Keeping Chickens in Extreme Cold | Off Grid Alaska

okay morning everyone right here in the chicken coop and getting the chicken situated got the lights turned on for him got some order right here for him and actually today happens to be the day we go pick up our weekly gallon of milk so that's what we're doing next ah ah [Music] we made it back to the cabin we're gonna make a cup of coffee real quick and we're gonna make some breakfast we're gonna make some omelettes got some sausage going over there we're gonna do red onion some dehydrated tomatoes and some bell pepper okay [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well we were lucky enough to get some fresh cream for the coffee so look we got this nice thick cream oh my gosh okay it's so buffy right now like a dream put a little milk in those eggs it makes a difference now that eric and i have a breakfast we are going to feed breakfast to our chickens and we're out in our comics making some of their food up we buy the grains usually separate and then we mix them up in this barrel we have here i've already started i have a few more things to add and then i'm gonna mix it all up we've been feeding our chickens the same thing for about two years and i know i've mentioned it before but it has been a while i was just going to mention again what ingredients go into our chicken feed i've already got barley oats and peas in the bin and i'm going to add some sunflower seeds those are the four main ingredients we use in our feed in the summer but i do add some corn and some red wheat in the winter and because we've been mixing our feed like this for several years i have a pretty good idea of what proportions i'm doing to get them at the right amount of protein [Applause] this is an awesome bag of feed because it comes with a 50 50 ratio of the red winter wheat and the corn the crack corn so it's great for them for the winter i only give them corn in the winter i don't give it to them in the summer they don't need it and the wheat is extra protein for them and i find that they don't eat it in the summer so again we really only give those two extra ingredients to them in the winter months so this usually takes a few minutes to get it nice and thoroughly mixed all the ingredients in here are important for our chickens and for their health but the sunflower seeds the wheat and the peas actually have the most protein so those are the things that i'm kind of calculating in how much i want of certain things the other stuff is more just like a filler and in fact it's really interesting when you feed your chickens this way you'll see if they're not getting enough of something because you'll see they'll pick out that specific item in here so sometimes they don't have enough sunflower seeds and i'll add that back or add some more of that in we found that when feeding chickens peas we always like to get them milled or crushed because in the whole form they do eat them but our chickens only eat them soaked so in the summer we ferment our food we soak it for a few days and feed it to them it's a really good way to stretch their food but in the winter because everything freezes we have just found that it's not practical to do that for a while we would bring the feed in the house and soak it that way but what we've resorted to is just feeding them dry food now in the winter months we're going to bring this over to the chickens we have a lot of feeders throughout here because we have 35 chickens we've got some fresh water we have to fill it up a few times a day because it does freeze if it's this cold so we are going into our third winter here in alaska but only our second year with our chickens and this coop we figured we'd just give a little update and tell you guys how they've been doing here the coupe is a 10 by 10 and we have some open big open windows on the front that really never gets shut up and that's definitely intentional it's kind of like an open airflow coupe design and that's because when you close up a coop a lot of the chickens droppings has a lot of moisture and ammonia and you can get a really potent unhealthy environment for chickens fast we wanted a well-ventilated coop so we could mitigate those problems and it also helps prevent frostbite this design has been working really well for us and only on occasion if it is super windy and there's snow blowing in do we close you know the front windows or the front shutters for the chickens we added this second overhang this year and i love it this whole area will get covered with snow last winter but this year the chickens have been using it as another area to hang out they basically have four areas to hang out this area they have a partially enclosed shelter on the other side lean to they have their coop and since their coop is raised they also have the entire underneath area of the coop and that just we have found is just wonderful for them it's a bunch of room for them in the winter even when there is a bunch of snow this whole area is the rest of the run and our chickens don't really like to venture out into the snow i mean they will sometimes go out on it but for the most part they stay away from it two of our most common questions for keeping our chickens in alaska is do they get cold and do you heat your chicken coop or better yet why don't you eat your chicken coop we don't eat the chicken coop for several reasons and we've kept chickens for several years like i said again this is the second winter for these chickens they can tolerate living in alaska without a heat lamp where we're at so in our zone they can do it they live they survive it's not just that why we don't heat there's also some safety concerns with straw