardless of economics of laying productivity vs.