 Winter brings challenges beyond cold temperatures for backyard chickens. Rodents, mites, and lice can all threaten your flock’s health during the colder months. Keeping chickens pest-free in winter requires a combination of prevention, vigilance, and practical treatments: secure feed storage, dust baths, regular coop cleaning, homemade sprays, and careful monitoring of your birds. Implementing these strategies will help your flock stay healthy, stress-free, and productive all winter long.
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 Winter is tough on chickens, especially when the ground is frozen, greens are scarce, and the cold challenges their metabolism. Proper nutrition during the colder months is essential to keep your flock healthy, warm, and productive. Offering winter greens, scratch grains, grit, and maintaining a consistent feed schedule are key strategies. These “chicken feed tips for winter” help your birds thrive until spring.
 If you’re asking yourself, “Should I use supplemental light in my chicken coop during the winter?” the answer depends on your goals. Chickens naturally slow or stop egg production in colder months as daylight hours shrink, and while supplemental light can extend laying, it may also cause stress or affect long-term health. Many flock owners prefer to let hens rest naturally, while others add gentle morning light to keep eggs coming. Done carefully, supplemental lighting can be safe—but it’s not always necessary.
 If you’re wondering, "Should I use supplemental heat in my chicken coop during the winter?", the answer is usually no. Healthy adult chickens are well-equipped to handle cold weather, and adding heat often creates more risks than benefits. Supplemental heaters can cause fires, condensation, and dangerous temperature shock if power fails. Instead, focus on proper coop ventilation, dry bedding, and choosing cold-hardy breeds to keep your flock safe.
 Keeping chickens’ water from freezing in winter is essential for their health and egg production. The easiest solution is a heated poultry waterer, which keeps water just above freezing with minimal electricity. If electricity isn’t available, alternatives include insulated buckets, black rubber tubs that absorb sunlight, or bringing out fresh warm water multiple times a day. Proper placement, daily monitoring, and safety precautions ensure your flock always has access to liquid water.
 What is a Biosecurity Plan?A biosecurity plan is a set of measures put in place to prevent the introduction of disease into a flock, or keep disease from spreading within a flock. While the phrase “biosecurity plan” might bring to mind industrial scale poultry houses, these precautions also have a place in a backyard flock or small scale farm.
Biosecurity plans don’t have to be fancy. They are composed of simple, everyday things you can do to protect your birds from disease and keep them healthy. In this post, we’ll break down what each element of a biosecurity plan means, and give examples of how they can be applied to your own flock.  Here in Western MA, where our farm is located, winters are often tough and unpredictable. We can experience everything from sudden spring-like temperatures to blizzards in the same week. There is one constant, though: a lack of greenery, with no pasture or forage available to our flocks.
When winter has killed off everything but the pines, we pamper our chickens with sprouts. Nutrient dense sprouts are great for our birds all year round, and they are the perfect way to give our chickens the greens they are craving during the coldest months of the year. The best part? Sprouts are INCREDIBLY easy to make yourself, and in this post I'll show you how.
Two friends enjoying the view.
Caring for your chickens in winter can feel like a daunting task, especially if you are a newer chicken keeper. There are so many things to consider. How do you keep your flock’s water from freezing? How cold is too cold? Should you shut the coop up completely in cold weather? Add supplemental heat?
It’s easy to get worried about your chickens out there, braving the cold and snow. But chickens are tough, and with the right strategies, they can get through winter comfortably. In Western Massachusetts, where our farm is located, New England winters can be harsh and unpredictable, with snow and temperatures that dip into the negative. Despite all that, our chickens do just fine, as long as we prepare well and provide them the right care. In this post I’m going to talk about all aspects of chicken winter care, from coop building down to how to best keep your chicken’s toes warm at night (spoiler alert, these two things are actually related!).  Using medical tape to treat a crooked toe. Have you ever wondered what medical supplies you need on hand in a chicken first aid kit? You want to be ready for everything from emergencies to common ailments, but it can be hard to sort through all the supplements and medications out there to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what you actually need.
In this post, I’m going to go over everything I keep on hand to take care of our birds. Putting together a medical kit for your chickens is an investment of both time and money. I hope this peek into our medical supplies will help you save both, and be a starting point for you to put together your own chicken first aid kit. A few months ago, one of our Marans hens, Mollie, suffered an impacted crop. We performed an at-home surgery for her, which went incredibly well. After a few weeks of rest and recuperation in our house, Mollie started laying eggs again--a clear sign that she'd made a full recovery!
While we would miss her company, we knew it was time to move Mollie back outside. Since we don't breed birds that experience any kind of illness, this meant integrating Mollie into our laying flock, a new group for her. Integrating or re-integrating a chicken into a flock should be done with care and planning, in order to reduce stress on all birds involved. Below are our best practices for introducing or returning a chicken to a larger group. |
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