A little nature and a whole lotta nurture.

Cornish Cross chicks in brooder – day 5.  “Are we in the forest?”

I’m not a PC chicken farmer.  By this I mean I don’t let my chickens free-range.  There I said it!  The F-word of the pastured poultry world.  But, I know raising these chickens for part of our meat supply is an un-natural task.  These babies will never know the warm and protective feeling of their mother’s breast feathers, or learn her clucking chicken language.  Likewise, their mother will never have any responsibility to her babies.  Her job is to lay eggs at a hatchery, the ultimate fertility clinic.  She lays her eggs and someone else keeps them warm until they hatch, then her babies are put in a cardboard box and hopefully sent to someone like me who will watch over them like a “hawk” (no pun intended).  I prefer mail order chicks to the ones is the feed store, which more than likely have already had medicated feed.  The feed store has speculated on selling the chicks, so they don’t want to take any chances on losing them.  Plus, at our local feed store, that chicken room doesn’t get any rest until fall, so it is not the most sanitary for baby chicks.  There is no point in feeding antibiotics, which can irritate the digestive tract, if you provide healthy feed, clean water, and clean surroundings you shouldn’t need the antibiotics. 

Our chicken brooder is actually a small greenhouse.  It measures 20′ x 20′.  The personnel part is 5′ x 20′ and the chick part is 15′ x 20′.  I realize this is quite large for homesteaders, but a design like this, just smaller, can save energy and labor over time.  This was about the fourth refinement for us.

We raised chicks 400 – 500 a batch, plus turkeys, each season.  Every batch we tried to see how we could improve our outcome.  Less mortality, less labor, happy chickens and happy farmers.  This is where we ended up.  The brooder has a dirt floor, which is healthier and more natural for the birds.  Dh built it with wide doors for easy clean out, and vents for ventilation.  Actually, the poly was leftover from building the larger greenhouses, and since it is a lower profile, ( read: easier to clean snow off) we spaced the bows at 5′ and could use scraps of lumber from other projects, keeping the cost down.  In these pictures you can see the horse stable bedding we get for free.  It makes perfect chicken house bedding.  There is chicken wire on the chicken side, so if predators try to get at the birds, they are safe…  We have had bobcats claw off the chicken wire, but that should be another post… maybe.

What we like about this brooder setup:
♣ Large enough to hold the chicks for 4 weeks if the weather is too cold to move to pasture.

♣ Natural sunlight abounds, allowing me to turn off the expensive heat lamps on even a partly cloudy day.  I do leave the lights on at night until the chicks are 2 – 3 weeks old. 

♣ I’m walking around with the chicks to feed them, and they can get used to me.  I’m not reaching over into a box causing them to scatter.

♣  We have used the tops of the hover boxes as a place to start our vegetables.  The heat is adequate to start even  warm weather crops, this makes it dual purpose.  Using that electricity twice.

♣ We will clean the bedding out before the turkey poults, but if I was raising multiple batches of chicks, I could add fresh bedding for the whole season and get the benefits of deep bedding.

♣  If we quit raising birds, since the floor is dirt, not concrete, we could use it as a greenhouse instead.

Mistakes we made along the way:(

* Crowding chicks in too small a space.  This can cause pecking and cannibalism.  No fun.
* Too many sleepless nights worrying if we were going to burn down the barn or shop.
* Not enjoying the chicks, they were stressed and so were we.

Hover built out of scraps.

Plasson hanging bell waterer. 

 

 

Even though the chicks aren’t using this waterer yet, they will have one like this when they move to their field shelter.  As they get a little more adventuresome, I start moving their small waterers farther away from them and closer to this hanging one.  My goal is to take one of the small waterers out every other day until they have all been trained to the larger waterer.  My reasoning is two-fold.  The larger waterer is easier to clean and is gravity fed by a five gallon bucket outside the brooder.  The smaller waterers are hard to keep clean, even if you keep raising them, and they are just plain inconvenient.

At first, I put food and grit out on newspapers (Capital Press only, to get their mind right!) and in feeders.  It helps to put out more than you think they might eat, so they don’t get hungry.  There are also waterers everywhere they look.  I need them to eat, drink water, and sleep.  After 72 hours their yolk is used up and I’m totally responsible, so after day 3 if something happens, it’s on me.  You can tell if something is wrong by listening and looking.  You will learn what each noise means, and you can tell if they look sick.  They are just like any other baby – ON or OFF.  They shouldn’t look weak or holding their wings askew.  If you have one or two sickies, that’s probably OK, some dying every day, then there is something wrong.  Temperature, food and water is where I look first.

This shows the water hanging with an adjustable toggle.

These birds grow fast and the water should be at the correct height. You can adjust the height in seconds. Most important, keep the manure out of the water.  This makes it easy.  We purchased our Plasson waterers from Strand Ag Supply, 209-538-1771.  They have very few parts, are easy to clean, and are virtually indestructible.

Here are the lawnmowers – our Katahdins.

I fence them around the greenhouses to mow.  They can do a better job than I can with the tractor.  They mow very short, which helps with any rodent problems.  Rodents need cover, so this keeps them exposed and  between methods like this, our army of kitties, and our diligent doggies, we have had very few problems.  I also keep the headlands around the gardens short to keep the voles at a minimum.  If you look close you can see the graze line in the foreground of this picture.

Trapper Creek Blue Moon Melvin – Vole hunter, he got 6 on Thursday.