Many reports have been coming in from chicken owners that their hens quit laying recently, or that their chickens stopped producing eggs in recent months.
The cause, according to many, is feed that was either too low in protein or contaminated with something.
This is very possible, and I don’t have enough data to confirm or refute it.
However, I do know that many other possibilities can affect egg-laying.
In my recent video, I help new chicken-owners eliminate the likely causes, before immediately assuming it was something wrong with their chicken feed.
We’ll see what shakes out with the chicken feed conspiracy. My bet is that we had a batch or multiple batches of chicken feed that were too low in protein.
It really brings home the need for producing as much as we can on our own homesteads – including chicken feed. For city chicken keepers, however, that may be impossible.
Finally, here’s another note on the conspiracy – a friend writes:
“Friends at church bought feed from TSC and their hens completely stopped laying the day after they gave them that feed. They took 400lbs back to TSC and are hitting the local co-op for feed. Not saying conspiracy (because ineptitude and a host of other things can explain it), but just a data point to add as it seems there is actually something going on.”
These are truly weird times.
6 comments
They often stop laying in the winter. I’ve kept Rhode island reds a couple of different times over my lifetime and have decided to do it again this spring. I kept them back when there wasn’t so much info floating around prior to the internet. I once worked at my sister’s restaurant and they had a huge salad bar and I would bring home half a garbage can of salad bar scraps and basically slop the fenced in part, plus I would rake garbage cans of leaves and dump it over. I think we threw some laying mash or pellets on the ground in the mix occasionally. I would open it and rake the contents of the results into the garden and use the soil in a green house made of visqueen plastic and poles of some sort. I threw their crushed egg shells back in and anything pulled up from the garden. Late 1970s early 80’s after reading a few organic gardening and mother earth news articles. Our home was a 1950 travel trailer. Those were the days. We survived off scrambled eggs, few green onions, trout from the nearby dam and a few grocery items basically. Now we are older and retired and am going to get a small tractor supply coop, with run, buy laying mash and pellets and let them be our composters and pets and egg layers. This time I’ll know better and get the chickens sexed. No roosters. We didn’t have any predator problems for the most part but they stayed confined. So if you are looking for free feeding inputs, perhaps some of the restaurants would save some good fruit and veggie scraps if any have wonderful salad bars in the area. I didn’t free-range them, I may be a little different this time and treat them a little more like pets and see if I can train them, walk around with them yet get them to go back in the coop. I’m only going to get about 4 hens. It’s just the 2 of us now. I suspect a lot of this so called conspiracy is people not understanding the seasons affect their ladies. Spring is more conducive to raising babies and their egg laying will increase with the light. I may dumpster dive the grocery store for veggies for them. It’s probably cheaper to just buy eggs but I find this all therapy, exercise, recreation, and a connection to the divine all rolled into one.
Also could get trash bags full of more than day old bread from the bread store for 50 cents to feed them. They loved it. I mentioned that on a facebook site and got clobbered by the haters for some dumb reason, I forgot but my chicken ate it plus the other scraps and lived for years and laid eggs. No worries. Be happy.
I think that’s a great idea.
The odd thing is that chickens don’t usually STOP laying well after days are starting to get longer. Mine slow down and stop starting in November and into December. This year I had one start laying again the day or two after the solstice, as if “woo hoo, days are getting longer again!” (I don’t buy feed from TS, I just don’t expect much from them because they’re old and I don’t use supplemental light or heat in the winter.) But there are a lot of things that can throw them off laying. If there wasn’t, there wouldn’t be home remedies to get them laying again (particularly in spring) like red pepper, or they seem to lay better for me if they have some oats.
I got 14. Buy my feed and mix with kale, scraps, meal worms, old bread. Get 12 eggs/day, not slowing here
Very good.