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 .