and primarily we have a small solar setup so it's just not realistic to run a heat bulb in here for them and one of my biggest personal reasons is because our chickens are very adapted to the cold you know they were born out here as chicks and they're just they they're very used to the cold so if you get them really acclimated to warm weather they're not as likely gonna go out in the colder weather and these chickens do great in the winter they actually go out in negative 10 sometimes they just chill out a little more around here but for the most part they're fairly active in the winter we have found that they are not immune though to extremely frigid temperatures if it's like negative teens they usually chill in their coop we had a stretch last january where it was like negative 20s for several weeks and they pretty much just hung out in their coop that entire time and that's why we have such a big coop we open up the door so they can go in and out but they prefer to stay in the coop because it was so cold outside we're going to come around to the side of the coop so i already tapped into that first question but the answer is truthfully they do get cold like i said they're not immune they have feathers they're not like me and you as far as our skin so they can tolerate much colder temperatures than you and i can you know we have to wear clothes and their feathers is like their clothes the major thing that eric and i have learned is when you keep chickens in this cold of temperatures they're large combs and even wattles are susceptible to frostbite no matter how much you you know try to have an open coop or things like that it can still happen just because they kind of have a large appendage so what we have learned and decided is that we will always keep chickens with rose comb or you know like a closer i think they're called peacom but we won't keep like a single comb that classic rooster with a really tall comb in fact one of our roosters in there is a rooster that had that comb the first winter and he got frostbite extremely bad he lost most of the comb it healed and i'm fairly certain he will never get frostbite again and that's spazz he's all the way under there hanging out with the ladies this is we call him ruru because he's our biggest rooster he has a huge rose comb and he did actually get a teeny tiny bit of frost bite last year on his wattles and his his comb but he is looking really good this year we added on a third rooster this year that was hatched out and he also has a really nice small comb made that choice deliberately because i just don't want to put them through that so this is a pretty typical day for them you know it's a little colder today but they're still outside some of them are eating scratching around in fact this is an area that they like to dust bathe a little bit there's some loose dirt but they do like to hang out up there and kind of huddle and we have that area protected by some pallets and by some straw so they don't get wind underneath the coop you can see there's a lot of hay and straw spread out they really like just sifting through that picking through it gives them something to do in the winter and it's also a good way to protect their feet from being on the snow too long or getting frostbite because sometimes snow does blow in here and that's just like our covering for it we're gonna head back to the coop to talk about how we manage it all right so things in here are fairly easy to manage because we don't really do much all winter uh we will just spread some new straw on top of the droppings every once in a while i'll spread some new straw in here you know for them to hang out in and it'll get pretty thick by the springtime when everything melts and that's when we'll actually pull it out and we found that moisture and smell is just not really a problem when we do things that way we went with two by fours for the roost and that's for their feet to lay flat and then they you know push up with their body feathers i think that also helps prevent frostbite on their feet and we added a ladder this year they seem to really like that especially the jersey giants the black chickens it is a little hard for them to fly up as well as our icelandic chickens i mentioned that the chicken's desk bath outside while they also dust bath inside we have a dust bath area for them and i fill it up right now has a lot of rocks but i filled it up earlier in the fall before we went into winter with sand ash and some soil we also put de or diatomaceous earth in there on occasion to help prevent mites and lice we've never really had an issue with that here one big thing about keeping chickens here is lighting so depending upon where you are in alaska you know you're going to receive less light some areas receive a lot less light or no sunlight we get down to about five hours a little you know just over five hours so that's not that much light for a chicken's body they have to recognize it's getting you know white out come down eat drink go to the bathroom do all that and then they get back up as soon as they start to sense that the sun's going down so providing some form of light is pretty crucial to having a nice healthy flock in the winter eric's going to talk a little bit about our lighting in here the lighting with these chickens it's not really constant i basically just put out lights for them whenever i wake up in the morning i usually get up about 6 30 in the morning sometimes a little after seven so i just put the lights out here and give them some fresh water as soon as i wake up in the evening we've kind of decided that we just stopped putting light out here for them we don't think it was really helping