How To Keep Chickens Warm in Freezing Temperatures | Northern Canada
Hello Everyone and Welcome to the Blog; If your new here we are a family of 4 who love to Adventure, Garden on our Zone 3B Homestead and of course our newest adventure of raising and keeping chickens in our harsh cold winters. Where we live we can reach temperatures of -50 Celsius and Below with wind chills for several weeks in the winter months. Our Cold temperatures and snow some years start before Halloween in October and can last until End of April. I think I can say that I have officially seen snow in every month of the year living in this crazy province we call home. Not every winter is crazy and we do get some nice days that hover around freezing so keeping chickens can sometimes be a challenge.
There are a few things to keep in mind for keeping chickens in the winter that we believe are essential for the health and wellbeing of your chickens.
Keeping the humidity levels low can be tricky and most struggle to keep them the same or lower than than the outside humidity. We find that ventilation in the coop is essential so our coop has some open vents located at the top of the coop. We also have a piece of plywood below the roosts that we scrape the extra poop away.
We also have an insulated coop to help with warmth, our windows on the coop are south facing so although we do not get much sun in the winter it does help warm up the coop a bit during the day. We also have installed a Sweeter Heater above our roosts to help take the chill off. I will link our vlog below for the sweeter heater if you are interested. We find we like it so far and it is a lot safer than a heat bulb.
We also use a heated water dish in the coop and a heated dog bowl in the chicken run outside to ensure that their water does not freeze as water is essential as well.
We use the deep litter method in our coop and so far it has been working great. We have a sand, dirt based run that is enclosed and covered with Polly to give our chickens a place to hang out protected from the wind. Outside of the chicken run in their free roaming area that we have a few spools, raised platforms and benches for them to roost off the ground on nicer winter days. We also give them bales of straw once in a while especially after a fresh snow. They absolutely love to spread the straw and it covers the snow and helps keep the chickens warms while they explore. I will link a video below of our chicken coop build and check out the several other videos we have on keeping chickens in a zone 3 climate. One other thing we do is apply Vaseline to our chickens that have a taller comb to help prevent frost bite.
Our list of essentials for keeping Chickens in cold Climate:
1) Ventilation in Coop is Key
2) Keep humidity Levels low
3) Supply Clean not frozen water
4) Apply Vaseline to larger Combs
5) Give straw to cover snow
6) Good Healthy Diet
Well there you have our list for keeping chickens healthy and warm in the cold harsh winters. Please check out our YouTube channel or follow us on Instagram @Albertaadventurerfamily.
