the natural chicken

useful bucket trap for rats

2012-02-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

Since rats have been perching on the bucket rim to take soaking grains, I thought I'd have a go at making a bucket trap.

I've made a few in the past following internet directions, but none has worked. Rats are more than anything else creatures of habit, and the sudden appearance of an oil-smeared bottle sitting above a water-filled bucket makes them wary. I suspect these traps only work when there are so many rats around the place that some (particularly young ones) are absolutely desperate for food.

Last night I filled the soaking bucket so the water sat about 7.5 inches or 19cm from the top. Then I sprinkled a layer of sunflower seeds to float on top.

This morning I collected 3 large dead rats from the water. About a third the sunflower seeds had been eaten, so perhaps the seeds were a little too close to the top (some have probably eaten their fill and gotten away), but still, it's a good result.

I doubt this will work for long if I keep setting the trap in the same way. However every few nights I'll make sure the grain is right at the top of the bucket so any remaining rats can obtain a feed. Meanwhile of course I'm removing all other food sources before nightfall.

Hope this works for others as well!

chick diet

2012-02-17T16:52:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to show my current chick diet for the 9 week olds. They're extremely well grown and are doing well on it, having been gradually introduced to larger kernels (so I no longer have to grind anything for them).

Ingredients are sprouted wheat, corn, peas and sunflower seeds; soy meal (non GM); lucerne (alfalfa) chaff; seaweed meal; salt; and soured skim milk.

Of an afternoon they also get fresh greens to pick at. I'm extremely happy with their growth (below).

Some malay coming through in the bird on the left. Her mother was the ISA brown x malay game.

Leghorn x red layer, well grown and healthy at 9 weeks.

A little bit of malay game gives this cockerel a nice shape and stance. He's heavier than the cockerel in the previous picture, even though he's trimmer to look at. His mother was the ISA brown x malay; his father was leghorn.

These birds are well grown for 9 weeks of age, and have nice temperaments to boot.

home grown extras for chickens

2012-02-17T16:42:00.001-08:00

Chickens love comfrey, yet seem to know their limit. It grows well in shade as well as sun, and supplies a variety of vitamins including B12 (though whether it's the most useful form of B12 I'm not sure). It's also a rich source of minerals and was known as 'knitbone' in former days. Much is made of its toxicity (it's apparently got some chemicals that are liver-toxic) but I've never seen the chickens gorge on it, nor have they come to harm. (They never had access to comfrey when they showed liver damage while eating lupins, or perhaps I'd have suspected comfrey.) I think chickens are extremely good at knowing what to eat or not eat, and I trust them on comfrey.

Overgrown zucchinis make great chicken treats. Just slit them lengthwise and watch!

...my rotting wheat update, and more on rats...

2012-02-17T16:18:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately this post also concerns rats.

Recently I had major trouble with wheat not sprouting, and going off in the sprouting bag. My first assumption was that rats were climbing over the bag, contaminating it with droppings and urine, and thereby causing the wheat to go off. However after I'd dealt effectively with the rats nibbling through the bag, the off wheat continued, so I felt it must have been pre-germinated or otherwise damaged before purchase (see my other post about off wheat).

Once I stopped rats getting to the sprouting bag it seemed there could be no other source of micro-organism contamination. My soak times were always 24 hours, never more, and the ratio was 3/4 water to 1/4 grain (important to prevent fermentation). My feed bins were in good shape and generally air-tight. The wheat was brought fresh. Weather wasn't a problem as it hadn't been too hot. Perplexingly, shortly after being soaked, the wheat smelled rotten, not mouldy. I couldn't understand where the contamination was coming from, but it did seem bacterial.

Then I had a little thought. I looked at my soak-bucket and realised some of the grains (ones still trapped in a hull, and occasional sunflower seeds that had gotten mixed in) were floating on the surface of the water. I suddenly realised that this might be attracting rats to the water-filled bucket.

So that night, I put a lid on the bucket, and the next morning the lid was sprinkled with rat droppings. Then when I drained the wheat and hung it to sprout, it sprouted beautifully.

So this is what must have been happening all along:

- I was leaving the wheat to soak overnight without a lid, thinking that nothing could harm wheat sitting at the bottom of a water-filled bucket! The soaking wheat was a good 40cm below the water's surface. The water came right up to the brim.

- Apparently rats were perching on the bucket rim to snatch food floating on the water overnight. Some of their droppings would have fallen into the water.

- The rat droppings were causing the wheat to break down and rot faster than it could sprout.

This was a very sobering discovery, not least because the birds were sickened by eating what should have been perfectly good feed. And goodness knows what germs I'd been bumping into while handling the bag of feed and the rotting sprouts. Needless to say I owe the feed store an apology for casting aspersions on their grain.

I must admit, I'm astonished at the ability of rats to find food (and foul it). Unfortunately the neighbour's property provides ample cover (there's a huge lantana patch crowding against the fence) and these are tree rats, so very agile. But at least I can stop them fouling the water I soak my sprouts in!

Since adding a lid I've had no more smelly grain, no sick birds and plenty of eggs!

rats and how to deal with them

2012-02-17T16:14:00.000-08:00

Confession! I have a persistent population of rats. They live in the scrub behind our back fence and slip over the fence during the night to eat any fallen food from the ground. I have to be very careful not to leave food lying around.

Every few weeks I rebait the trap and usually catch a few, but of course the really wary older rats are too clever for that little ruse. They won't touch baits, and although I'm scrupulous at cleaning up spilt food when I'm trying to catch them, they're amazingly smart.

Some time ago I realised they were shinnying down the 40cm long wire hook my sprout bag hangs on, and nibbling at the sprouts. I kept trying new places to hang the thing, only to see telltale bag-holes a few days later.

So I did this:

For a little extra detail, here's a close-up of the top arrangement:

The silver thing is an upturned stainless steel bowl bought cheaply from one of those two-dollar stores. I made a hole in the bottom and slid the wire through (after straightening it temporarily). Then I wrapped a rubber band around and around the wire just below where I wanted the bowl to sit. The rubber has a good purchase on the wire, so it doesn't tend to slide down, but to make sure, I added a layer of glue. Then I sat a disc of foam matting (purpose-cut and also threaded over the wire) to help ensure the stainless steel bowl doesn't tip too far when a rat climbs on top of it.

Since rats are coming along the beams in the shed roof and then clambering down (rather than jumping onto the bag from below) this is an effective barrier. They can climb onto the bowl but they can't get over the lip of it to reach the wire again.

There have been no more rat raids on the hanging sprouts!

ancona x red layer at 19 weeks

2012-02-05T01:29:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update on the ancona x too. She's half ancona, half red layer. The others of her hatch have more red feathering on their faces and chests, but I don't mind the basic black. And she's certainly very glossy!

The willow legs are also nice. All five ancona x red layer pullets have these.

Here's a completely gratuitous head shot of one of the commercial bred ISA browns I bought at point of lay (but which have only just started). I do quite like the white streaking. She seems like a nice well behaved bird. Her beak was clipped before I got her (often birds raised away from soil or other abrasive materials get very overgrown beaks by 20 weeks).

meat hybrid x leghorn rooster and pullet

2012-02-05T00:57:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd show how the meat hybrid x leghorn experiment is going.
I'm happy with both cockerels and pullets (though I've only ended up with two of each, after various troubles getting the incubator to hatch anything at all).
So here they are.

These birds are enormous, but not massively overweight. They can jump up 600mm to perch, and are just as adept at getting down. In fact (combs aside) they remind me of the way Indian game (Cornish) used to be, full of
power and vigour.

They're also of the right temperament. In fact they're better than many male birds I've kept, as I'm having no great trouble keeping both cockerels in the one pen. This may change as they mature, but basically they ignore each other most of the time. And needless to say they don't show any signs of turning on me, nor are they what I'd call 'too tame' (often a precursor to human-aggression).

They're not quite 19 weeks of age, and one of the pullets laid an egg today, so that's pretty good going.

