Heat Stress In Poultry-Part 2

This episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast is part 2 of Heat Stress in Poultry.  Jeff Mattocks, John Gunterman, and Rip Stalvey finish their discussion on the topic.  We've also included some discussion on other types of stress that can affect our birds besides hot weather.  

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Transcript

Rip Stalvey: 0:00

Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock.

Jeff Mattocks: 0:23

Yeah. Yeah. And it's going to be, like I said, they just don't, they don't tolerate wet. Wet feet and high humidity environments. And of course, after the rain, the temperatures go up and the humidity in any confined space is going to be horrible. So as much as you can do to get good airflow

John Gunterman: 0:41

Would maybe putting an oscillating fan in the coop or would that be too much?

Jeff Mattocks: 0:47

I would just put a single directional fan, across the top, pulling out the top air, right? And that's going to naturally draft up, right? It's going to pull up from the, so I would just like a 20 inch box fan, up in the gable or up in the peak, let her go, just get as much airflow as you can get. I mean, you can tilt it down a little bit. If you're in the 90s, if your temperatures are getting insane up there, which you were talking in the pre show that, you actually had to fire up the pellet stove, so temperature isn't an issue at the moment, but then you would put that fan down closer to the bedding so the chickens can get the full effect of the fan. And drying out the bedding. So you have to make a determination based on temperature where you're going to put that ventilation. You need to win. You need to win the mega ball, the mega millions tonight, John. Then you can put what they call a BA fan, a big ass fan in there. You can move all the air you want to move. You can have, a horse sized arena.

Rip Stalvey: 1:46

Those things are incredible.

Jeff Mattocks: 1:48

They are. They are.

John Gunterman: 1:50

I just need my 30 by 20 poultry house built, that's future expansion possibilities.

Jeff Mattocks: 1:57

But you need to put two like six foot super fans in there they're low speed, but they just the way their blades are designed and how long they are they can move air

John Gunterman: 2:09

So some are like the round tops that I Used to see on restaurants in the old days, they'd put those round bonnets on the top of their exhaust fans. It's so they would always be turning no matter what. Going back to the 1970s now. They

Jeff Mattocks: 2:27

used to put those on all the old barns around here too. So they would just let heat out. Those were called cupolos and yeah, they would just naturally, vent heat. And allow air flow out the roof, and it's amazing how much of a difference a cupola makes in an enclosed structure. It's phenomenal. It's truly amazing. Alright Rip, what do you want to get through tonight?

Rip Stalvey: 2:51

Let's talk about, we've covered heat stress, but what about some other types of stress that our birds can experience? I know one thing that comes to mind is when you start mixing flocks together. Sure. And introducing different ages of birds together, that can be a stressful situation.

Jeff Mattocks: 3:10

People need to know, any time you make a significant change or a change to a bird's environment, feed water location, housing, new birds, all that, it's all stress, we just don't understand it we don't necessarily have stress just because our friends come over to visit, but, and intermix our flock, but I can tell you that my mother did, whenever somebody was coming to visit, she did the flight of the bumblebee, had to clean the house from top to bottom she was a nervous wreck, Until they were there for about a half hour. Your hens are pretty much the same way. You just don't want to disrupt their social order, but we do it as breeders because we have to.

Rip Stalvey: 3:52

They pick up on the smallest thing. The smallest thing. It's absolutely incredible.

Jeff Mattocks: 3:58

Believe it or not, if you wore the same pair of jeans and the same shirt every day to feed your chickens and one day you come out there and change colors. Oh yeah,

Rip Stalvey: 4:06

they flip out.

Jeff Mattocks: 4:07

They they get so used to, they have a routine and they don't want to, people need to get ready because fall is right around the corner and the mites and the lice are going to be looking for a home. Really common, probably most of the people that have watched this have had it or experienced it, or if you haven't, it'll happen in just a matter of time. When I had my flock, I'm pretty sure it was from sparrows and cowbirds and wild birds coming down, eating and drinking, where the flock was. It was pretty simple for me, I cut off a, one of those plastic 55 gallon barrels, made it, about 12, 14 inches deep, and I filled it half full of ashes. And of course, up here in the North, we get ashes from coal or wood. I don't know what you guys in the South are going to do, but you can make a mixture of peat moss, diatomaceous earth, but there isn't an exact recipe. Somebody's probably saying, Oh, I got to get that recipe. Throw in some peat moss, throw in a feed scoop of diatomaceous earth, and feed it, throw in a half a scoop of powdered sulfur, mix it up. Just, and don't get fussy about mixing it up, because once the hens figure out what's in that barrel, they'll mix it for you. Yep. Yep. Yep, and, I tell ya, I'd go out to feed and water the chickens after work when I get home, there's nothing funnier than my daughter's Brahma, she had a white Brahma, and that, she was the boss at the coop, and she would be in that dust bath, And buried all the way to the bottom of her eyes. I'm not lying, right? She's buried, she'd stand up and they take this ghostly appearance because they got all that dust on them and that ash. And they get really perturbed at you if you interrupt their dust bath. I'm telling you that just don't do it. And in this barn, which was out in Wisconsin, That hen, when I got too close to the barrel, she was not happy because I got, I interrupted her day at the spa, so to speak. But it works great. I know people talk about using Ivermectin, all these other externals, and that's fine. But the more and more that we use those things, the less and less effective they're going to be. Because they're getting into the environment, and the insects are becoming tolerant to them. So you need to start. I'm not saying never use ivermect, but maybe one time you want to use I think it's called Elector, right? Elector something.

