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Throughout December and into the middle of January, our hen’s egg production began to drop rapidly.  We had a long stretch of extremely cold weather so I figured that was the culprit.  As the days got warmer, the egg production became non existent.  I knew of others having the same issue and adding artificial light as the answer.  My hesitation was bringing in something artificial just to get them laying.  I dug deep into this and found differing opinions.  However, many articles I read stated that adding artificial light was actually beneficial for the overall health of the chickens.  I figured it had something to do with lack of vitamin D.  Humans in northern regions, such as Minnesota, can benefit from visiting tanning booths (artificial light) during the winter months to grab that vitamin D our bodies are craving.  Bringing that back to chickens, the light doesn’t need to be some fancy UV, red spectrum, blue light, etc.  It just needs to mimic daylight and have the hens waking up earlier and going to be later.  Around 16 hours of daylight is roughly the amount of light a hen’s body needs to kick her hormones into gear and start producing eggs again.

So, I first added an LED light strip to the inside of the coop.  It was the cheapest light strip I could find at our local box office store.  I plugged the light strip into a digital timer and programed the lights to come on around 330 am and turn off around 730 pm.  I then programed our chicken door to open up the same time as the lights turn on and close the same time the lights turn off.  A few days later, I added an LED floor light to the outside of the coop.  I have the chicken feed and water out there and shined the light on both.  They had not started producing eggs yet.

A couple more days past and my skepticism was getting the best of me.  A little over a week past when the magic started to happen.  We went from zero eggs for weeks, to two eggs, to six eggs…  At around the third week of introducing artificial light, we were getting between a dozen and 16 eggs a day.  As of writing this article, we are getting 20 to 26 eggs a day with 35 hens.  What a success!

NOTES: Supposedly lumens matter.  The best tip I got was light bright enough to read a book.  That is around 500 lumens.  With my experience, pretty much any light or rope you would buy is going to be at least 500 lumens.