Category Archives: Pastured Poultry

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Hatching a Few Eggs

The duck hatch was so successful we set some eggs from our mostly New Hampshire flock.  Somebody gave us a gold laced Wyandotte and a Buff Orpington so those eggs were mixed in as well.  We can sift those chicks out as they hatch striped, not a big deal.  They started hatching Thursday night and will have to be finished Sunday morning so I can set more eggs.

IncubatorWe are attempting to hatch our own replacement layers this year.  Approximately 20% of the eggs we get are not New Hampshire eggs.  50% of those remaining will be males.  And we shouldn’t expect to hatch more than about 75% of the eggs we set.  That means I probably only get 12 pullets every hatch.  I’ll be hatching for a while.  It would be better if I would just go separate those two hens from the flock but the kids like the striped chicks.

Brooder

For now we are brooding in a 300 gallon Rubbermaid trough in the back room.  Really, this is just a place to keep the chicks warm until we free up brooder space in the greenhouse.  (AKA we kick the ducks out).  We’ll need nicer weather before we do that.

NHRThis is an awful lot of fun and could be the beginning of generations of NHR chickens on our farm.  Their mothers and fathers (plural) have survived 2-3 years of heat, cold, wet and dry.  Some of their peers didn’t make it.  Hopefully, in a few generations, we’ll have birds that are genetically predisposed to success on our farm.

Red birds?  Red cows?  I sense a trend.

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Chicken in the Mornin’

So.  How does this work in the morning?  What do you do with your chickens each day?

I’m glad you asked.  Have you seen the Walmart cheer?  We don’t do that.  We walk or bike down to the alfalfa field (half mile?) and are greeted by the entire flock.  Then there are a couple of checks we do every time.

1. Are any layers dead?  It happens.  Something penetrates our fence, enduring the pain of electrocution in desperation for a free chicken dinner.  Or it flies in.  Whichever.  But it happens rarely but sometimes birds die.

2. Do they have water?

3. Do they have feed?  We now keep a 300# pasture feeder in the field.  We only feed the birds once each week.  It’s great.

4. Do they have shell?  No shell means broken eggs.

LayerMorning

Then we check the chicken tractors.

2. Do they have water?  Do the birds have access to that water?

BroilerWater

3. Are any broilers dead?  It’s rare but it does happen.  Most commonly happens when they are very young and pile on top of each other.  It can happen when they get just about butcher weight.  But it can also happen after a heavy rainstorm.  You will know because the birds will probably be laying on their face.  We have only had two deaths in a chicken tractor related to predation.  One morning we found two dead chickens in the same tractor.  They were young birds.  One was killed by talons of a predator through the chicken wire side.  The other was crushed under a pile of chickens trying to get away from the owl.  However, the owl never returned.  He banged into the side of the tractor and left a pile of his own feathers on the ground.  You may also find a bird laying on its back and looking purple.  Heart attack.  We had an americauna rooster die of a heart attack so it’s not just a CX thing.

Broilers

4. Do they have feed?  We always feed the broilers.  I want to know if I fed them too much or not enough last time.  I want to offer them too much feed…but only a little too much.

Feed or not, I pull the feeders from the chicken tractors one at a time.  Then I use the dolly to move each tractor forward, waiting on the chickens to move, being careful not to run over any birds.  We find this goes better in the cool of the morning when the birds are hungry than in the evening when they are fat and the temperature is higher.  The dolly was a trade for 8 chickens.  He made it from sucker rod, angle iron and lawn mower wheels.

Dolly

The layer houses also need moved because they too make serious deposits on the ground.

LayerMorning2

Feeders are filled and replaced, the water is filled again and we’re done for a couple of hours when we come back to feed and water again.  The broilers need our attention about every four hours or so.  If they go short on water they die.  If they go short on feed they don’t grow the way we need them to.

We can easily get away with checking the layers once/day when we gather the eggs.  All it takes is excess feed and water capacity.  But the broilers need our attention regularly.  Consequently we’re shortening our broiler production windows.  Keeping the two groups of birds together saves on time, reduces our fencing needs and limits waste from the broiler feeders.  Any food that hits the ground gets picked up by the layers eventually.

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Delayed Chicken Processing

The chickens just aren’t paying attention to our butchering schedule.  If you want a fresh, never frozen, hormone- and antibiotic-free, humanely-raised, pastured chicken you’re going to have to wait another week.  If you want a frozen, hormone- and antibiotic-free, humanely-raised, pastured chicken you’re going to have to wait another week…cause we’re all out.  Either way…we’re moving our processing date to the 20th.

