How were flocks of poultry maintained hundreds of years ago?

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

A post about old timey chicken raising AND alcoholic beverages? Awesome!

A couple more thoughts on raising chickens in the past:

• In US colonial times, chickens were sometimes known as "dung hill fowl" as they spent significant time on the manure pile...eating bugs, undigested seeds, mixed in bits of wasted feed from larger animals, etc.
• Stories abound of the youngest farmhand being tasked with the unenviable task of catching and splaying some pest animal periodically in the winter (possum, raccoon, etc.) to provide extra protein to the flock in the winter.

 

[Altairsky]

I love this, great information. Do you remember what type of wine was thought to have antibiotic properties?

Whatever wine was available in the farm. Back then, in my region, every farmer had a grape field and made their own wine, not to sell it but for the family. Our wines are around 11-12% in alcohol content.
However I think wine was used in place of how we use vinegar in poultry today.
Another way that wine was used in the past was to make hens broody. They basically took a hen or a capon, made them drunk, close the drunk bird in a box with the eggs, and it usually would start sitting. I definitely do not recommend this method nowadays, lol.

 

[Henhouse Harlot]

This post is excellent! My addition is more about how great France is than alcohol or feeding racoons to chickens...but here it is! Someone told me awhile back that roosters crowing was now protected by law in France, sure enough;

https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/06...ght-to-crow-as-they-please-in-the-countryside

So awesome!

 

[Chicken Heel]

Enjoyable thread with posts from all over the world and I always enjoy reading about history.

The prettiest chickens I ever saw was my Grandpa Shook's bantam/game mixes that ran around his small farm around 60 years ago. He would throw a little scratch and/or corn out for them and pour them a bowl of fresh raw milk from his Guernsey cow, Pet. Otherwise, they ranged through the barn and fields enjoying the flora, fauna and insects. My favorite memories are those days spent on that farm on the top of Beech Mountain, NC.

 

[Pojojuniper]

I’m curious how people fed flocks of poultry throughout the year hundreds of years ago before the convenience of processed poultry feeds. I know free ranging flocks was way more common as well as food scraps but how did people maintain them when food was more scarce like in the winter months.

I asked this same question when I was new and got a rather snarky and unpleasant reply that this subject had already been addressed in numerous threads. It was very disheartening because I had considered myself to be amongst friends. However, this is the answer that I ended up finding: Back in ol' timey days, people didn't really keep entire flocks throughout the winter. For most of the year, flocks foraged and free-ranged, then in autumn most of the flock was butchered, leaving only a rooster and one or two best breeding hens to feed during the winter on scraps and grains. In the spring, the rooster and hens repopulated and the cycle started again.

 

[RubyLady]

I've recently done quite a bit of research about historical chicken-keeping between from the 18th to 20th century when commercial feeds were produced and sold in the 1940s. I've read a number of chicken and livestock manuals from about 1820-1920s.

In the late 1800s to the 1920s, poultry was expected to produce about 100 - 120 eggs a year. The most common farm and backyard breed was the white leghorn which was lighter and slimmer than today's leghorn.

Feed was non-existent. Chickens were set loose to forage but usually had farm produce and livestock feed and dung to forage from as well as fields, grass, weeds, bugs, fallen fruit, etc. Farmers likely grew some kind of grain which was also thrown to chickens, mostly over winter.

During the very late 1800s and into the first and second World Wars, chicken keepers were encouraged to use more "scientific" feeds based on a balanced diet (as was incredibly minimally understood at the time - vitamins were only discovered around 1912) which was basically a morning feed of a mash of ground grains and meat meal, oyster shell, etc. with an afternoon feed of grain, or a mash made of culled produce or kitchen scraps cooked down with corn or wheat bran in the morning and grain in the evening.

During WW2, UK rationing allowed for some chicken feed with kitchen scraps being the rest of the chicken's diets. In the US, farms just let the chickens out to scratch through cow patties, eat fallen livestock grain and pretty much had access to everything but the fenced garden, made to keep chickens out rather than keep them contained anywhere. Scratch or leftover field corn was thrown out at the end of the day to get chickens to come back home to roost.

The breeds were lighter and more able to avoid predators, roost in trees or barn rafters, though they laid fewer eggs. But when you are not spending anything, or much of anything, having more hens to lay is the obvious trade-off.