Rip Stalvey: 6:35

Yeah, Elector PSP, I think.

Jeff Mattocks: 6:37

And, sometime maybe you want to use a pyrethrin, maybe then you want to, so rotate what you're using. This slows down, the adaptation of the insects and the internal parasites by, changing up what you're treating with. It's too easy to go buy Ivermect, right? And I get a kick out of people buying it for sheep or cattle, and then they post somewhere out there on a poultry group, How do I figure out how much to use for my chickens? I just sit back and laugh. It's it wasn't really made for chickens, folks. It's, last time I looked, there's no label for chickens. Or nothing on the label for chickens.

Rip Stalvey: 7:17

Jeff, you asked what we do in the south we don't have wood ashes and we don't have coal ashes, so we do without. But the best combination I've found is some white, fine white builder's sand and some sulfur, maybe some diatomaceous earth, and that's worked pretty good for me over the years.

Jeff Mattocks: 7:36

Yeah, the sulfur and the diatomaceous earth are your key ingredients, so the sand is just a carrier. It's still an irritant to to the mite, to the external parasite, but the true active ingredients are the sulfur and the diatomaceous earth. So I like the peat moss and here's why when it starts getting matted down or it doesn't look fresh anymore, then, you can take it in the coop and add it to the bedding in there. And you're, even with the sulfur and diatomaceous earth and you're adding a layer of protection, as far as the bedding in the coop, one less place for the mites and the lice to, live and hang out waiting for a chicken. Just the way I think about it, anyway. Yeah, people love to do it. I love it. They go to swap meets or something and they pick up chickens or, they just go, they go to their friends, they go to a swap meet, they go to a show and well, A, you want to quarantine them before you mix them because you don't know what you're bringing in. Two, keep them in a cage where, maybe they can see each other for a week or so. And if you're in a hurry and you want to see World War 4, then, go ahead and put them in there, but it's going to be, it's going to be ugly or it's going to be a lot of carnage. So you can sneak them in once they've gone to roost at night. So if they go to roost at, let's say nine o'clock, if you go out there about 10:30 or 11 o'clock before they're fully asleep. You can put the new bird on the roost, don't turn on the lights, just go out there with a headlamp or something small, like a red headlamp, put them on the roost, in the morning you need to be there when they wake up and they come out, just make sure nobody's killing each other and partly depends on breed. My black Australorps were pack hunters and you put a new bird in there, chances are it wasn't going to live long. So yeah, you just put it on the roost somewhere in an open spot. And I already talked about socializing. There's a product out there that is botanical. So it comes from herbs. It's called Box Rescue Remedy. You can put a few drops in their drinking water for a few days that'll help, inside the coop, try and reduce the amount of total light, so you want enough for them to move around, but you don't want enough for them to, light intensity stimulates cannibalizing and fighting. So keep it really muted, low light. I think you'll be a lot happier with that.

Rip Stalvey: 10:06

Wormers, heavy internal parasites can also stress birds. Heavy loads of those parasites and we've got some excellent advice on how to worm your bird.