Fingers crossed!

providing protein for layers without poor mineral balance

2012-01-28T00:24:00.000-08:00

I've been very happy with the growth of my ancona x red layers and my meat hybrid x leghorns. When I bought the new commercial layers I was anything but happy with them. At nineteen weeks of age they were only a fraction larger than my twelve week old ancona x and meat hybrid x birds. I now suspect they were a little under the stated age, as their combs were also quite poorly developed for age.

To complicate things, shortly after this there came the setback with bad wheat, and all my birds suffered. While on the suspect wheat, the ancona and hybrid x birds stopped increasing in size at the rate they had, and their combs stopping growing larger. Meanwhile the commercial layers are only just starting to lay now (at 23 weeks). What a drama!

But with onset of lay comes a new problem: how to add protein without upsetting the mineral balance of layers.

My usual practice with chicks (milk based protein to offset a wheat-soy base) isn't practicable with adult layers. This is because they need a massively enriched calcium level. However while milk is high in calcium it's also fairly high in phosphorus. The problem with high phosphorus levels is that phosphorus competes with calcium for absorption; thus the wrong ratio quickly produces problems like soft shelled eggs. I probably don't need to spell out the problems that can come from soft shelled eggs, but egg yolk peritonitis is a common one and it's deadly.

Free ranging the birds is a great way to get them to find their own greens and protein, in which case the pressure on the diet to be complete is a lot lower. Not only will they find a lot of calcium via greens, but they'll also eat insects that will supply omega-3 fats and calcium from shells alongside high protein.

Thus I've been braving the goshawks and letting the adult birds out every day for several hours at a time. It's no surprise that a day after they started being let out, one and then another began to lay.

Once again, in view of milk's problems mineral-wise, I've been looking for other cheap animal protein sources. As in earlier posts I've been thinking through the gamut of choices: worms; pet mince (good but may have sulphites that need to be washed out, and is almost invariably too fatty); normal butcher mince (expensive); and of course high protein scraps.

As it happens I've found a pretty good butcher shop that sells whole lamb livers very cheaply ($1.50), so that's being given every 2-3 days in small quantities. But on other days I'm relying on either scraps or whatever the birds rummage up. They're also getting small amounts of kefir in their feed (but only a quarter of what the chicks get, per bird), and of course they have soy meal. Given that they're starting to lay after their bad wheat setback I'm pleased that this is all working. One whole lamb liver is lasting me two weeks, so it's not exactly an expensive addition, and the scraps and insect forage cost me nothing at all except a little bit of worry when it comes to goshawks.

As for goshawk deterrence, I simply haven't seen the old boy around in a while, so perhaps he's decided to range elsewhere. Or it may be that having two near-adult roosters out and about now is keeping the divebombers at bay. There's also a new trampoline giving the chickens somewhere to hide where they can still peer out at the sky. Lastly, the ancona x have inherited their father's flightiness, and are rapidly scurrying for cover at every blink. Which isn't a bad thing in this backyard!

So that's a bit of a roundup more than a proper discussion of protein, but I hope it's reasonably clear.

Little case of cocci in a chick: UPDATE

2012-01-27T23:47:00.000-08:00

UPDATE:
Still no signs of cocci in any of the chicks that remained here, so that's positive. We've had many days of rain and the pen has definitely been warm and damp, but the chicks are handling it. Good news.

--------------------------------------------------

The other day I sold a handful of chicks, and the new owner rang me up the next day to say one was sick. Clearly she has cocci (and after I suggested what to buy, the chick apparently came good again). The stress of transport probably contributed, but I don't think it's a major factor.

Now I confess I've been a bit lazy with the latest chicks, and have put them in the large pen from four weeks of age without taking off the surface litter, and to top it off we've had a week of heavy summer rain. However none of the remaining chicks in the pen now are showing signs of cocci, nor have the other sold chicks succumbed, so the pen isn't the problem in itself, nor is the rain, nor is transport stress.

Normally if one bird has coccidiosis the others will show signs either at the same time or a little later. When you get one chick with coccidiosis while the others are well, it could be a sign that the sick bird has other underlying illnesses (whether congenital or infective).

Which brings me to a new thought. Although I've stated that the chicks were fed bran/pollard instead of sprouts, that's not strictly true -- they did get some. It's just that their staple diet was made up using the bran/pollard. This little girl may have been unlucky enough to eat more than her share of the bad wheat, or to be unable to cope with its effects on her digestive system, predisposing her to secondary ailments. Marek's is another possibility, though I've never seen classical Marek's signs, so it's fairly unlikely.

I'm just putting this 'out there' so anyone reading this blog will realise (if they haven't already) how many co-factors there are in managing coccidiosis; and sometimes it may be that a bird simply doesn't have the immune strength to cope with moderate challenges. If the other chicks had been sick I'd be saying the opposite and going hell for leather to clean up the pen and improve management. But it's not as simple as management in this case, I feel.

Naturally I've offered to swap the sick bird for another, but the new owner is happy to keep her. I hope she stays well.

When feed goes bad...

2012-01-17T19:16:00.000-08:00

UPDATE:

I took the remaining wheat back to the shop and they gave me a replacement bag. That doesn't help my birds, but it's good enough (and frankly I was surprised that the store attendant took me seriously). However I think she soon realised it wasn't coccidiosis and I do know what I'm talking about.

At any rate, three days after removing the suspect wheat, I'm seeing my first eggs from these layers. The two (rooster and hen) that were ailing have improved to being indistinguishable from the others.

It's a great relief, but also a reminder as to how easy it is to forget a basic principle (the basic principle being, examine feed closely and don't use it if there's anything amiss). Wheat that doesn't sprout well is surely a huge sign of a problem.

Silly me, but it's fixed now... hopefully.

-------------------------

A couple of weeks ago my usual grain store was shut, so I bought 2 bags of wheat from the more expensive place up the road.

Straight away it went into plastic drums with good lids, so I had no reason to think there would be any problem. However I noticed over the following week that this wheat doesn't soak up water quite as well as normal, and its sprouting rate is somewhat reduced. That is, only about half the grain will sprout at all, and it's usually beginning to moulder before the second day. I've never had wheat behave like this before, and I've been sprouting for years now!

Meanwhile some point of lay birds I got earlier have still not come into lay and two of the commercial meat hybrids had a few days in which I could see that they weren't well. Both carried their tails low and were a little listless.

The little chicks are eating exactly the same food as the older birds, with one difference: instead of sprouted wheat forming the chief grain, they've been getting mainly bran and pollard (mixed with all the other things I usually mix). They've also been given extra soy and kefir. They're doing incredibly well and look absolutely super.

I've realised the wheat is most likely very old, and has been improperly stored, or damaged, perhaps by beginning to germinate some time ago. Whatever the case, it's bad.

Now that can happen with other feeds as well, so please don't be put off sprouting. If I look close I can see that this wheat is slightly greyer than usual, and has a dimpled appearance, as though it's been withered. I can't see signs of weavils (which I've had in the past when wheat is poor) but it does appear the seed coat is damaged. Most importantly though, it's barely sprouting even though conditions are perfect (good clean water at 3/4 of the bucket, only 1/4 being wheat; good storage here; hanging in shade; and daily rinsing).

If I haven't poisoned my birds completely, I should start seeing eggs within a week or so of taking that wheat out of their diets...

But it's a wake-up call, at any rate.

2 week old chicks in tractor on grass, no medication

2011-12-27T17:20:00.000-08:00

Just an update. The chicks have just turned 2 weeks of age and I made them a new tractor to celebrate.
This is their first move out of the miniature wire brooder, which they were outgrowing. It's also their first time on the ground, though of course they've been on a floor containing a small amount of healthy adult hen droppings.

Their diet is the same as last time I talked about these birds.

So here they are in the new tractor, complete with hose-covered wire handles for dragging. It's basically a miniature replica of my huge tractor. This one is about 600mm x 1100mm, so it isn't very big, but quite sufficient for either a hen with babies or a dozen or more chicks on their own.