they kind of just went to sleep anyway so we're pretty much just doing it in the morning now we have three main ways that we put the light out here in a coupe we have a flashlight it's a no light it's rechargeable and it comes with this little lantern attachment this is probably my favorite way of putting light out here which looks like that i put it on medium mode we also have a little light bulb that has a battery in there and this is usb or solar rechargeable this works pretty good it's not as bright as the olight but this definitely works good and then something new this year that we didn't have the first year is i put a 12 volt battery out here this is the battery we usually use on our electric fencing but since we take it down in the winter it's in here and it's got some alligator clips and if you follow the wires up top we've just got some simple 12-volt lights they work pretty well they're not the brightest in the world but it's definitely nice having those in here this year and as soon as the sun starts to come up out here which varies the time of year but it was about 10 o'clock this morning we come out here we collect the lights give them some more water and it's about how we light our coop and it actually works out pretty good for us the last part of our coop is their egg boxes and i have to grab the eggs for today it looks like we have three you're seeing a lot of other little white ones because those are wooden eggs we have those to help increase the production this year about half of our chickens are really close to a third are original chickens and the rest are all new year chickens so they're not even a year old we had a period in the fall where our older chickens stopped laying they went through a malt and our newer ones were not laying yet so we were getting really no eggs at all but only a few weeks back the first year chickens started laying and they've been laying extremely well considering we only have five hours of light i mean the chickens themselves are probably getting seven to eight realistically so that's really good in my opinion to come out here and get eggs we're averaging it varies a lot anywhere from like five to ten we can even get so it just depends it's definitely going to go up a lot in the spring with the amount of hens we have but it is of course lower in the winter and i did want to mention our icelandics are not a very high production breed if you're ever looking into them they're definitely on the lower spectrum of how many eggs you're going to get and that's because they're excellent moms so they go fruity that is why we wanted them they actually hatched out 35 little chicks earlier this year they did a great job took care of them out here and everything we also have a few jersey giants the big black chickens those are better layers and our jersey giants aren't really laying right now either another thing we researched with the icelandic chickens is their food consumption they are extremely thrifty birds so for how many birds we have we really do not feed them a lot we have had large flocks in the past and we we absolutely had to feed them more you can tell the icelandics have a smaller stature so you know they just don't eat as much and i find that uh jersey giants need a lot more because they are much bigger chicken i clean the nesting boxes as needed and just add some more straw for them or some you know pine shavings i'm gonna grab the eggs and head inside they're not yet frozen but if you leave them out here long enough they will actually crack and freeze so you can tell that these are super new pool and eggs because they're really small the icelandics do lay bigger eggs than this but this is what they look like when they first start today i'm also gonna be making the chickens a warm treat in the summertime they get fish a lot of other scraps and definitely a lot of veggie scraps so we like to supplement them in the winter with like little treats every now and then just to keep their spirits up since it is so cold today i'm going to be using our sourdough starter i'm going to be using the discard mainly and adding some baking powder and adding a whole bunch of other stuff to make them a nice fluffy bread i added some flour and water and i'm going for like a thicker pancake texture for them other things we like to make are you know hot oats eric will make some hot oatmeal for them and we'll also do keeper sometimes they really really like that i actually don't worry about feeding them the apple cider vinegar or the garlic that much in the winter months those are more my summer and spring routine for them just because of their diet and eating things that possibly have worms in them once i get this in the pan i'm going to be adding some cinnamon oregano and thyme other things i like to add is cayenne but i do not have any i run out of it so i need to buy some more all right that looks super tasty definitely human quality here i'm gonna let that cool down once it's done and we're gonna get chopped up and bring it out to the chickens oh coming in hot self-serve ah so

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 254,080

Rating: 4.9642158 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, off grid cabin, winter in alaska, off the grid, solar system alaska, cabin in alaska, winter cabin living, homestead off grid, chickens alaska, winter alaska, do chickens get cold, keeping chickens alaska, diy chicken feed, chicken frostbite, homemade chicken feed, keeping chickens in winter, no heat lamp chickens, preventing frostbite, unheated chicken coop, open air coop, icelandic chickens, chickens cold climate

Id: 6l53Rsd6HMg

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020