Jeff Mattocks: 10:15

That's why I worry about with John up there with the ground being so wet. Just keep an eye on them, do your fecals like once a week, once every two weeks, just to see where you're at. Just had a large flock in California. All of a sudden birds started dying and production went from, 80, 85, 90 percent production down into the 40s. And that was over the course of about two to three weeks. He was just losing eggs. Finally, we cut some open and they were just full of roundworms, right? So we're trying to manage that out there. Natural warmers, you can mix equal amounts of garlic, cayenne, diatomaceous earth, by volume, equal amounts by volume. If you want, you can add a little bit of milk or molasses to it, just to encourage them to eat it. Not a lot, don't get carried away. I'm trying to get about a teaspoon in every bird. Per day run it seven to ten days, two weeks. They can't taste hot, so people that are thinking cayenne, what do I want to do cayenne? They can't. Chicken doesn't have the taste buds or the sensors in the mouth or the tongue. to know what, what capsaisan is. So it's not a problem. They don't really care. And actually we make this mix and sell it at Fertrell. And the reason I say that is we used to sell it in tubes for horses and other animals. One day I was at a, Little small gathering for some horse people and squeeze some out, on a little six inch paper plate. And I actually tasted it. It wasn't bad at all. It sounds worse than it really is. I probably could have put it on a taco and been pretty happy. So it wasn't bad at all. And I said taco, cause it's John's fault. It keeps showing pictures of tacos. I want tacos really bad. Okay. Just to finish up on molting, make sure you clean out your coop at least twice a year. It's important to do it. When your ground temperature is about 55 degrees both spring and fall, okay? That's when your parasite activity level is most active 55 to 65 once it starts getting above 70 They're not coming up the plant. They're not as active. So for us here in Pennsylvania again, I'm looking at tax day and probably around the 1st of October and But you can get those digital thermometers and you can measure You know, what this, what the ground temperature is, but somewhere in that time frame is what I'm looking at. Look, we were talking about molting earlier and birds are trying to molt right now. It's just what they're doing. It's designed to be roughly a 45 to 60 day break for the hen. It's just part of their system. It's part of their, it's predetermined plan or, just go with it or actually control it. Make the feed change, getting them down to a high fiber. Basically, the diet being 50 60 percent oats, whole oats vitamins, minerals, very little protein, lots of oyster shell, lots of grit, heavy birds 3 4 ounces, 4 pound birds 2 ounces and, but be careful not to overfeed, gotta have enough room for everybody. If they don't go into the molt, you can consider withholding feed and water for 24 hours just to trigger it. And that should get any stubborn hens to, to start molting. Depending on your birds and how much internal fat they have trying to lose anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of their body weight, trying to get them back down to pullet weight, right? And we were trying to collect that information and find out what pullet weight should be. Didn't get very far. Got some, but didn't get very far. Yeah I need to change that. Molting hens right after Christmas, not really a great idea. I would say, July, August, if you're not doing shows, get them away from breeding season. And so I need to adjust that. Now for commercial flocks, I like to do them, right after Christmas. And the reason being is we always have too many table eggs, right over, the end of December. Once we get past Christmas into February, eggs always get long. There's too many eggs on the market. And it's also a good time to use natural light to stimulate them back into production, once we get past Christmas, so that's, it just works together with a natural plan.

Rip Stalvey: 14:36

Yeah, I think we've got one more slide of nest boxes.

Jeff Mattocks: 14:40

Yeah, I, It's really hard to get people convinced that their hens want privacy curtains on their nest boxes, and I don't know why. I don't know why this is the, one of the most difficult things I try and tell people. You don't want more than one hen in a nest box at any time. You're just asking for trouble, right? And she's looking for, yeah, you're looking, the hen's looking for somewhere around nine, 10 o'clock in the morning or earlier, but she's looking for the darkest place in the coop. To lay her egg. Now, I'll bet anyone that listens to this, if I said, how many of you ever found eggs in a corner? Oh, the coop. Everybody's hands gonna go up. Something's wrong. Either the nest box is too high off the ground. She doesn't feel like she has the privacy. It's not in the right place. So you need to go look in your coop and determine. In the morning, between 7 and 10, where's the darkest place in your coop, where those hens are going to want to lay those eggs, right? And that's where your nest box needs to be. Not where it's convenient for you. I don't care what you think. It doesn't matter. It's what the hen wants. Okay? End of the day, it's all about the chicken. And if you lose sight of that, you're just going to have pain and suffering. Now, when you put curtains on, Hens go in, lay their egg, they leave. They don't want to be in there for an extended period of time. So when I go into a hen house and I see hens in the middle of the day just lounging around in a nest box,

Rip Stalvey: 16:12

that's not good.

Jeff Mattocks: 16:13

No, it's not good at all. What else are they going to be doing in there? They're going to be, depositing manure. That's a great opportunity for birds to start eating eggs or pecking eggs, right? The eggs are going to get trampled. They're going to be dirtier eggs. This was actually an Amish customer in Wisconsin, right? Town called Cashton, Wisconsin. His name was Chester Schmucker. For five or six years, I told Chester, I said, Chester, you really got to get curtains on your nest boxes. I know. I know. He says, I know. I just, Never get it done. One year I went in there, I always go see him in February, one year I went in there, I was like, Chester, you put curtains on your nest boxes, he goes, he got a big old smile on his face, as my dad used to say, a shit eating grin, and he said,

Karen Johnston: 16:58

he goes, that's the best thing I ever did, I go, How come, Chester? He goes,

Jeff Mattocks: 17:02

I only wash half as many eggs as I used to. I wanted to smack him in the back of his head right then.