The structure is basically made of Bunnings compost panels (this whole unit took a single pack, plus one offcut from last pack; I could have done without that though).

Two panels were bent to form a semicircle when clipped together with c-clips up the spine (which is the top middle of the curve). Another panel was halved and c-clipped to the curve to lengthen it and make it even bigger. To keep them in this U shape (when seen in profile) the ends were then c-clipped to cut-out sections of panel. The front opening (to the right in this picture) has a lower section that doesn't open, so chicks don't come flying out all at once when I change food and water.

Over the top of the compost panels, once they were fairly rigidly clipped together, I then added a layer of bird mesh. It's not the really good stuff (which has square holes) because the compost panels provide security against big predators and little ones find any sort of small-holed mesh a challenge. With a good dog in the backyard I tend to focus on slowing predators down rather than building Fort Knox. Even so it wouldn't be easy for a fox to get at these chicks through the wire.

The unit is also pegged to the ground in 5 places. Yes, an animal could dig underneath. But again that's something that takes time to do, and my dog is very alert. If this unit was to be used away from the house I'd perhaps think about adding a mesh skirt around the outside. At any rate the tent pegs keep it from being lifted up.

Over the unit, as you can see, there are some small tarps (folded in half and fitted around the curve) and some offcuts of shadecloth to stop currawongs herding the chicks from one side to the other and pecking their eyes.

The feeder (attached to the front of the cage so it moves with it) is a piece of drainpipe slit lengthwise. This is set in at a slight slope so water tends to drain away, though practically speaking the tractor is never really on level ground anyhow.

The chicks are really enjoying the mixture of grass, sunshine and a generous long feeder.

Now for the simplest part of all. You can see I'm using a cat carrier as the cold brooder in this setup. That's because it's summer right now and although it's an unusually cold summer (current temperature 22C, last night down to about 18C) the chicks are doing perfectly with an open fronted sleeping area. They've been trained already to go into an insulated nest at night or when cold.

The cat carrier isn't just bare, of course. The floor is 2 layers of foam insulation. The walls and ceiling are a rectangle of the same insulating foam (camp/yoga matting) cut to size then bent into a curve that hugs the structure above and on the sides. The pressure of the foam wanting to turn into a rectangle again keeps it pressed against the walls. With another piece of foam at the rear, tucked behind the curved piece, and some loose wool (from my pet sheep) stuffed into the cavity between foam and cat carrier plastic ceiling, the little space is truly cosy. Lastly I've inserted a couple of pieces of packing foam across the front, as an extra heat retainer.

These chicks know where to go because they've been largely cold brooded (after being trained to use the insulated nest area in the first place by a ceramic bulb). They're largely self sustaining now. About 6 days ago I sold 5, so these remaining 10 birds are doing all the work at staying warm.

At 2 weeks of age you can see they are remarkably well feathered. Largely this is genetic (the red hybrid and leghorn parents are both early maturing) but partly it's because they've been asked to do some of the insulating themselves.

Of course coccidiosis is always a worry, but these birds are on the kefir diet and I'm not expecting to see any setbacks. They've had the usual regime of a handful of hen soil sprinkled through the litter from day one, and being moved from the starter-brooder before 3 weeks of age. However the grass under them is damp and it's been raining off and on for a couple of weeks now, so I'll be watching them closely. This is their second day on the ground so we'll see by day 5 whether I'll need to make any changes.

But I don't think I'll see a problem. :)

home made chick feed

2011-12-22T13:43:00.000-08:00

These chicks are a week old and haven't eaten any commercial feed. My feeding regime is quite simple: after mixing up the adult hens' feed (sprouts, kefir, lucerne chaff, soy meal non GMO, seaweed, oyster shell, salt) I usually have a little too much. I add extra soy meal and also extra kefir, whiz it up in the food processor and that's my chick feed. The wheat sprouts are thus growing right up until the point of consumption by the chicks. Because they're sprouted the wheat kernels are soft and whiz up to a crumble very easily.

The amount of oyster shell in the base feed is only 1.5%. It's too low for the layers, but they have shell grit available in their pens all the time. Thus I'm not harming the chicks with too high calcium.

At the moment they're in the cold brooder (the one made entirely of wire). I was planning to slip these birds under a broody hen, but unfortunately due to a domestic disaster I gave away all my hens. I was going to give away all the chickens but things calmed down. Ultimately it makes no sense to pay $5 for stale supermarket 'free range' eggs if I can get better eggs in the backyard at lower cost, with just a little effort.

Having switched my children's diet to one containing more vegetables and less refined carbohydrates, I'm also happy to feed scraps to these birds. The kinds of scraps I'm talking about are vegetable/egg patties, mince patties, home grown greens and so forth. My dog is already thriving on scraps (with extra bones, meat, liver, etc) and her severe flea allergy of two years ago entirely disappeared when I took her off commercial dry food, so I know what a difference it makes to use fresh food.

The one thing I'm really learning as I make these big shifts (from industry-processed to home-processed; from fillers to fresh) is that feeding even very young chicks doesn't have to be a science. As long as the basics of both human and animal diets are richly varied, fresh and/or made into living foods with additions like probiotics (lactobacilli from kefir, for instance) there's a lot of room to vary. Of course, there are some crucial things to understand such as what range of seeds and feeds will provide the complete range of vitamins (you can't for instance just feed wheat and linseed/flax), but again there's no need to be out there with measuring cups and scales every day. Sprouted wheat, corn and peas, lucerne (alfalfa) meal or chaff, non GMO soy meal, sunflower seeds (ground for chicks, whole for adults), kefir, fresh greens: these can be used to make a whole feed at home.

The chicks are eating a ground crumble of about 60% sprouted wheat, 6% sprouted corn, 4% sprouted peas, 4% sunflower, 20% non GMO soy meal, and 6% lucerne chaff. That's the dry basis. To this I add about a cupful of kefir made from powdered skim milk, and of course a pinch of seaweed meal per 10 chicks, and a very small pinch of salt. Then of an afternoon I add finely chopped grass, chickweed, dandelion, spinach or other greens. As soon as they're out of this small brooder and on grass, I won't need to chop greens for them.

This is the same diet as the adults, except that the bigger birds' soy meal and kefir amounts are lower, and I'll usually increase the calcium by adding more shell grit to the bucket just before putting it in their feeding troughs.

When soy meal in this country goes the way of US soy (almost entirely GM) I'll of course be changing the feeds and probably going back to using meat meal. I might even find a way to buy fish meal, perhaps by forming a co-op with other home feeding chicken keepers to buy bulk amounts. Or I might do more gathering of protein around the backyard, e.g. by laying out carpets on top of grass and scraps to draw worms underneath, harvesting them of a morning.

Growing birds on home diet

2011-12-02T18:23:00.001-08:00


The above birds are 9 and 10 weeks old. All seem to be at an appropriate size and weight for age, with the exception of the leghorn x meat hybrids, which are obviously much larger. The black mottled birds are a lot calmer than purebred anconas, and I'm happy with their overall style, vigour and health. They're currently in with two commercial feed store pullets, both of which have just started to lay. Because I joined the groups only after a couple weeks' getting to know each other through an adjoining fence -- also because all birds are fairly young, and the introduced chicks are in a larger flock than the 2 individual older birds -- there have been absolutely no incidences of aggression, or even much if any pecking-order hassles. This surprised me as one of the older pullets is an ISA brown, notorious for brutality.

Diet I'm using for these birds now consists of sprouted wheat, bran, pollard, soy meal, sprouted corn, sprouted peas, lucerne (alfalfa) chaff, sunflower seeds, skim milk kefir, seaweed meal and salt. Earlier they had ground and then cracked wheat, corn and peas, but I've slowly introduced sprouted grains instead, so I'm no longer adding much in the way of bran or pollard. Whole sprouted wheat is a far better feed than any processed wheat product. However I'll be watching their weight to make sure withdrawing bran and pollard doesn't cause a setback (which it may do if the birds' gizzards are not able to handle larger seeds, even when they've been soaked or sprouted). An ongoing project...