Chickens left to nature on the farm will eat about 1/3 of their diets as grass and weeds, 1/3 as animal protein (mainly bugs, snakes, mice, but also butchering waste, excess dairy as well), and 1/3 seeds (grass, weeds, sunflower, millet, spilled farm grain, etc.).

People serious about owning producers culled flocks at 2-3 years. Small farms, mountain people, backyard homestead flocks, and generally poor folks kept their hens as long as possible and let broody mamas tend the new generations - kept all the chickens they had as they needed all the eggs they could get and really old hens and roosters made satisfactory stew.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I asked this same question when I was new and got a rather snarky and unpleasant reply that this subject had already been addressed in numerous threads. It was very disheartening because I had considered myself to be amongst friends. However, this is the answer that I ended up finding: Back in ol' timey days, people didn't really keep entire flocks throughout the winter. For most of the year, flocks foraged and free-ranged, then in autumn most of the flock was butchered, leaving only a rooster and one or two best breeding hens to feed during the winter on scraps and grains. In the spring, the rooster and hens repopulated and the cycle started again.

The snarky response was this one. I was its author, and it was largely because the question had already been answered, consistently, several times in the first 13 pages of that thread. Would not have been the response had you asked the question in a new thread, where there would have been no assumption that you had read the pages of content preceding your query. I was "tired", and it showed. I'll own that, and apologize publicly here and now.

Glad you stuck with BYC in spite of, hope you've found it as useful a resource in your chicken keeping journey as I have.

 

[Chicken Heel]

I've recently done quite a bit of research about historical chicken-keeping between from the 18th to 20th century when commercial feeds were produced and sold in the 1940s. I've read a number of chicken and livestock manuals from about 1820-1920s.

In the late 1800s to the 1920s, poultry was expected to produce about 100 - 120 eggs a year. The most common farm and backyard breed was the white leghorn which was lighter and slimmer than today's leghorn.

Feed was non-existent. Chickens were set loose to forage but usually had farm produce and livestock feed and dung to forage from as well as fields, grass, weeds, bugs, fallen fruit, etc. Farmers likely grew some kind of grain which was also thrown to chickens, mostly over winter.

During the very late 1800s and into the first and second World Wars, chicken keepers were encouraged to use more "scientific" feeds based on a balanced diet (as was incredibly minimally understood at the time - vitamins were only discovered around 1912) which was basically a morning feed of a mash of ground grains and meat meal, oyster shell, etc. with an afternoon feed of grain, or a mash made of culled produce or kitchen scraps cooked down with corn or wheat bran in the morning and grain in the evening.

During WW2, UK rationing allowed for some chicken feed with kitchen scraps being the rest of the chicken's diets. In the US, farms just let the chickens out to scratch through cow patties, eat fallen livestock grain and pretty much had access to everything but the fenced garden, made to keep chickens out rather than keep them contained anywhere. Scratch or leftover field corn was thrown out at the end of the day to get chickens to come back home to roost.

The breeds were lighter and more able to avoid predators, roost in trees or barn rafters, though they laid fewer eggs. But when you are not spending anything, or much of anything, having more hens to lay is the obvious trade-off.

Chickens left to nature on the farm will eat about 1/3 of their diets as grass and weeds, 1/3 as animal protein (mainly bugs, snakes, mice, but also butchering waste, excess dairy as well), and 1/3 seeds (grass, weeds, sunflower, millet, spilled farm grain, etc.).

People serious about owning producers culled flocks at 2-3 years. Small farms, mountain people, backyard homestead flocks, and generally poor folks kept their hens as long as possible and let broody mamas tend the new generations - kept all the chickens they had as they needed all the eggs they could get and really old hens and roosters made satisfactory stew.

I recall White Leghorns being smaller back in the latter 1960's, very athletic fowl in fact. Had two roosters that would roost high up in trees with the bantams. And one of those roosters was the meanest SOB of a chicken that ever was...

 

[RubyLady]

I recall White Leghorns being smaller back in the latter 1960's, very athletic fowl in fact. Had two roosters that would roost high up in trees with the bantams. And one of those roosters was the meanest SOB of a chicken that ever was...

I also remember chickens being much leaner and capable of flying a lot higher, farther, and better than my fat ladies.

 

[Chicken Heel]

I also remember chickens being much leaner and capable of flying a lot higher, farther, and better than my fat ladies.

One of my favorite memories from youth is my dad getting me up just before dawn so I could watch my chickens fly off the roost from the trees. And we would often see deer grazing in the backyard too. Wish I could time travel back to those innocent days...