Their feed consumption goes way up, and their egg laying goes way down. As you can imagine, that sort of weather is hard on chickens. This year, February was exceptionally cold, and the temperatures hardly came up above -25 for most of the month. Of course, we are zone 2/3, and get pretty cold in the middle of winter. While the walls cut the wind, there is not much insulation, and the body heat from the chickens still doesn’t bring the temperatures in the barn up above freezing if it is cold out. We keep our chickens in an unheated barn / coop that we made from a converted granary. While it won’t be an issue for us now for several months, I thought it was still worth putting up a post about it, as we all know winter (and polar vortexes) will be rolling around again soon enough. A couple of weeks ago, I started writing this post, as it was still -40, and we were having problems with cracked eggs. We are finally getting temperatures that suggest spring might come…eventually.
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