The big fellow standing on the stump is a couple of days shy of 10 weeks, and is massive without being overly heavy for his age. He's able to get up and down via the ladder-ramp (bottom right corner), which leads up into the night shed, and has no problem alighting from the perch. Of course he may get too heavy for that, so I'll keep a close eye on his weight and decide if and when I need to find some other night shed for him.

goshawk protection

2011-12-02T18:05:00.001-08:00

It's not just actual attacks that harm chickens; fear and stress stop the birds eating and can open the door to other problems. Unfortunately the goshawks in this area have a penchant for harassing my birds even with the pens fully netted. Indeed yesterday the goshawk didn't fly away until I was about ten feet from it. The chickens were almost injuring themselves trying to hide.

I realised it was time to give them some extra cover. So I wheeled the ancient barrow into the pen, and also rigged up a corrugated iron-roofed shelter using some cut pine logs and 2 spare planks. The roof is screwed onto the planks, which are long-nailed into the stumps; it's not going anywhere.

While it took the birds a while to get comfortable with the new arrangement, they were soon happily perching on top of the obstacles and also checking out the under-side. If the goshawk comes back, at least the birds will have a visual barrier between themselves and the eye of doom. As for the goshawks, they'll never leave the pens completely alone. But at the moment, as long as the netting stays intact, they can't get in, and even if something tears a hole in the netting the birds have got some chance of evading the talons.

I don't know if these things would work on free range, but it seems to me a goshawk would have a lot of trouble chasing prey under a low roof. If I ever free range again, that's what I'll do.

Removal of right to grow food, coming to a country near you!

2011-11-25T12:41:00.001-08:00

New Zealand has apparently passed a law relating to food which is of great interest to anyone growing their own (whether meat or vegetables or anything medicinal). The link below explains how the law makes it a state-granted privilege, not a right, to grow and trade (or swap) seeds and food.

http://nzfoodsecurity.org/

Such laws will happen here in Australia too, but it's arguable that they're designed purely to enhance the interests of big multinational corporations like Monsanto. It's very hard to see how they could enhance the interests of a population subject to the laws. Indeed, if food safety really is the issue, why is the distribution of seeds subject to the new law?

There's not much point feeling sorry for New Zealanders because it's merely a matter of time before the laws are introduced here. If gun-toting police can raid an organic shop in New Zealand, rest assured, they will eventually be able to raid a chicken breeder's backyard under similar laws here.

Ever since the 1990s corporations have been among the top ten global economies. They have revolving door access to governments, and as the Kevin Rudd issue shows (deposed by mining corporation pressure through media influence) they can effect regime change. I shouldn't be surprised by the extent of corporate power over lawmaking, but I can't help feeling depressed by the speed with which our global landscape is being incorporated.

Most frighteningly, the drive for profit has no boundary, no upper-end. There's never a point where corporations say 'enough' -- just look at battery chickens. Corporations aren't happy enough with seven week broilers; they're constantly looking for ways to make the process cheaper and shorter. They're genetically modifying broilers as we speak. So rest assured, we haven't seen the last of the encroachments on our age-old human rights... After all, to a mega-corporation obsessed with profit, what's the difference between a battery hen and a human being?

update: 8 weeks, no cocci medication, all well

2011-11-18T16:07:00.001-08:00

Last post for the day (I think...), here are the growing chicks, doing well in their pen:

Apologies for a blurry photo, but you can see the amazing difference in size between the meat hybrid x leghorns and the other crosses (which are ancona x red layer).

As you can see too, despite the cull of 13 males I still have many cockerels to choose from. There's no hurry to sort these into keepers and table birds as it will be some time before they're crowing with sufficient volume to bother anyone, and the pen is far from overcrowded (though it is a little denuded of green stuff).

For me the best thing is that none is showing signs of coccidiosis or other health setback. No medication since week 1, no special treatment after being put in the pen (beyond continued soured skim milk), I'm happy with that.

raised on home mix since week 5...

2011-11-18T16:00:00.001-08:00

This bird is one of the feed store pullets bought at about 3 weeks of age. She was weaned off commercial starter onto my home mix by about week 5, and here she is now just short of week 17.

I'm pleased with her growth, and pleased too with the evidence of her being very close to starting to lay. Nutritional issues often show up as a failure to begin laying on time. I think this suggests that the home mix (remember, these birds don't free range) is doing what it should do.

In case this sounds like bragging, I've made many mistakes in the past, and keeping a record in the blog lets me review things as I go. But for now, all seems good.

easy peasy sprouting for chickens

2011-11-18T15:05:00.001-08:00

Sprouting is easy!

All you need are a very large bucket (20 L for instance), a circular piece of shadecloth about 80cm in diameter, about 10 narrow cable ties, some whipper snipper cord or thin rope, and a hook for hanging.

One way to make a hangable bag is to take the circular shadecloth and insert a cable tie every so often until they go right around the circle, evenly spaced. Leave a good inch or more between where you insert the tie and the shadecloth edge. Only do up each cable tie enough to form a generous hoop. If you insert whipper snipper cord or rope through the cable ties you have an instant drawstring bag, which you can hang or close over the bucket during draining.

Another way is to simply insert whipper snipper cord through the circular shadecloth near the edges, knotting it just tight enough to allow it to open over the bucket (for up-ending). When hung from hooks the drawstring naturally pulls tight:

The process is quite simple. First the grains are soaked for 24 hours, at a ratio of a quarter-bucket of grains to three-quarters water. If you try to increase the grain-to-water ratio you may see some fermentation on a warm day (which you don't want).

Secondly after 24 hours' soaking you want to drain the grains into your shadecloth bag. You can either tip them onto the outspread shadecloth or gather the shadecloth about the bucket top and up-end the whole thing.

Gather the loops over a hook and hang this newly-formed bag. Every day in passing you should give the bag a jostle to make sure the grains are not clumping together (if they do this too much you may get pockets of souring/mould), and you should also give them a rinse by either dunking the bag in water or giving them a good spray with a hose.

You can use the soaked grain on that first day, and every day after that for about 3 or 4 days you can feed the sprouting seeds. By day 4 I find that the sprouts are getting pretty lengthy, so I mostly feed them out by day 3.

Of course, you could always keep two hanging bags at different stages of sprouting, if you want to aim for the maximum nutrition (when sprout tails are about 1cm long). But I seem to get good bird health results feeding anywhere between days 1 and 4.

This is a terrific way to ensure a constant supply of sprouting grains, and do I need to add that sprouting enhances the availability of vitamins to birds, and makes the grains more digestible?

What better way to avoid artificial vitamins in feed? Sprouting rules!

fake eggs

2011-11-18T13:26:00.001-08:00

I'm absolutely done with plastic fake eggs! This is the fifth or sixth time I've had to replace them.

The trouble with plastic fake eggs is that bush rats try to eat them by opening the end, just as they do with real eggs. Net result: chewed up half-eggs. Even if they don't make a huge hole, they take them away from the nest, and eventually all my plastic eggs disappear.

To teach hens where to lay, some people use golf balls, but they're not much more durable than plastic eggs, and they don't fool 100% of hens when it comes to setting a broody.

At the moment I've got a broody hen I want to move to a ratproof aviary, and she's so fussy I know she won't sit on golf balls.

Ceramic eggs are ideal, but aren't that easy to find.

That's why I've made these:

They're a bit rough round the edges, but only took 10 fiddly minutes to make, and cost about 20c each (that being the amount of plaster-of-paris I used from a $4 bag).

I simply took 4 eggs and chipped a 1cm hole in the fat end with a sharp knifepoint. Then I drained out the contents after a quick swizzle with a skewer to break up the yolk. (The contents became scrambled eggs.)

