Raising Chickens

The meat birds are seven weeks old now and time sure has flown...hard to believe they go from this...

 to this,

in such a short time!

The time has really flown by this year and I have actually enjoyed it this time.  This is our third year raising chickens and I think we have finally figured things out.  Our first year we brooded them in our drafty tool shed on two levels...it was stinky and messy until we moved them out to chicken tractors over at Big Bear Ranch.  I loved the chicken tractors but driving over to Big Bear twice a day and hauling water in the back of my truck was a lot of work.

Last year we built an insulated brooding house which worked out very nicely and used an outdoor pen we constructed using poultry netting.  This meant the chickens had access to the outdoors but our chicken house was still kind of stinky and I was still hauling a lot of water around.

This year we have made a number of improvements...first, the automatic waterers...you can see from this picture of the inside of the chicken house...the hanging waterer...

It is attached to this big tank which I only need to fill every three or four days, using my garden hose...

Second, we installed a ventilation fan (you can see the outlet above the water tank) that keeps the fresh air coming through...that makes a big difference... no more eye-watering ammonia smell!

Third, we hauled all the feed over to the chicken house and stored it inside.  Last year I was carrying the bags from our hay shed over to the chicken house on a daily basis and those bags are heavy at approx. 45 lbs each.  I am also keeping a tote full of shavings in the chicken house so I can easily scatter a fresh layer of shavings every day.

The last thing I would like to improve upon this year is making it easier to move the poultry netting.  It works well in the sense that you can keep moving the chickens onto fresh grass but it moving it is quite a chore.  It is heavy and must be taken down and collected up very carefully.  It is also not the easiest to use on our brushy grass areas as it gets snagged regularly on all the wild rose bushes and saskatoon bushes.

I will have to keep thinking on that one...I suspect using some heavy machinery and flattening, tilling and planting grass seed is the only answer to improving the ground around there.

Maybe next year...stay tuned for another post on butchering day!