Broilers

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You Will Know Them by Their Hen Fruit

Over the weekend I noticed our egg yolks are looking a little pale.  A customer also mentioned it to me.  That’s not much of a shock given the time of year but it’s something I need to manage.  The picture also indicates that my whites are a little loose, though those particular eggs came from geriatric hens so it may be a hen issue.

EggYolks

The yolks should be orange.  The kind of orange that screams at you like like William Wallace calling for his favorite crayon…”ORANGE!!!”  My chickens are not getting enough greens in their diet.  Later in the spring when the dandelions are growing well, the color will return on its own.  Right now the chickens need some supplemental greens.  I’ll start tossing in a bucket or two of alfalfa chaff and some winter annuals that are growing among the carrots in the garden (chickweed and henbit) and we’ll see how things go.  Things are starting to green up already but I’m not moving the birds fast enough to keep them in the green.  Work, work, work.

If you want a little bit of homework you can read about what makes a good pastured egg and how they compare to factory eggs on a nutritional level at Mother Earth News.

PS
My lovely bride (who is looking particularly beautiful today) says my joke title is a bit of a reach.  Chime in on comments if you get it at all.

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Generalizing about Specialization

Specialization has made us all wealthy.  Cell phones, packaged meat, refrigeration…the dreams of kings!  All because of specialization.  Focusing on doing one thing very well and doing it repeatedly means I don’t have to do 50 things poorly.  I focus on doing what I do best and hire other specialists to manage the other things.  For example, I no longer turn wrenches on my own cars.  I hire a specialist.  Also, I am not my children’s dentist but I am my son’s barber.  By separating the duties of a roofer from those of a machinist from those of a cardiologist we end up with better roofing, more precise machining and a better chance of surviving when our lifelong assault on our heart becomes more than it can handle.  We are all better off because of specialists.

Generalization lends security.  What if I can’t get to a dentist?  What if I have to perform CPR on that stranger who wrecked his motorcycle on the road?  What if all the roofing companies are overbooked and nobody is available to put a roof on my house?  That’s when we rely broad knowledge and experience.

Everyone bridges the gap.  No person is 100% dedicated to their field.  The best cardiologist in the world is still a human the rest of the day.  She may also be a mother, a child, a volunteer or a welder by day and a dancer by night (she’s a maniac!)

I have to balance this out as well.  If I did nothing but my primary vocation from sunup to sundown I would make more money but I would be bored…and boring.  Well, more boring.  I really like what I do for a living.  It’s exciting, challenging and stimulating.  It is also air-conditioned and comes with a nice, cushy chair and a desk.  Though I don’t even get a cubicle to protect me from communicable diseases, I do have a desk of my very own. I am not the only specialist in my office.  The office is filled with specialists.  Each of us can create, fix, plan or manage our way to corporate profitability (though some get cubes!).

So far this hasn’t been a current events post about the farm but I’ll swing this back to the farm for you now.  I am a specialist in my career but my career does not define me.  I have traded away decades (yup, plural) of my life and a small fortune in training and books to gain the technical knowledge I possess.  Please understand, I take my job seriously.  I work hard to stay current on changes in technology.  That said, I am not my job.  The job is too small to describe me.  It’s just one thing I do.  I am not a specialist on the farm either.  Our speciality is pastured chicken but we also raise pigs, cows, turkeys, ready-to-lay pullets, mushrooms, garden vegetables, children, make tons and tons of compost, cut and manage our woodlot, and grow acres and acres of grass some of which we store in the barn for future use.  Each of these endeavors requires knowledge, practice, education and experience.  Because we do so many things I can only go so deeply into each one.  Why do I stop at 1200 broilers each year?  Because I am a generalist.  That’s all I can handle given our time constraints…for now anyway.  But the same equipment we use to raise broilers allows us to raise pullets for ourselves and for sale.  In fact, our fencing and chicken tractors can be used for pigs as well.  Not only am I a generalist, I try to utilize multi-purpose, non-specialized equipment.

I can set up, design and maintain your SQL Server database.  I can raise, kill and process chickens, turkeys, rabbits, ducks and pigs.  I am, over time, becoming a gardening and canning fool.  I can shingle a roof with the best of them.  I have flipped burgers, watered plants, mowed grass, designed landscaping, framed houses and traveled the length and breadth of North America (and Puerto Rico) training truck mechanics how to use software.  I have changed tires on everything from cars to semi-trailers to tractors.  I have changed diapers.  But I am not rich.  Were I to give up all this generalist nonsense and focus on my career I might be closer to “rich” but I do feel secure knowing we’ll eat well.

Forgive me if the world is less wealthy because I refuse to specialize.  I’m just having too much fun.  Besides, Heinlien said:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

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Why Does the Salatin Model take 20 Acres?