After rinsing the insides out fully, I left the shells to drain in egg cups while mixing up the plaster. I made it about the consistency of custard and syringed it into each cleaned-out eggshell using a 10ml syringe (20 or 50ml would have been easier). After a few shakes to dislodge air bubbles I sat each egg hole-upward in an egg carton, topping up with a little extra plaster-of-paris as the stuff began to set (as plaster sets in a mould it tends to sink a little).

When all eggs had hardened I sanded off excess plaster and painted the eggs with some leftover house acrylic (which usefully enough was beige).

There are a few rough spots, and if I cared enough I'd give them another acrylic coat, but I think these will do. They'll behave and feel like eggs to a hen, and a few smudges will merely look like nest grime.

As plaster eggs are porous, they may need repainting to remove mould spots in future. And of course rats may still have the odd experimental nibble. But with four fifths of a bag of plaster left I can always make more.

petit poussins: processing young chicks

2011-11-12T15:15:00.001-08:00

I was feeling quite the failure for deciding to dispatch the majority of my ancona x cockerels at 6 weeks of age instead of waiting for them to reach maturity. One of the main reasons to do all this has always been humanitarian, and there's no doubt that killing one animal to feed a whole family is better than killing one animal each.

But there were some important management considerations such as crowding and aggression, and overcrowding is almost certainly going to lead to higher cocci oocyst numbers in the pen. As well, I was facing a time of extra difficulty getting 'farm' work done while a few other things intervened. Since I'm the only chicken fancier in the household, I had to move.

So into the freezer they went, 13 well grown but very young birds. It took me an hour to do the whole job, clean up, get back inside, have a shower and greet some guests. I won't say it was an easy hour.

I was a little surprised (and less guilty) later to come across a reference to 'petit poussins' in an old chicken keeping handbook. Apparently they were dispatched at about the 6-8 week mark and sold for eating. What they lacked in size they obviously made up for in tenderness.

While I still feel guilty processing such young birds, I'm a little glad that I'm not the only person in the world to have dispatched birds at this age for economic as well as practical reasons. And while the 'better than being minced alive at day old' or 'it's still older than a commercial meat hybrid' argument might not be much to justify a practice on, the chicks are certainly not being wasted.

It seems these petit poussins have their place, if baby birds must be removed for practical reasons. And I for one can't bring myself to dispatch at day old.

Success: no medications, no coccidiosis

2011-11-12T14:54:00.001-08:00

These birds are now coming up to 7 weeks of age, and were moved 6 days ago from the tractor into this pen (my worst as far as coccidia goes).

This pen has had umpteen chickens in it, but these birds are the youngest I've tried on that ground. It's my dampest pen, and is the one I'm going to see coccidiosis in if I see it at all. Since putting the birds in, it has rained twice.

You can see by the red combs (in the males, at least) that there are no signs of anaemia or pallor. All are eating heartily. Day 5 after exposure to heavy amounts of coccidia is when the first signs are seen... These birds are fine. The ones that look significantly smaller are much later hatched (about a week and a half); they were broody raised until 4 weeks of age, then put in the pen alongside the tractor-brooded ones.

So the roundup: one week on medicated starter; and 6 weeks on home mix.

The mix as you can see contains a range of whole and ground grains and legumes. However these birds aren't yet eating whole sunflower, so later in the day I'll go back and pick up what's left and toss it into the adult pen. By contrast the whole corn has been soaked and is beginning to sprout, and the whole wheat grains you can see are also sprouting. The young birds seem to be eating these very readily (helped probably by the container of hard grit nearby).

As far as cocci goes, I've never overcrowded the pen, so perhaps that's kept cocci levels from really shooting sky-high. As well, before these birds were put in the pen I tipped 2 wheelbarrow loads of woody mulch and raked it around (about 3cm thick), so it's arguable that the litter has helped reduce cocci exposure. Lastly regarding the pen floor it was also recently shovelled out to about 3cm depth to put on the garden, so that would have reduced cocci soil numbers somewhat.

But I've had the same circumstances (or nearly) when birds bought-in at point of lay from elsewhere acquired coccidiosis in this pen. Clearly the slightly improved pen floor can't be the reason why these birds are doing so well.

I'm left with two things: graduated exposure starting at day one in the brooder; removal of chicks from the brooder at exactly 3 weeks of age; further graduated exposure by moving the tractor weekly; and lastly and perhaps most importantly kefir.

The above mash contains about a litre and a half of kefir (soured milk) per bucketful of the following: soy meal (non GMO), pollard, bran, ground corn, ground sunflower, ground dun peas, wheat and corn sprouts, lucerne chaff (alfalfa), seaweed meal and salt.

Later in the day they get chopped greens, or I might hang something like kale or spinach in the pen.

Including organising the kefir and sprouts and grinding each day's corn/sunflower/peas, I spend about 20 minutes of a morning on all this. It isn't much considering the benefits (getting off the synthetic chemical roundabout, ensuring healthy birds/eggs/meat). And the longer I do it the more I learn.

What can be wrong with that?

old-time chicken feed recipes

2011-11-12T12:59:00.001-08:00

It's interesting to reread an old book now that I've been toying with making my own feeds for a few years. My favourite is Modern Poultry Husbandry by Leonard Robinson, published in 1948 in London by Crosby, Lockwood and Son.

Robinson includes many recipes for confined and ranged birds, and unlike some earlier books these recipes were actually tested during feed trials. What makes these recipes so useful now is that they were formulated after nutrition science had started to take off, but before the feed industry had perfected using cheap byproduct meals 'fixed up' with the addition of synthetic vitamins and medications.

Besides, for anyone interested in survival in the age of diminishing oil and increasing global strife (which, being Western, we're fully a part of), it's useful to learn how chickens were kept alive during the war.

I've copied out a few of the recipes below, and commented on each. I haven't tried them, but I can see where my diet basically carries the same amounts of each ingredient in terms of function in the diet (vitamin content, protein, etc). It's also heartening to read his comments about milk as an ingredient, particularly the statements, 'Where skimmed milk is readily obtainable it should be given to the chicks to drink ad lib. In that event no other protein concentrate is necessary.' (My emphasis, pages 308-309.) Modern claims that 'chickens are lactose intolerant' may only have some truth where pasteurised, homogenised milks are concerned. Even so, Robinson happily advocates using dried skim milk in many of his rations. It's debatable whether this is a good step, but I can accept that the feeding trials he was aware of probably showed good results, and I'd only add that it seems to me that souring is best (and it also negates the need to add yeast). More on that later.

The first recipe is Robinson's chick mash (page 318). He's written it all in pounds (lbs) and pints, but it should be fairly easy to turn these into percentages.

20 lb Bran
30 lb fine middlings (wheat milling byproducts: whatever's scraped up after milling)
24 lb maize (corn) meal
10 lb ground oats
6 lb skim or buttermilk (presumably dried)
5 lb meat or fish meal
5 lb yeast
half lb salt
2 lb limestone flour
1 pint cod liver oil.

Now some comments: the first being that if you make up the skim milk then sour it, you can omit (in my view) the yeast.

Secondly, as Robinson notes, if the birds have access to grass and sunlight, you can omit the cod liver oil. Most types of leafy greens will be just as useful as grass here.

You can also replace 5% of the bran with alfalfa (lucerne) meal; indeed I would do this in preference to using just bran.

I would also add some ground sunflower seed (say 4%) in replacement of some of the mix, but that's just my own preference. Robinson is quite clear that the above recipe will work.

Now his layer mash (page 320). This is one of several recipes he sets out for layers. They seem like quite simple recipes to me, and as with the chick recipe above I would sour the milk as kefir so I could delete yeast (which is very expensive), and add ground or whole sunflower seeds. Robinson makes it clear that the recipe below presumes access to fresh grass and sunlight, and ad lib shell grit.

