Keep Your Chickens Laying All Winter.
Our family uses an average of eight eggs a day and we sell about four dozen a week. We get all of these eggs from about 30 chickens. Each winter day we are getting what we usually get in the summer time, around 17-22 eggs a day.
How do we get our chickens to continue to lay eggs all year long?
Reason #1
We give them more food since there are a lot less bugs and grass for them to eat. We have feeders for them so they can just peck at their food all day instead of only one feeding.
Reason #2.
We have a light in their coop that comes on every morning at 3am. since chickens need around 15 hours of daylight a day and since they are only getting about 11 1/2-12 hours a day we had to give them some extra daylight.
Reason #3.
We keep clean nest boxes for them to lay eggs in. Keeping the nest boxes clean also helps keeps the eggs from getting dirty or broken.
Reason #4. We raise good laying breeds. We currently are raising Jersey Giants, and Rhode Island Reds which are good for laying in the summer and winter.
Jersey Giants
Rhode Island Red.
Each nest box has around 2-5 eggs in it and only about five nest boxes have eggs in them. We also keep a couple golf balls in some of the nest boxes to encourage the chickens to lay in them and not on the ground.
Full basket of eggs ready to be cleaned and put into cartons.
Thanks for upvoting and if you have any questions I will do my best to answer them.
We didn't know about the hours of daylight being such a factor. Will definitely look into making a light too now, thanks for the tip. We also use golf balls and they do seem to help, at least initially in a new spot it seems to settle them in.
Your hens are beautiful, the breeds we have here are quite different. Hope to make a post about that soon too..
Thank you.
That's amazing that you have the same egg production year round. I knew that you could increase production in the winter with artificial light, but not to that extent. And you have Jersey Giants too. I would love to hear more about those. I grew up In New Jersey but I have never seen one.
Wow the colour of those eggs at the bottom is so pretty, especially the one on the bottom right, it looks frikkin purple! :D I'm offgrid so powering a light during the winter is really not in the cards, curious if you know if LED would still work? Whilst I would totally do this if I had the power I learned that this does not increase the number of eggs you get from the chickens in their lifetime they lay a specific amount. Interesting that specific breeds are better for winter laying, makes total sense since my neighbors have RIR and they still get eggs but I have Sussex, Marans, Barnevelder etc and they haven't given any eggs this winter. Though they are pretty young. Thanks for sharing! ^_^ Following you