In part one of this blog series we discussed some of the reasons we raise our own meat, how much it costs, bringing home your new chicks and setting up their brooder. Part two will discuss keeping the birds on pasture in a tractor, briefly touching on some improvements and part three will discuss butchering in brief.
Those cute fuzzy chicks have been growing like gang busters! We lost around 3 or 4 during the brooder phase: two were my fault (pasty butt that i didn’t remedy quickly enough) and 1 or 2 more just died. Hey, it happens: some chicks fail to thrive, others just don’t cope with the stresses of environmental inconsistencies as well as the others. Expect to lose 10% of your chicks. At 3.5-4 weeks old, Freedom Rangers are nearly fully feathered and ready to get outside! That brooder gets smaller every day when you’re a fast growing baby chicken. If you have a brooder area attached to a run you can begin letting them out as early as 2.5-3 weeks old as long as they still have access to their warm brooder lamps. We move ours out to a pasture area enclosed with electric netting, so everyone gets moved at once.
Moving day: We collect each chick by hand and transport it in a large carry cage. It takes us several trips. We try to avoid stressing them as much as possible, but this moving day results in a lot of panicked squacking – never fear, chicks: you’re about to be sooo happy! Normally we’d pull the heavy cage full of chickens behind our lawn tractor in a trailer, but SOMEbody (me) ripped the tire off of it by accident and we didn’t buy a new one in time. Thank you for using your back muscles for the cause, husband!
It’s ideal if moving day coincides with a spell of nice weather. Moving from a warm, dry brooder into a drafty, damp tractor surrounded by rain is not the way to ensure healthy chicks. But if the forecast is not working with your plans you may wish to add a tarp to reduce drafts and even consider adding one heat lamp to a corner. I think it’s important to hydrate the stressed out chicks as i place them in the tractor. This way I’m sure they know where to get water in the future.
Thoughts on using a tractor vs free ranging: This year we are free ranging our chicks, within a safe boundary of electric poultry netting. But for their first 2-3 weeks on pasture we’re keeping them in a tractor. Ours is a Salatin style tractor that we’ve rigged up with some improvements. We still mostly hate it and will be building something better next year. Pros: large area for shade for the chicks, plenty of room for the chicks to loaf around, we added a roost for them to perch and plan on, easy to hang bell waterers from. Cons: really freakin heavy and hard to move, even with the tires we added that don’t really work well; hard to access the chicks on harvest day because it’s low to the ground, did i mention it’s really heavy? The reason we confine them to the tractor for the first few weeks is two fold: at this age they’re still easy pickings for ravens, which are a problem on our farm. Confining them for at least a few days ‘homes’ them to the safe area and location of water. The reasons we let them out of the tractor after the first few weeks are many fold: They get more exercise, they spread their manure out more evenly, they get to live lives as foraging chickens vs sitting around all day chickens (though to be honest, they still sit around most of the day in the shade), we don’t have to move the (really freakin heavy) tractor daily.
It’s such fun to look outside and see the Rangers running about, catching bugs and chasing off starlings. They were a bit nervous about ‘the outside world’ that first time we opened the hatch, but now they move freely in and out. We no longer have to move the tractor daily, but still move it every few days (the manure builds up fast) and as the tractor reaches the far side of the netting we set it up with fresh pasture ahead. So far we’re loving this system. The hatch door we added to the tractor works well and is held open with a simple prop of board. They do still spend most of the day inside in the shade but spend most of the early morning and late evening out and about. We close them up at night to double protect against predation that might get over the fence. We haven’t lost a single bird since they went out to pasture, despite trying our best to crush one with a support beam inside the tractor the first time we moved it. Yay!
These 6 week old Rangers are growing fast! We offer feed free choice, refilling their bucket twice a day plus more feed spread in a line in the grass. As they approach the 12 week mark that feed intake will go up a lot and most of their feed will be in lines in the grass so that they have easier group access to it. They’ve been foraging well along with eating the pellets, taking advantage of grass seed heads as well as any bugs they might find. We’ll butcher at 12 weeks and some will be HUGE by then, but hey: who doesn’t like a good turkey dinner that tastes like chicken? 😉
PS: Raising our chickens on pasture is good for the birds and it’s great for our soil. Our pasture was over grazed by horses for years prior to our purchasing the land. These little beaks, claws and butts are doing a heck of a job converting seeds into fertilizer. The patches of lush green grass following the tractor is enough to inspire happy dances from me
I don’t know anything about chickens. After these first two parts of the series I have a BIG RESPECT for people like you and your husband. And yay for happy dances!
Priscilla recently posted…Happy Freebies
Thank you, Priscilla!!
Oh Miranda – you all are such an interesting and enviable young couple! But how I wish you were vegetarians……your down to earth realty on the farm is hard to know about for an old lady-city girl! I’m a hypocrite for sure – thanks to your earlier posts here and there I now buy chicken from organic humanely raised kind of store. As I’ve gotten older it is getting harder to keep critter pictures out of my head when thinking of dinner. You seem to be doing a wonderful job on your land and giving 100% to it and life. Keep enjoying yourselves!