Boosting Winter Egg Production: Innovative Lighting Solutions for Backyard Chickens

This episode highlights the challenges of maintaining egg production in winter and introduces a practical solution based on light exposure. By experimenting with a smart red LED light to simulate longer daylight hours, listeners can discover effective methods to boost their hens' egg-laying potential sustainably.

• Explanation of how light influences chicken ovulation 
• Personal anecdote about my winter egg production dilemma 
• Details of the red light experiment and its setup 
• Clear results showing improved egg yield in response to light 
• Neighbor's experience with unexpected egg production 
• Recommendations for humane lighting practices for backyard chickens

Transcript

Sylvie: 0:02

Are we ready, pawpaw? Hello friends and welcome to Chicken. Every Day, a podcast for you, the backyard chicken enthusiasts, and mine. Your host is my Pawpaw, gary, Gary Valerie of Senla Backyard Chickens. Here we have fun while sharing ideas and learning how to care for our foul-feathered friends. Check out our videos at Senla that's C-E-N-L-A Backyard Chickens on YouTube, tiktok and Facebook. So, without further ado, let's start today's show. How was that?

Gary: 0:34

Hey guys, Gary, with CENLA Backyard Chickens with you again. It's wintertime, January, it's cold outside, you're not getting a lot of daylight and, if you're like me, your chicken's egg production it's gone down to very little all the way, maybe to even practically nothing. My next-door neighbor that lives over there. She's got about 20 laying hens and she's getting one or two eggs a week if she's lucky right now. And if you don't know, a hen's ovulation cycle, in other words how often she ovulates and produces an egg, is based on how many hours of daylight that they receive, and for good egg production a hen needs a good 16 hours or so of daylight.

Gary: 1:11

Chicken houses that are just in business to put out as many eggs as possible put artificial lights in there 24-7,. I do not believe in doing that. I think it's just a little bit, you know, on the cruel side to chickens. But I did want to explore this and report back to y'all and to see if it made much difference. So I started doing some more reading and some research and, according to the research that I found, it's the red light in the sun's rays that really helped pick these, these birds up and get them going. So let me show you what I did and I'll tell you the results about it.

Gary: 1:44

I am fortunate enough that the back of my coop here this is my metal shop and I have electricity in there, so I'm lucky enough that I'm able to run electricity to my chicken coop Right here. I'm sorry, there's not much good light. Right here is the back side of the coop. Right there that is a Wi-Fi extender and I have Alexa. Right there is an Alexa device. Okay, so what I did right here, I put a lamp with an with a smart bulb an LED smart bulb, not a heat lamp, an LED smart bulb and what I did is I connected it with Alexa and I said okay, at 430 in the morning, I want you to come on with the color red at 5%, 5 right there and spend the next hour slowly ramping up to maximum. I didn't want to just all of a sudden flood my chicken coop with red light and you can see in the picture that I'm showing you what it looked like when it was up to maximum. So it's spend an hour going to that 8 o'clock in the morning. It would turn off, of course, by 8 o'clock, actually by 7.15, 7.30,. The birds are all gone and out, running around in the yard and everything, and I did that for a little over a month. I wanted to see if it made a difference, and it made a tremendous difference in my egg production Now, right now I am down to eight layable hens that can lay. One of them turned broody, so that went to seven right there.

Gary: 3:22

About two and a half weeks into this experiment, I'm getting four and five eggs a day, every day. They are really laying well. Let me get over here with some better light I'm sorry it's late in the evening and the sun's going down. Getting a lot of good egg production, I mean really was working well and so I said, all right, I'm not going to keep doing this with them because my bird you know, my wife and I, we don't need that many eggs. Usually it's just two of us here, but I want to see how well it worked and it worked fantastic. So I pulled the light away after about, I think, four weeks and it takes them a while to ramp down and right now it's been about a week and a half since I got it. I removed the lamp out of there and I'm still getting three eggs a day, sometimes four eggs a day, but it is starting to slow down. So this does make a difference, and the reason I tell you guys this if you need the eggs, this is a possibility, you know. If you're selling them or your family needs them for food, then yeah, do this. But what I like about what I did is slowly ramping up that light, not just flooding them with light all of a sudden, and then they go to bed every night with natural light. So when the sun starts going down, the chickens come in here and they go to bed like they should, and I slowly bring that light to them, starting at 4 30 in the morning, and it really really made a difference. And if you want to try it, give it a shot. Don't use a heat lamp.

Gary: 4:45

Here's a funny thing. We're at a party with some friends, a nice get together that we have, and one of my friend's daughters has chickens, and she was telling me that her daughter just couldn't explain. She's just getting tons and tons of eggs all of a sudden and we're having extreme cold snap. It's been down in the teens in Louisiana. That's some seriously cold weather and she didn't understand why, and so we got to talking a little bit and she said well, her daughter does use a heat lamp in the coop.

Gary: 5:11

And I said, really? I said, is it a red lamp? She said yeah. I said does she turn it on or off, or leave it on? She just leaves it off. I said there's your reason right there. That's why she's getting all of those eggs. She didn't even realize that she was trying to put supplemental heat in her chicken coop and ended up in the process giving herself tons and tons of eggs, more than she can eat. So if you want to give it a shot, give it a shot. See what you think about it, let me know if it works for you, but this is something that can work. Again, I did not use a heat lamp myself. I used a smart bulb connected to my Lexus that slowly ramped up and I did it in the red color. So if this helps, see you all soon. Bye-bye.

Sylvie: 5:54

That's all we have time for today. I really hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast. Be sure to watch our videos. So, on behalf of my PawPaw, Gary, and me, Sylvie, thanks for listening.