20 lb bran
40 lb middlings
20 lb maize (corn) meal
10 lb ground oats
10 lb meat-and-bone or fish meal
half lb salt

Easy, huh? Middlings by the way are perhaps hard to find unless you live near a mill. Far better than either middlings or bran would be to freshly grind whole wheat and include it in the mix at the same percentage of both combined. Or you could do as I do, and always sprout wheat to feed to the layers (as part of the mix). That's really the best way to retain (and indeed enhance) wheat's vitamins.

If there is no access to grass, then you'll need to add leafy greens in some form, and if sunlight is hiding for half the year you'll have to add cod liver oil. But as I see it, these are fairly simple recipes.

One last recipe from the book (page 323): the war diet for chicks. It's simple as hell, though it's advised to peel potatoes first.

80 lb potatoes (cooked, obviously)
20 lb middlings
3 lb white fish meal (presumably any fish meal would do)
2 lb dried yeast
0.4 lb cod liver oil
half lb chalk.

Again, I would think you could replace the dried yeast with an equivalent amount of dried skim milk, then just before mixing you would sour the milk (for B vitamins) and use it as the only liquid in the mash.

I would also suggest adding seaweed meal to all these mixes. The high mineral content of seaweed, while in some ways unbalanced (e.g. massive amounts of iodine in some seaweeds) should help offset some of the soil mineral depletion that's gone on since these feeding trials were done. Basically this follows the philosophy that if it's not there in the soil (mineral-wise) it can't be there in the grain.

There are many other recipes in the book, and I'll be happy to include more when I get time. In the meanwhile, enjoy!

Ancona temperament can be fatal!

2011-11-06T18:34:00.000-08:00

Argh, one of those days.

When I went into the night-shed to open the hatches, disaster struck.

The ancona, which has been hand raised and is generally tame, suddenly burst into the air and tried to get past me. Unfortunately he got his head caught in the central mesh grille. To cut a long story short: he didn't survive. :(

It was a frustrating morning, and a reminder to always work slowly around flighty birds.

Side note, not for the squeamish! As usual I took the opportunity (once my own nerves had settled) to process him as I would any other cockerel. I was surprised to find him quite fleshy for such a light breed, and his internal organs were all completely shipshape. So there's one good thing, at least: my feeding program seems to be doing what it should now, with no more signs of liver abnormality (whether from lupins or artificial methionine in commercial feed).

Please excuse a photo of a processed rooster, but I just wanted to show the amount of flesh I'm talking about... Nothing like a supermarket bird, but ahead of the New Hampshires I raised a few years back. Please also forgive the rough processing; I was in a hurry because this was an unexpected death, and I'd started skinning him out of a desire to get it over with, but changed my mind and went with dry plucking.

Poor ancona, poor silly pretty thing... But waste not, want not.

Keeping chickens cool in a tractor during hot days...

2011-11-05T23:16:00.000-07:00

It can be difficult keeping chickens alive, let alone cool, in a tractor in summer. Often the low ceiling is made of metal, and heat blasts through.

Although my tractor is extremely airy, and has tarp + shadecloth on top, it's in a sunny yard where it could be quite easy for the birds to overheat. To stop this from happening I simply gather some fresh tree/shrub offcuts and drape them over the unit, like so:

This isn't a cure-all against massive summer heat, in which case it's best to have all tractors parked in deep shade, but in general I've found this system works even on quite hot days. Best of all, it lets me use renewable material (tree offcuts) that release water vapour as they wilt, helping to double-cool the air. Much better than shadecloth!

Meat hybrid x leghorn chick

2011-11-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

I seem to have ended up with very few of the meat hybrid x leghorns, but perhaps they're more vulnerable to incubator issues (and this time around the temperature was being a pain in the whatnot).

But I've got a really nice pullet doing well, and also a chunky great cockerel.

There are other cockerels that appear to be this same mix, but either they're favouring the leghorn side of things, or they're some strange outcome of the ancona x red layer that was in the same incubation. They're a fair bit bigger than the ancona x so I'll keep an eye on how they mature.

Meanwhile I'm pleased with their shape, growth and overall state of health. Remember these birds are completely on a home mix including kefir, and have had no coccidiostat after the first week of age. They've been on damp ground, and daytime temperatures have been mild mostly, but are currently high (over 33C).

I'm moving them once weekly, and by that time the green you can see in the photos above generally gets trimmed back to large patches of bare soil. There's no doubt that these birds are copping their fair share of whatever's in the dirt, but they haven't had a single day's setback.

They're just coming up to 6 weeks of age, so their most vulnerable time is nearly over.

A few thoughts on 'heritage' poultry, and home rations for chickens

2011-10-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd post this. I originally wrote it as a reply to someone on a poultry forum, when he raised the topic of feeding birds using 'heritage' methods and old style grains.

However after I'd written it I realised it pretty well summarises my feelings about the industrial farming system and the need for new approaches now. I'd quite like to keep it on my blog as a record of what I've tried to do and why.

.........

"[Dear Poster about heritage feeding]...I totally agree with what you're trying to do. Unfortunately though, if you can't free range 24/7, I can't help feeling you're going to have to go the whole hog with formulating a ration. It doesn't have to include synthetic additives such as are in nutrient balancers and in commercial feed, but I would think it needs to be pretty well designed. Even limited free ranging will help cover some omissions or errors, but not all... For instance in particular during winter you may see vitamin shortages, particularly the ones like A and K that are available in leafy fresh greens, and B vitamins in general might be a little low in your ration (I'm not a nutritionist, so don't take this as gospel at all; but those are my impressions from a quick read). From my reading yeast is a good additive for B vitamins (though not B12) and sprouting wheat and other greens like kale in a greenhouse may supply winter greens.

"If I were you I'd look at some of the 1930s and 1940s poultry keeping books, because they were written after some good studies on nutrition had been accomplished but before modern synthetic vitamins and other dodgy additives had become widespread in feeds. The University of Manitoba website has a really interesting review of a popular 1945 poultry feeding manual, and if you haven't seen it before but would like to check it out (forgive me if you've already done a whole heap of reading), it's here... http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/livestock/poultry/bba01s23.html

"Just to explain where I'm coming from, I hope you don't mind if I set out a few of my thoughts on the whole heritage breed/feed thing... It's something I've thought about a fair bit, but excuse me if I'm going off on tangents or if you're way ahead of me... It's a great topic though, and highly pertinent now with the petrochemical industry starting to cough and splutter...

"It seems to me that back in heritage days (let's say 'pre-industrial' to be clearer) farms were much more varied in their livestock, cropping etc, so it's arguable that the range of vitamins available on-farm was higher. For instance some vitamins were obtained (for poultry I mean) by picking through the droppings of other animals and so forth. In a way you could say pre-industrial farms were run much more like an ecosystem, with everything in some way complementing everything else. At the same time, birds had been bred to suit this system. They weren't expected to lay massively well and if they were highly productive in one way (meat or eggs) it usually meant very low productivity in other ways, to keep an overall balance. Nobody paid any attention to 'formulating complete feeds' for poultry because there was an environmental balance based on how small-scale farms ran.

"Industrialisation and monoculture farming changed all that, and small farms became no longer viable. Productive-type birds were also bred for even greater productivity at the expense of being able to survive on forage alone, while to a large degree the keeping of dual purpose heritage breeds became a show-thing (with the exception of a few game type breeds and perhaps one or two others, depending on where you live... In Australia we lost most of our genuine utility birds). At the same time thriftiness, foraging ability and hardiness were often neglected.

"However the highly industrialised monoculture approach to things is now starting to meet the reality of diminishing oil. A more positive way of looking at the situation is to say that small integrated farms could become profitable again, if they're closer to markets, as they can beat transport costs. That's if industrial giants don't do everything they can to kill a return to small integrated farming. But most of us don't have fertile smallholdings and for most of us doing things off the grid will be a compromise at best.

"My compromise has been to try to learn everything I can about poultry nutrition (I'm not there yet, nowhere near), and put a lot of effort into a feed recipe based on natural ingredients (i.e. no petroleum industry derived vitamins), while also keeping heritage x commercial birds rather than straight heritage purebreds (for better feed conversion among other things). Perhaps you won't need to make any compromises at all, if you source the right birds and have the right setup for them. Great if you do!

