Chicken Tractor Tragedy
August 14th, 2013 · 3 Comments · Posted in farming
Dead chicks litter the ground
Well, that didn’t go so well.
I was feeling so good about myself and the spiffy new chicken “tractor” I’d built to house our broilers. Then I took the “tractor” for its first spin in the yard and managed to run over and kill seven of the 30 chicks inside.
The tractor is a heavy box eight feet long and four feet wide that sits flush on the ground. In theory, when you move it, using a hand truck to lift and drag from one end, the chicks are supposed to walk along with it until we reach the next location. We must have forgotten to send the chicks that memo, because instead of walking forward as I was expecting they apparently bunched up at the other end of the tractor in a kind of chicken scrum. The ones at the bottom of the pile were simply run over by the tractor frame.
I wasn’t going fast–I swear, your honor. And I only had to move the thing one tractor length, or eight feet. Still, by the time it was over, I was horrified to find in the tractor’s wake these mangled chicks littering the ground.
Did I mention, one design flaw of my tractor is you can’t see through the metal roof? And because it’s only two feet tall, you can’t know what’s going on inside while you’re pulling it.
What was I thinking? It’s always tragic when innocent creatures are killed because of human error. This came closer to a disaster–the death of 23 percent of our broiler flock in a moment of carelessness.
The farmer must also consider the economic loss caused by his stupidity. The chicks cost $2.10 each. Add the time and feed invested over three weeks raising them. And around here, a pasture-raised chicken dressed sells for $20. That brings the total damage to more than $154.
What the finished “tractor” looks like
This happened last week, the day after we rounded up the chicks and moved them to the tractor from the brooder in the basement. Since then, I’ve moved the tractor several times, inching it along the ground much more slowly–much more cautiously–frequently stopping and crouching down to see what the chicks are doing. Pull, crouch, pull, crouch. There hasn’t been any problem since the first misfire. Except one morning I ran over an uneven patch in the yard and three of the chicks escaped through a gap under the tractor frame. It must have looked pretty comical, me chasing the chicks around the coop, diving to grab them. They aren’t particularly anxious to be caught and held.
This is my first major blunder operating our new farm. I’m sure there will be others. It’s called a learning curve. But special care needs to be taken when the lives of animals are involved.
So sorry for your loss. Brave of you to share your learning curve with your readers.
Oh. I can’t think what to say. But you leant a lesson the hard way.
Celia, I keep thinking it wouldn’t have happened if the chicks had been a little older. Definitely my bad.