Chicks!
April 7th, 2014 · No Comments · Posted in farming
It’s that time of year again. A trip to the post office where a friendly clerk hands me a box containing 50 newborn Freedom Ranger chicks. If you think that’s considerably more than we ordered last year, you would be right. We had great success selling our broilers, so this year we are increasing production.
Once home, we open the shipping box and gently scoop the young chicks into their new, temporary home in the basement brooder. I installed an additional heating lamp, laid a fresh bed of chopped straw over the concrete floor. The chicks immediately crowd around the waterer for a drink, then dive into the feeders. They’re getting a “grower” mix from our friends at Elsworth Family Farm where they grow and grind their own blends of non-GMO corn, soybean and oats.
Commercial starter feeds for chicks typically contain medication to ward off common diseases. Not the Elsworth feed. We do take a bit of risk, I suppose, eschewing the antibiotics, but so far we haven’t had any casualties and we feel good about feeding our chickens grains from a local family farm. They’ll continue eating the same mix until slaughtering time about 12 weeks from now.
Meanwhile, we just add feed, clean water and fresh bedding until about a month from now when it will be time to move them to our chicken “tractors” outside, where they’ll have fresh grass to forage in. And try to keep the cats out of the basement.
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