"It's nice of you to start a conversation about these things, and I'm sure while there haven't been many responses so far it's not because it's an uninteresting topic. Some [forum members] have connections to industrial farming and are ever-ready to jump on those who want to try formulating diets themselves, but many more people will see the long term point to all this, and realise that Uncle Industry isn't necessarily going to be there for all of us in the next several decades. If they are there for us, well and good, and we can all relax; but meanwhile those of use pottering about on our own won't have done any harm, and we just might have done some social good for ourselves and others during hard times..."

Raising chicks off medicated starter

2011-10-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

A little earlier I explained my current projects as crossing red layer hybrids to an ancona, and meat hybrids to a leghorn.

Here they are now (most of them) and as you can see, they're all quite well grown. The big heavy robust white ones are the meat hybrid x legorn. Some of the others (ancona x) are developing nice feather patterning, especially on the males.

Now for a little bit of background, especially on the feeding regimen.

With some temperature problems it wasn't a great hatch, but I ended up with 26 chicks from the first hatch and, a week later, 8 chicks which I put under a broody hen.

The 26 older chicks were given heat for a little under a week, by which time they were able to use the cold brooder (with gentle encouragement when they forgot where to go to stay warm). They were shut in at night only for the first few days after the switch to a non-heated brooder, then they could basically come and go.

They were also given medicated starter (the only version I can buy) for the first week only. This was to help them over the hump of being incubator hatched and then the change to cold brooding. Since I'm not a scientist, and haven't had my home feed tested in a lab, I start chicks on commercial feed just to make sure their first meals are completely formulated.

I also sprinkled adult hen droppings in some dirt and seeded this through the brooder litter. Apart from that there was little floor litter besides some gravel. The floor, being wood, doesn't really need litter (which is often there to insulate as well as soak up liquids).

After the first week, I switched the feed over 2 days to my home made mix. This consists of freshly ground corn, sunflower, bran and pollard (though usually I use freshly ground wheat), soy meal, lucerne chaff (alfalfa), seaweed meal, salt and kefir (soured milk). Every day they were given freshly chopped grass or other greens (e.g. dandelion). Lastly, I made sure the chicks had access to stone grit and shell grit if they needed.

The birds grew well, and then were transferred to the tractor (at 3 weeks of age). Again, I do this at that age so as not to seed the brooder with high levels of cocci. During their time in the brooder I didn't change much except remove droppings from the nest area (where they sleep in close confines, hence it needs to stay dry and fairly clean). Droppings built up on the brooder run floor and as they didn't smell of ammonia and weren't clinging to birds' feet, I left them there. It sounds terribly unhygienic, but by this stage chicks were scratching straw out of their nest area, and thus a layer of deep litter had begun to build up. Deep litter has a controlling effect against coccidia.

So as I speak, these birds have been in the tractor on the same spot as other chicks have been raised for the past week, with no signs of coccidiosis. I haven't moved them since putting them on the patch of grass as there's still plenty of green growth there. It's a large tractor for only 26 birds. I'm presuming the main reason that they haven't come down with coccidiosis is that since they're not meat hybrids, they don't put out a huge amount of droppings (meat hybrids soil the ground much more quickly, due to high volumes of food passing through). Thus the area they're on is still relatively clean.

So here we have 26 chicks just coming up to 4 weeks of age, on ground that's had several batches of chicks raised on it before, without medications for 3 weeks, and I'm seeing no coccidiosis.

I'm not saying this is a perfect system, and I still can't say if deliberate exposure from day one is the main thing, or whether it's the soured milk they've had in the diet all along (even when given commercial starter I moistened some of it with kefir), or whether it's something else going in my favour (such as local weather conditions). But I will say that it's been warm and humid and we've had rain since they've been out on grass, so I do feel that coccidiosis would have shown up by now.

Still, I'll be moving them today to new ground to keep the greens up to them. And I'll be watching them fairly closely to make sure none starts showing symptoms. But for now, it's all good. Need I add, the chicks that went under the broody shortly after hatching have remained in the same aviary since hatch, and as with the tractored chicks they're coccidiosis free too. But as they're now 3 weeks of age, I feel it's time to move them too. I'll be putting them in the tractor with the week older birds, and putting the hen (though she'll hate this) back in the hen-pen.

Clearly it's possible to raise small batches of chicks without using medicated starter, as long as some basics are observed (and I would also add that separation of several weeks between chick batches is a very good idea--we're taught that coccidia live for many many months in soil, but I suspect a good many die off in those first few weeks between hatches).

Some slow-feathering genes apparent in this bunch...

Best of all, I haven't seeded my soil with drug resistant coccidia; at least, not so far.

Logging in okay... Will keep going for now. :-)

2011-10-19T12:48:00.001-07:00

Update on earlier post: I seem to be able to log in, so will keep on for now at this address.
Thanks for staying with me.

Blog PAUSED due to account issues... Update later.

2011-10-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

Hi there. Apologies for this inconvenience, but I'm having trouble logging in at times. Google data-mining requirements may be clashing with my choice of using a pseudonym for certain aspects of the blog.

However I don't like running a blog that might upset a few commercial interests under my real name. I'm sure most people reading this well-intentioned blog will understand why. If not, look up Monsanto and its treatment of small-time naysayers. I'm very, very smalltime, but you never know how badly folks get irritated by alternate points of view, particularly when they clash with profit goals.

For these reasons I'm looking into moving the blog to a different carrier. That will take time, and obviously it could mean that some viewers become lost. Hopefully that won't happen!

If I can still log in to this blog when I set up the new page I'll make sure to put a redirect so you can chase me up at the new address. Hopefully I can transfer all aspects of the blog including back-posts.

If I don't manage to log in to Google again, then I might ask people to do a general search for 'the natural chicken' or any post titles or keywords you might recall (like 'artificial methionine is it safe' or 'layer cockerels for the table'). You should be able to track down the new blog that way.

Apologies for these hassles. The web is becoming more and more difficult to use while retaining some measure of privacy. For those with alternate views to giant corporations it's perhaps becoming even harder... But that may just be a fancy of mine.

Best wishes to all, and thanks for reading... Fingers crossed for a smooth transition when I set up the future website.

D-day for layer cockerels for the pot...

2011-10-08T03:40:00.000-07:00

Well, they've started to crow, a little on the early side at 12 weeks. I have a neighbour to think about, and these birds are out in a tractor beside his house, so I think the best thing would be to dispatch them early and let the neighbours get some sleep.

It's a shame though, as I'd intended to let them grow as long as possible eating fresh grass and having a safe happy life in the tractor. They always rush at the door when I bring food, and they're friendly happy little birds without undue aggression. Alas, their early maturity goes against longevity in the crowing department.

At just past sundown I took a trolley with a cage on it up to the tractor, and began carefully and gently catching each bird and loading him in. I was so gentle (and they're so tame) that none made more than a tiny chitter of alarm. There was no chasing involved, just a gentle pickup. I know this sounds ridiculously sentimental, but it matters to me that they don't get anxious.

At the moment they're in the warm dry shed in a small cage, all sitting side by side. Dispatch time will be first thing in the morning, probably when the sun is not quite risen. They'll still be sleepy but I won't say it's going to be a good morning for them; all I can hope is that none sees what's coming, and all stay reasonably stress-less until the last. Then it will be quick -- I know that much.

Sad, isn't it? I find I can face this more easily if I allow a token survivor. Tonight I felt through the mass of warm feathery bodies until I'd found the heaviest black (I'd prefer to keep a black rather than an ISA brown, as their temperaments are better for my purposes) and took him down to the roost area housing the pullets from the same hatch. There he'll stay until I decide on next year's breeding setup, or unless I find myself at saturation point rooster-wise (which isn't hard to reach on a narrow acre where neighbouring houses are close).

