Author: Anna & Mark

Did you ever wonder what
poultry keepers fed their flocks before the modern feed mixtures came
on the scene?  Feeding Poultry was published in 1955 by
G.F. Heuser, who had spent the last forty years researching poultry
nutrition, and his book is a fascinating peek into the era during which
commercial feeds were being developed (but while poultry keepers still
remembered the old ways).



Heuser began his book by
looking at chicken care from a hundred years prior.  In the middle
of the nineteenth century, chickens were being kept in small flocks on
diversified farms, so they mostly fed themselves, with a bit of corn or
other grain tossed in once or twice a day.  Some farmers would let
the hens into the garden for an hour or so of monitored bug control,
and they generally had free rein of the barnyard, where the chickens
happily pecked apart manure from horses and cows.  A slightly
later nineteenth century text mentioned feeding chopped and scalded
clover hay.  Heuser reminds us that this laissez-faire method of
chicken-keeping worked at the time, but that the hens didn’t lay
terribly well, concentrating most of their efforts on the spring months.



As we entered the twentieth
century, chickens began to be bred for high production and were crammed
into small spaces in large numbers.  We also started to stress the
birds by raising chicks unseasonably (such as in late winter to ensure
the pullets would lay their first fall).  The changes in poultry
setups necessitated a similar change in chicken feeding.



Commercial chicken feed
mixtures began to be used in the 1910s, and scientists continued to
perfect their formulas over the next several decades.  We were
just learning about the differences between animal and vegetable
proteins and were discovering many vitamins and minerals, so it became
clear that chickens thrived on milk because of riboflavin and needed
cod liver oil when kept in confinement because they couldn’t make their
own vitamin D.



I’ll be regaling you
with more highlights of Feeding
Poultry this fall
and winter, whenever a rainy day tempts me to dip back into this thick
but easy-to-read book.  Stay tuned, or pick up your own copy and
read along.

Last year, we
put a light in the chicken coop in October in an effort to
get our pullets laying.  We were rewarded with eggs all winter —
something I’d taken for granted with our Golden Comets, but which seems to be less
of a norm with heirloom breeds.



This
year, the majority of our flock is a year and a half old, so we didn’t
have to worry about pullets waiting until spring to lay.  And yet,
production began to decline dramatically as soon as the calendar rolled
over to September and day length dropped below 13 hours.



You’d think that four
eggs a day would be plenty for two people.  But as our pasturing
system provides the flock more wild food and the eggs get tastier and
brighter, we want more and more of them.  Four is now the bare
minimum since Mark and I each enjoy two eggs scrambled up for
breakfast.  If we want a butternut
pie, we need a few
more eggs!

So Mark ran an extension cord
back out to the coop and hooked up the timer and light to artificially
extend the day length back to summer levels.  I’ll try to remember
to report back and let you know if our girls pick up the pace.  I
hope they do — otherwise, Mark wants to hunt down a few more layers
to ensure his winters are full of butternut pies.