Rip Stalvey: 17:09

And you were talking about curtains on the nest boxes. Years ago, when you bought a galvanized nest box, they came with curtains installed.

Jeff Mattocks: 17:19

Yeah. Yeah. And now they're optional. You can still get them. And people don't buy them cause they don't see the need for them.

John Gunterman: 17:26

Is there something to the red color on the curtain?

Jeff Mattocks: 17:29

The newer ones like hen gear and so on, they're using red. Red is a natural attracting color for a hen. There is some attraction to it. So what you do with these, if you looked really close, is you take those, this is nothing more than pond liner. The black, or rubber pond liner. You take the flap and you actually roll it up and tuck it in behind itself, above. And, so when you have pullets and you're training them to the nest boxes before they start laying, They're curious where they're going to start laying. So this gives them a chance to go in, check it out, get comfortable with it. Once you start seeing eggs in there, then you just slowly start dropping flaps, right? And they're going to keep going back there because of habit and routine. So here you can lift the flaps up, get them out of the way so they can check out the nest boxes. Not too many people listening, to the show are going to be using these type of nest boxes. I get it, but the curtains are still just as important and putting it in the darkest place in the hen house at nine to 10 AM is still just as important. I can't say that enough.

Rip Stalvey: 18:39

The thing that gets me is I see so many pictures of vegetable crate nest boxes, and there's no top, there's no sides on them, and then they wonder why their birds don't, they lay on the floor of the coop.

Jeff Mattocks: 18:51

Yeah. Or I see five gallon buckets that are four feet off the ground or, all kinds of stuff. But yeah, I see milk crates, vegetable crates, all that stuff. And people would go out and spend more time observing what their birds are doing. That wouldn't be nearly the, it wouldn't be nearly the issue.

Rip Stalvey: 19:08

It's interesting that you bring that up, Jeff, because in reading through some of the old poultry journals and magazines, and just reading some of the articles written by the old major breeders Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns, those guys, and ladies, spent a huge amount of time, really, compared to what we do today, just sitting in the coop and watching their birds.

Jeff Mattocks: 19:36

Look, it's therapeutic for you, and it's also therapeutic for the chicken. I was having this conversation with one of our dealers from North Carolina, Reedy Fork Farm, and I was recapping the field trial that we did on turkeys. So my intern, every day we had two groups of turkeys, 25 in each group Thanksgiving and Christmas. So Christmas got food, water, bedding changed, but that's it. They got no extra interaction whatsoever. Just like typical, taking care of birds. Thanksgiving, we told everybody in the office, you can go out and hug turkeys all you want, play with them, pick them up, whatever. And she dedicated 20 minutes a day to being out there, interacting with them, talking to them, singing to them, whatever, petting them, playing with them, pictures of her with Turkey sitting on top of her head, sitting on her shoulder, sitting on her lap. When they got bigger, when they're getting close to processing, when she'd go sit, she'd flip her bucket over and sit in the coop out of the sun. They'd line up like children at story time in a circle around her, right? So here's the thing when we got done When we processed them at 13 and a half weeks old There was one more pound of carcass in the birds that got human interaction Then there was with the birds that did not one pound. Okay finish weight That doesn't sound like a lot but When you're working with, production people, commercially, or, on a larger scale, when you're selling your turkey for 4. 95 a pound, that's an extra 4. 95 on every turkey. So that, that's a big number. All animals respond to human interaction, and you just got to take your time and enjoy them. They'll enjoy you just as much as you enjoy them. And if you don't enjoy them, get rid of them.

Rip Stalvey: 21:27

That's right. Yeah.

Jeff Mattocks: 21:30

I just want people to realize they can always message us or post on all of the groups. Poultry Keepers 360, Poultry Breeder Nutrition. And look, if I missed it because you're in a different time zone, just, send it again, okay? Be persistent. You're not gonna hurt my feelings. I gotta sleep sometime.

Rip Stalvey: 21:52

Thank you for joining us this week, and before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released, and they're released every Tuesday. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd like to ask you to drop us an email at Poultry Keepers Podcast at gmail. com and share your thoughts about the show. Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast. We'll see you next week.