Freedom Ranger Roundup
August 9th, 2013 · 3 Comments · Posted in farming
New experience for chicks: real grass
There’s nothing easy about moving 30 broiler chicks. Call it organized chaos.
Turns out baby broilers don’t especially like humans or want to be held. Approach them from one side of the brooder and they all run to the other. Transferring them to pasture in the newly built chicken tractor was definitely a job for two people. Good thing my wife was here to help.
While she poked, prodded and nudged the chicks with a length of two-by-four from one side of the brooder, I waited to grab them on the other. Still, the chicks didn’t really cooperate. They piled up all over each other and tried to leap out of the brooder anywhere they could. So we ended up chasing some around the basement floor and grabbing them any way that worked. Then into a cat carrier they went, to be carried out to the tractor a few at a time.
Once in their new coop, the chicks seemed to settle down. For a feeder, I’d screwed a length of vinyl rain gutter to the base frame of the tractor and filled it with plenty of broiler feed. This is good stuff: local grain grown “naturally” and ground by a local farmer. Not only did the chicks find the feed, pretty soon they were climbing into the gutter and gorging themselves. Oh well, they’ll just have to figure out for themselves that you’re not supposed to walk and poop in your food. I suppose that will become a little easier when they’re bigger.
Now we just have to start making plans for the slaughter some five weeks hence. Hard to believe these chicks can grow so fast. But already they are towering over the Guineafowl keets they’d been sharing the brooder with these last couple of weeks. They eat an enormous amount of feed and throw off so much heat, the basement where we keep the brooder was turning into a kind of terrarium.
At home in the new tractor, they’ll get a taste of fresh grass each day as I move the coop along the ground with a hand truck. Not such a bad life–though short–for chickens destined to be eaten, you think?
Wow! I love the new look of your website, Ed! Beautiful : )
Thanks, Diane. It’s been in the works for some months now. We like it, too.
Be careful if you use a hand truck or dolly to move the tractor… it can lift up the edge far enough for them to escape! I know this because my first 26 Freedom Rangers ended up living under the porch for a couple of days until I managed to re-capture them. 🙂