Gold Rush and the Petaluma Colony System

The Petaluma colony system is an outdoor production system for egg layers named after an attractive Californian City in Sonoma County. A fertile and wholesome place, the town really began to prosper at the beginning of the gold rush in 1849. The area soon became the centre of a rapidly growing poultry industry serving the growing metropolitain districts. A temperate climate, lush farmland and proximity to the urban population of San Francisco made it perfectly suited to poultry production. It was at one time known at the "Egg Capital of the World" and the home to the inventor of the first modern egg incubator in 1879. (The Egyptians had beaten him by a few thousand years).

The egg laying industry of Petaluma was based around family run farms each with several thousand hens. The Californian poultry farmers hit upon the following system of production which is regaining popularity today. The hens live in colonies of around 200 birds. Each colony is served by a common feeding area, a communal egg laying house and a drinking station. The colony is sleeps in movable roosting houses containing around 50 hens each. The key aim of the Petaluma system is to maximise the peace and harmony within the flock while minimising the labour inputs. I have tried to implement this labour saving system on our small-holding; it suits the dawn and dusk raids by the guerrilla farmer. With a single feed point, the hoppers can be filled once a week from the back of a tractor (or horse drawn cart). In an age before pressurised running water, having a single drinking point was also a labour saving ruse. In our case we have a mains pressured trough linked to gravity fed waterers

In the roosting house, roost bars are 24 inches above bare ground where the manure accumulates for a few weeks until the house is towed to fresh ground. The manure is removed to the compost heap and ultimately finds its way to the vegetable garden. The roosting houses were traditionally very open structures, often a simple roof with walls sheltering three sides and almost completely open on the fourth. This leaves the sleeping birds quite exposed to predators but the large flow of fresh air keeps them healthy. Birds suffer more than most creatures from respiratory illness so a closed structure with damp air is to be avoided. Our roosting house is very similar with an over-sized roof and wide ventilation gaps on three sides.

The benefit of splitting the sleeping quarters from the egg laying nest boxes are two-fold. The manure is kept a good distance from the eggs and the egg gathering by the farmer is all from one place. During the day, the hens lay their eggs in a spotless laying house stacked high with nest boxes each brimming with clean wood-shavings and sawdust. The wood-shavings dry out muddy feet keeping the eggs picture perfect. The nest boxes have been fashioned from wooden wine cases. The names of the finest vineyards known to humanity furnish the insides of our laying house; a generous gift from my oenophilic neighbour. It is kept dark inside the laying house. The smell of the dry wood-shavings and all those wine cases makes it a special place to go hunting for hen-fruit on a sunny afternoon.

Modern practitioners of the colony system advocate a line of electric fencing to keep predators from the roosting house. Since our small-holding is on the edge of town we see rather a lot of foxes, so I decided to build a 9 strand electric fence as the perimeter of a one acre grassy plot. After several weeks' success things started to go wrong in December. The fox enjoyed hopping through the wires and was helping himself to a feathery breakfast of chicken sushi. After one attack on 'the colony', the hens also decided to start darting through the wires if only to escape from Charlie. I have since gone back to electric netting which has done the job of keeping the birds in and fox out. To further defend against night-time raids from badgers, mink, owls etc I have fitted light-activated electronic door openers. With some weeks of training, the hens now put themselves to bed at dusk and wait patiently for the doors to open in time for breakfast. I'm considering investing in a child sized version for the house.

For further reading on Alternative Poultry Production Systems and Outdoor Access http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/poultryoverview.html#layers