Why Does the Salatin Model take 20 Acres?  That’s an excellent question someone asked the blog.  Though I have only met Salatin once and can’t begin to read his mind, I’m willing to take a stab at it.  This is my opinion, not his.  It doesn’t take 20 acres.  He suggests what is possible with a mere 20 acres.  But since I have 20 acres I’ll explain why I think it’s a good number when you are starting out.

First, 20 acres isn’t a lot of ground.  It’s an amount of ground that could be purchased for a reasonable price when the book “Pastured Poultry Profits” was published in the 90′s.  If the idea is to get in cheap and get rolling quickly, buying 20 acres generally fits the bill.  If you get started and decide raising chickens isn’t for you then you could still keep the land as recreational ground or take a stab at growing something else.

An acre will raise 300-500 broilers depending on how fast they grow out, how good your feed ration is, temperature, rainfall, bug population and numerous other factors.  Let’s just say 400 birds per acre per year.  As pointed out in the book, once your broilers spend a day on an area of ground you’ll need to wait until next year to bring them back.  Otherwise you’ll saturate the soil with nitrogen and (probably) kill or at least damage your grass.  If you are buying in all of your feed (as Salatin indicates in the book) and using all of your land for poultry production (assumption in the book) and the land is relatively flat, level and well drained you can raise 8,000 Cornish Cross birds in a year.  But wait, there’s more.  His goal is to net you $25,000.  That means each acre of birds has to put $1250 in your pocket over expenses.  So you have to buy the chicks ($1 each), feed each bird 15 pounds (or $4.50) worth of of feed.  300 birds at a time are brooded together then split up into groups of 60 in chicken tractors.  Along the way you’re paying for the brooders, lamps, water, electricity and time handling.  Then, once in chicken tractors, you take time each day to feed, water and move them.  At my efficiency level, by the time the birds are grown I have spent about 2 minutes with each bird.  It takes me a further 2.5-3 minutes per bird to kill, dress and pack them.  That time is worth something.  You aren’t going to process many birds alone so you’ll have to pay some help.  Finally, the purchase price of chicken tractors, processing equipment, fence and freezers have to be spread across multiple batches of birds across a number of years…adding to your costs.  If you don’t buy processing equipment, add in the cost of transportation and processing off-site.

SO, to net $25,000 on your 20 acres you have to make $3.13 above costs for all 8,000 birds.  OK.  That’s not too bad.  Let’s say the birds average 4 pounds and you are charging $4/pound for the whole bird.  You have just made your margin.  But you still have to sell 8,000 birds.  That takes time.  Our first three years were 500, 900 then 1200 birds and I suspect we’ll stay at or below 1200 next year.  Salatin outlines a similar schedule.  It takes time for you to learn marketing.  It takes time for word of mouth to spread.  It takes time to build skill with the livestock, learn about seasonality, learn how to process and package.  It takes time to train customers to buy in bulk rather than just a chicken or two every other week.  But you only have to manage 20 acres while you’re learning and growing your small business.

If you are looking to get started, have room to grow and ultimately earn a fair portion of your annual farm income from seasonal broiler production, read the book and get to work.  If $25k doesn’t quite go far enough you could augment your income with any number of additional enterprises on the same land.  Anything from large market gardens, pecan trees, cows, sheep, apples, nursery stock…who knows.  Let your imagination run wild or check out Salatin’s other books  (especially You Can Farm and Family Friendly Farming) and works by other authors like Making your Small Farm Profitable for lists of suggestions.  The chickens are just one option to boost your small farm income.   But that, I think, is why Salatin suggests a small parcel: manageable costs, manageable workload, steep but manageable learning curve.  Again, the book lays out what is possible with 20 acres but in no way requires 20 acres.  One acre will keep you busy with chickens the first year.

Now, if you really want your noodle baked, he suggests elsewhere that you should rent until you build wealth then buy to preserve your wealth.  Stay light, portable, flexible and out of debt.  Pastured chicken is the new black.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

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Processing Day 10/20/12

We will begin processing chickens as soon as we’re finished milking in the morning on 10/20.  If you are interested in seeing how we do this, show up any time after 9.  If you are coming to pick up fresh chicken, whole or cut up, show up any time after 11.  If you don’t come on butcher day the birds will be frozen.

The weather promises to be cold and breezy so we’ll work pretty fast to get done quickly.

Wish us luck.  These are the last birds of the season.  If you miss out, we have a few in inventory.  Otherwise we’ll see you in April or May.

Finally, if you want to come out but don’t know where the farm is, shoot an email to chismheritagefarm@gmx.com and I’ll help you find your way.

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Did You Ever Give a Chicken a Bath?

No.  Heck no.  They run around in the rain.  Good enough.  I also don’t snuggle with my birds.  Maybe I’m the weird one.

