Posts filed under: health and diet

health and diet

8 Ways a Chicken Stays Cool

Chickens are very sensitive to high temperatures, much more so than cooler temperatures. While winter chicken keeping does pose its challenges, summer chicken keeping also presents a whole new set of issues. Chickens have a normal body temperature around 105-107 degrees F, so keeping them cool in hot weather is...

5 Bad Summer Foods for Chickens

We all want to keep our homestead flock healthy and cool during the summer months! Monitoring your flock’s diet during the summer is essential to helping them handle the heat. It will also help them stay healthy during the summer months. These 5 bad summer foods for chickens are ones...

9 Summer Treats for Chickens- Beat the Heat

Chickens can handle cool weather way better than warm weather. High temperatures can cause a drop in laying or cause the hens to lay soft eggs. Chickens can also suffer from heat exhaustion and heat stroke very rapidly in hot weather. There are several ways you can help your flock beat...

Caring for a Sick Chicken- the basics

Caring for a sick chicken is difficult and challenging, there’s no way around it. Chickens are prey animals, so they try to act tough under all circumstances to prevent showing their weaknesses. Being able to recognize a sick chicken as soon as possible and learning how to diagnose poultry ailments...

Recognizing Cold Stress in Chickens

Cold stress is often an overlooked aspect of winter chicken keeping due to the fact that chickens generally handle cold weather better than warm weather. However, cold stress is almost always present in the flock during the winter, it’s just a matter of determining when that stress becomes detrimental to...

Alternatives to Oatmeal for Chickens

What’s warm, cheap, easy to make, and something that chickens love on cold winter mornings? Oatmeal why of course! However, there are also many other treats that fall into those same categories and are even healthier for your flock than oatmeal! Oatmeal is not downright terrible for chickens, but there...

Good and Bad Table Scraps for Chickens

Raising chickens on the homestead means you have natural composters right at your finger tips! However, just because chickens act like they will eat anything doesn’t mean they can eat everything. There are good and bad table scraps for chickens that you should be aware of when giving your flock...

How to Pick Out Chicken Treats

Like any good pet owner, I enjoy browsing the farm store isles looking for goodies for my chickens. Since I’ve been striving to become more sustainable and self-sufficient, I have started looking for ways to make my own chicken treats, but occasionally I still like to buy them a ‘store-bought’...