How To Keep Your Chickens Warm During the Winter Season
Chicken can survive well in cold temperatures because they can trap air under their wings. This also insulates against heat loss. However, despite this fact, the extremely cold temperatures in winter can make it too much for the chicken’s survival. The effects of very cold temperatures are that the layers could stop laying eggs.
If your chickens are not strong enough, the cold may overwhelm them such that their immunity weakens, increasing the chances of catching infections some of which may be fatal. To prevent such incidents, where you lose your chicken or income from selling eggs, it is important to provide extra warmth for your chicken during the winter season. This article will take you through some tips on how you can keep providing a warm and comfortable environment for your chicken.
Here are some tips on how to provide warmth for your chickens during winter:
1.Keep the Right Chicken Breed
The first step that you can take to ensure that your chicken can survive during the cold weather is to keep the right breed for such a season. Look for cold-hardy breeds that are adapted to cold weather. A hardy chicken breed contains more fat and muscular tissues when compared to other breeds of chicken and this provides extra heat for them.
Another adaptation feature of hardy chicken is that they have tiny combs and wattles that reduce the chances of getting frostbites. If your chickens are lean and with very large combs, their probability of surviving during winter is low, and therefore you might suffer losses. Even when you invest a lot of money in building structures to keep the chicken warm in winter, you will be in for a disappointment.
2. Use Deep Litter On the Floor
The deep litter method involves putting a layer of organic material like pine shavings on the floor of your chicken coop. When using this method to provide extra heat for your chicken, do not remove the chicken waste but allow it to accumulate on the floor and then stir it gently. As the chicken moves about the floor, it will help to further mix up the organic material and chicken waste.
One advantage of this method is that the compost that forms from the mixture has good natural bacteria that outgrow the harmful bacteria that might be present in the chicken waste and this prevents the infestation of mites on the chicken. Since your chickens do not step on the cold floor, they will have extra warmth from the compost layer. This is also a sustainable way of disposing of chicken waste without polluting the environment.
3. Heat the Chicken Coop
You can heat the chicken coop by trapping the little sunlight that is present during the day. This heat will keep your chicken warm during the night and this prevents them from catching an infection. Some of the ways of trapping this sunlight include installing insulated windows in the chicken coops for winter and increasing the thermal mass of the coop. Thermal mass means that you use a material like concrete and compost floor that traps heat during the day and releases it at night thus warming your chicken.
Traditional heating methods like heat lamps are not the best option to heat the coop because it may cause a fire accident. Some reports also claim that heating the rooms using heaters may prevent the chicken from adapting to cold temperatures. While this may be true, some people still use these temperatures to enhance the survival of their chicken during winter.
4. Provide Enough Feeds for Your Chickens
Just like human beings, chicken also breaks down the food that they eat to form energy which they also keep them warm during cold weather. You can add some nutrients like corn or pumpkins to the regular feed that you give your chicken. While choosing the right diet for the cold weather, it is also important to add the proportion of proteins that you give the chicken so that they can build more feather mass.
Healthy feathers will provide more heat to the chicken because they trap some air beneath. Water is another important requirement for your chickens because it makes the digestion process to be efficient as well as preventing the chicken from becoming dehydrated. During winter, it is hard to keep the water in an unfrozen state but you can make the water ice-free by placing it in a container. Place this container inside a tile that is covered with heat-trapping material like leaves.
5. Insulate Your Chicken Coop
One of the ways to keep your chicken coop warm is to insulate it. There are different ways of insulating your chicken coop depending on the budget that you are working with. A more pocket-friendly approach would be to hang blankets or stacking straw bales on the walls. If you have set apart a bigger budget for this, you can invest in fiberglass wall insulation that is covered with plywood.
6. Have Enough Ventilation
It is also important to ventilate the coop so that the chickens get a good flow of fresh air and this also prevents the accumulation of ammonia in the coop. The best place to put the vents is on the roof where little cold air will flow inside the coop. It is advisable to have vents that can be opened during the day and closed at night. Venting also lowers the humidity inside the coop and prevents mold formation.
7. Minimize the Size of the Coop
Another modification that you can make on your vents is to reduce its size using walls or hanging blankets. This is because at night the chickens will be releasing some of the heat that they have stored up for themselves into the air to heat the room. When the space inside the coop is too large, the hot air will not have any impact and the chickens will end up freezing in the cold.
In summary, when temperatures drop during the winter season, it is important to keep your chickens warm so that they can survive the weather and still lay eggs. Some of how you can keep your chickens warm during winter include choosing the right breed for such weather, insulating the chicken coop, providing enough feed for the chickens, and putting litter on the floor. You can also heat the coop using sunlight or traditional heaters.
