Chicken Tractor
September 24th, 2013 · No Comments · Posted in farming
This is how we raise our Freedom Ranger broilers on grass.
Most commercial chickens in the U.S. are a Cornish breed that has been engineered to grow big very fast. In fact, they are notorious for getting so big after just eight weeks that they can no longer walk and are prone to die of heart attack. They are also famous for their insipid flavor.
Freedom Rangers derive from French stock and are the preferred European breed. They are an old-fashioned chicken, slower growing with smaller breasts, larger legs and better flavor.
Or so we’ve been told. We haven’t eaten a Freedom Ranger chicken yet but we hope to do so soon. These particular birds arrived on our farm as wee little chicks. They spent four weeks in the brooder in our basement, and an additional two months–almost–being moved around the pasture just outside our house in this “tractor” I built from scratch.
I can build anything, just as long as all the angles are right angles and the measurements are easily divisible by two. You may recall that my first tractor move didn’t go so well. I ran over and killed seven of the chicks we started with. Since then, all of the chickens have survived more or less intact. Sometimes a leg is injured when a bird fails to move out of the way of the tractor quickly enough.
The chickens devour the fresh grass when I move the tractor. I do that twice daily. In addition, they get a feed composed of various grains and soy grown and milled locally on a family farm a few miles from us here in Washington County. These birds have not been exposed to any GMOs, hormones or medications. The tractor leaves a trail of chicken manure in its wake, fertilizing the pasture.
Over the 8 weeks they’ve been on pasture, I reckon our Freedom Rangers have consumed approximately 300 pounds of feed, which works out to about one-quarter pound per chicken each day. Does that sound right? At current prices, that’s $90 worth of feed, or a bit less than $4 per bird.
See why food grown locally on a small scale is more expensive?
With any luck, we’ll get our first taste of Freedom Ranger this week. Slaughtering is scheduled for tomorrow. Film at 11.
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