The Slowcook at Spydog Farm The Slowcook at Spydog Farm

Chicks!

April 7th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in farming

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How do we know spring has arrived on the farm? We get a call from the post office to come pick up our broiler chicks.

Somehow we missed the first call Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon the postal clerk called a second time rather frantically because they didn’t want the chicks–54 for of them in a shipping box–sitting around the mail room overnight.

It all seemed a day early to me, and there’d been so much other excitement on the farm I hadn’t had a chance to replace the crusty old bedding in the brooder from last year. In went the chicks, crusty bedding or no. They don’t seem to care. As long as they’ve got plenty of grain and clean water, they’re happy as clams.

My wife had been hoping to move the brooder out of the basement where it creates a lot of dust from the local, non-GMO feed we use. We surrounded the brooder with plastic, and that seems to help quite a bit. But I just haven’t come up with a good outdoor brooder design, especially for this early in the year when it’s often below freezing overnight.

We’ve moved up our broiler production so we aren’t hauling chicken tractors around the property all the way through Thanksgiving. My back still aches from last fall. If all goes according to plan, we should receive a fresh batch of chicks around the first of each month until August. That would mean selling the last of the birds around the end of October.

We order 52 chicks each month and the breeder adds two extra in case of any deaths. After four weeks in the brooder to grow out their feathers, we move the chicks into two tractors–large cages we drag around with dollies–and finish raising them on pasture. At the moment we have four tractors. The new scheme means building two more. Our broilers are so popular with our local friends, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble selling them with plenty left over for our own freezer.

Just to confuse matters, we also have 20 new laying chicks scheduled to arrive the middle of this month. How we juggle new chicks with two-week-old chicks remains to be seen. Looks like somebody’s going to be moving outdoors sooner than originally planned.

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