Click on image for source

However, I don’t show my birds.  Mine are economy birds, not luxury birds and certainly not show birds.  They eat bugs, dethatch the pasture, spread manure piles and lay eggs, all on a relatively small amount of feed.  Economy.  They are not pets.  When they get old they get retired to freezer camp.  If they get sick they get culled.  If they develop a limp they get culled.  If they don’t lay eggs they get culled.  I think they are happy taking dust baths so I don’t waste time fighting it.

I now present two links.  The first is a how-to on bathing your chicken sent by my sister.  I read that and shake my head.  Others may read it and take notes.  Good for you.

Click on image for source

The second is a portion of a documentary called The Natural History of the Chicken.  I would swear it was made as an homage to Christopher Guest.  Just watch the bit about the lady with the chicken.  Start at the beginning of the series to learn about giving mouth to beak to a chicken…lol.

Click on image for source

Good luck and let me know if you have ever bathed with, gone swimming with or kissed a bird.  I haven’t.

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Talking Turkey

To be honest, I don’t think about the turkeys very often.  Once they are out of the brooder they are darned near indestructable.  I keep water in front of them, give them feed and a source of grit, move them daily and they’re good.

Oh, they’ll do everything in their power to kill themselves in the brooder but after that they don’t really need me.

Broad Breasted Bronze

I don’t have any experience with heritage breeds.  We have raised Broad Breasted White and Broad Breasted Bronze turkeys the last two years.  The first year I slaughtered all 20 chicks.  This year 7/10 died in the brooder.  But 3 came through with flying colors.

This year’s turkeys arrived on May 4th.  At 4 weeks the turkeys left the brooder and went to the chicken tractor.  This is a bit early but since the weather was unseasonably warm and dry we took our chances.  They dressed out early in September as HUGE birds.  Huge.  Dinosaurs.  Once again we waited too long to process them.  Also, the white (no surprise) are easier to dress out.

I can tell you how many pounds of feed my broilers eat.  I have no idea how much my turkeys ate.  I believe they are pretty efficient because they forage so well but, honestly, I have no idea.  We just feed them and they grow.

Two years in and we still have much to learn about turkeys!  Let me know if you have any advice on keeping poults alive.

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The Last Broilers of 2012

Well, it’s time.  We recieved our last batch of broilers for the year.  We were on the fence about ordering more birds but the weather cooled off a bit, it finally rained and we are nearly sold out of boneless breast meat.  At the last minute we decided to order 125 chicks.

I called our normal hatchery, Schlecht Hatchery, to see if she could fit me in the 8/15 shipment.  Etta said she had gone to hatching every other week and wouldn’t be able to fill my order until September 5th.  Well, a Sep. 5th ship date means a Nov. 1. butcher date.  I don’t want to butcher chickens in November again…too cold.  I called another supplier, Sun Ray Hatchery (also in Iowa).  They acted like they were waiting for me to call.  No problem at all with my order.

I had very good luck with turkeys from Sun Ray last summer and I have high hopes for their chicks.  At any rate, these are all destined to be cut-up birds, available either Oct. 13th or 20th depending on weather.  Between now and then we have a good supply of whole frozen birds and backs but very few boneless breasts, leg quarters or wings available.  If you are in the market for a whole bird or one hundred whole birds, give us a call.  That means it’s a good time to learn how to cook and use the whole bird.  Look for a new series on cooking the whole bird soon and check back for updates as these little birdies grow.  They will be on pasture in early September.

Before the chicks arrived we went through the normal routine.  We put a layer of well-composted (and quite warm) wood chips down in an even layer.  Then we turned on the heat lamps.  We thought we only needed two lamps but it turned out later we needed three.  No big deal.  We filled the water bucket with 5 gallons of water and 1/4th cup of sugar.  The sugar tip came from Andy Lee in Chicken Tractor.  He actually says 3 Tlbs sugar or honey per quart of water for the first 2 days.  I also filled two feed trays and two bucket lids with feed and nestled them into the bedding so they were level with the ground.  That gives the chicks a place to eat at ground level.  It’s important that they don’t have to reach up to eat and, I think, important they don’t have to jump hurdles as they run around and play.  Tomorrow they will get creek sand on top of their feed but today I just want them to drink, warm up and rest.

The post office called early in the morning but we finished our chores before driving to town.  Everybody looked great.  Julie counted 80 chicks from her crate, I lost count of mine.  There were supposed to be 125.  We’ll count them again as we unload the brooder.

Two by two we loaded them into the brooder.  I don’t know how they know but chicks know how to be chicks.  They went right to work.  Scratching, pecking, running, chasing, even drinking from the watering nipples.  Amazing.

Even more amazing was the packaging label.  Caution!  Step Back!  Dangerous Chickens!  OMG!!!  BIRD FLU!!!!!