Of course I have to keep in mind the ultimate goal, which is a self sustaining dual purpose flock. If the leghorn x meat hybrids prove to be healthy enough to reach breeding age without massive intervention, I guess I'll prefer to keep more of those roosters and fewer of the strictly egg laying ones. But still, it's hard to take twelve or thirteen healthy young boys not yet in their prime and process them for food. They'll be tender but less flavourful than older birds, and in any case I can't help but admire them as living creatures. I don't doubt that they think and feel and worry, even if they don't do these things to the extent (or in the way) that we do.

I'd better stop before I give home meat making a bad name... It's not that bad, and the night before processing is always a little sentimental. Hope that's forgivable!

On with the show.

between the broody hen and the cold brooder

2011-10-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

No photos yet, but last night I tucked 8 two-day-old chicks under the malay x ISA brown, who had again gone broody. Readers might remember that she raised several ancona chicks quite a few months ago.

The hatch from my recent incubation was quite a patchy one. The earliest-set eggs were exposed to low temperature swings at a vulnerable age and I believe many were lost to this. About half of this first setting hatched, with many deaths in shell. It turned out that the little plastic mesh box I'd made to house the second setting (the later hatch) had upset the internal dynamics and stopped the thermostat working properly. Once it was removed (after the first hatch), the temperature stabilised correctly, and of the later-set eggs, all but one hatched successfully.

But back to the broody, my malay x ISA game. She wasn't the best mother in the world, because she rejected all the white chicks (leghorn x) and was only interested in raising the dark ones. However at the moment all the chicks, black (ancona x red layer) and white (leghorn x meat hybrid) are doing well under her. She's a good mother when she decides to commit, so hopefully these chicks were placed under her early enough for her not to get too choosy.

The earlier-hatched ancona x red layer and leghorn x meat hybrids are running around in a brooder at a week and a day old. They all look in good health and up till yesterday were given the 60w ceramic heater to keep warm. This heater was put above the straw-surrounded nest area; the run is of course unheated. The chicks learned where to go to stay warm almost immediately.

Now I've taken away the ceramic heater and am encouraging the chicks to use the nest area without added heat. They're slightly confused and kept trying to huddle in the lit area where daylight streams in from the north side of the carport, but I've now blocked the light from that direction. It's a mild day, in the low 20s temperature-wise, and I'm confident these week-olds are capable of keeping themselves warm with a little extra guidance as to where to go. There are about 25 or 26 chicks in here, a sufficient number of chicks to cold brood.

About once an hour over the next few days I'll check the birds and make sure they're going into the nest area when they need to cosy up. Meanwhile I'll start thinking about diet.

Up till now they've been on 100% medicated chick starter from a shop. This is still the easiest way to get little chicks eating and to ensure that they're getting a full range of nutrients at first hatch. However the medication irks me and so I'll be switching them over in the next week to a home feed made of finely ground wheat, corn and sunflower, soy meal, lucerne (alfalfa), kefir, hard grit, seaweed meal and salt.

At three weeks old I should be able to put them in the tractor, and the whole sequence starts again, this time hopefully without temperature swings or staggered hatching.

ISA brown and black layer pullets: some observations

2011-09-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

Here are the kindergarten-hatched girls:

Two of the blacks, showing the nice shine on the feathers. When healthy, this sheen is typically a deep bottle green. I've heard that a violet or purple sheen is indicative of nutritional or health problems, though I haven't been able to verify that. However I'm quite happy with the growth and look of these birds.

These are the three ISA browns (or ISA brown types) from the mix. Funny how they stick together! They're active, able bodied birds, but are notorious for being stroppy with any newcomers and being prone to peck and feather-pick. Given a good area to scratch in and decent feed they don't seem to peck or pick at one another, and interestingly while very tame the roosters don't tend to be aggressive toward the handler (unlike many other breeds). However it's true that they give newcomers a hard time, and their tameness seems to go hand-in-hand with a tendency to be bullies. I've found, however, that when they're crossed to something flightier or in fact to anything else, the offspring lose a lot of that ISA brown territoriality.

A close-up of one of the blacks. These are typically a cross between layer australorps and rhode island reds (both commercial utility strains, not common backyard strains). They're a great forager like the ISA browns, but seem to have a slightly milder temperament. I've found them to be terrific layers and great pets.

Four of the five blacks picking at the litter. Their male counterparts are still in the tractor and are larger than the girls, as well as having a much stronger hunger drive. While the girls are quite respectful, the males keep trying to eat my fingers as I stoop in to fill the feed trough. But they're great little chaps and I might even keep a couple of the black cockerels in case I lose a rooster to a goshawk. They'll always be useful to increase egg laying ability among purebreds and backyard crossbreds, and despite opinions to the contrary, I think they have been selected for hardiness. After all, while they're vaccinated to the hilt in commercial situations, they're also kept in massive sheds where sheer numbers create disease risks via stress. And given that they're on-sold to commercial egg farms, the breeders have to be sure that the offspring will survive the laying year. This contrasts with the variety of backyard breeding situations and approaches, some of which don't consider hardiness or longevity at all, and many of which don't cull or select for egg laying. Thus while there's a common generalisation that commercial birds will lay for a year before collapsing due to layer fatigue or reproductive disorders, when crossed to a rugged kind of backyard bird, the result can be selected for the best of both worlds (egg laying ability plus hardiness).

Just some thoughts!

ceramic bulb in the tub brooder... not!

2011-09-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

Three of the ancona x bubs are out of their shells and bouncing around in the incubator. That leaves, um, 57 or so to go... I'm not counting them before they've hatched this time around, as temperatures were a little unsteady. I'm expected quite a draggy hatch.

It was a slightly annoying day, despite the emergence of chicks. Usually I settle hatchlings in an infra-red-lit tub for 2 days before putting them into the cold brooder. This gives them a little head-start and allows me to make sure they're all eating and drinking before the challenge of learning to use an unheated 'igloo'.

However the infra red light has its drawbacks, not least being the fact that it is a light and not just a heater. Since cold brooded chicks have to learn to go inside a dark space to get warm, a heat lamp confuses the issue.

Today I went to the pet shop and paid $53 for a 60w ceramic heat bulb. Now since the infra red lamp provides sufficient heat at 40w for my small tub brooder, I felt a 60w ceramic bulb that gives out only heat (rather than heat and light) should be perfectly adequate. Wrong! The damn thing gives out barely any heat at all. That is, the bulb itself gets terribly hot, but not only does it not heat the brooder air, but it doesn't heat the brooder litter or floor or walls higher than about 25C when suspended at a safe height. This is despite having a reflective shield above the globe aiming to direct the heat down.

How disappointing! Clearly the infra red bulbs give much more heat on a per-wattage basis.

Perhaps the ceramic bulb will be useful when teaching chicks to use the cold brooder, as if I hang it over the wire mesh on top of the little igloo the chicks should feel the warmth and go inside through the doorway when chilly. This will help retrain them out of going toward the light when they're feeling cool. I wouldn't want to leave the ceramic bulb switched on for any length of time though, because a straw-stuffed 'igloo' full of chicks could easily overheat.

So not a great purchase, but perhaps not a useless one...

cocci update: layer chicks immune

2011-09-23T23:15:00.000-07:00

Updated update:

Well, I'm going to call it on this one: these chicks are immune. They've been in the damp pen now for 7 days with no symptoms, and have been consuming only home-mixed feed for a few weeks now. If they were going to get cocci they would have.

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Update:

Last night we had so much rain the roost shed was knee deep in water, as was the lower end of the pen. Poor chicks were sodden and drenched. I make them a little umbrella-roost out of a trestle table with a plank underneath, and they spent the night drying off above the waterline.

Today amazingly they're none the worse for wear, all eating to their hearts' content. Typically cecal cocci takes 5 days between challenge and symptoms, so I'll be watching them closely given the drenched pen.

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Well, here they are, the pullets out of the recent chick purchase. They're now around 8-10 weeks of age and I feel fairly confident that they're cocci-immune.

Having said that, a major challenge might overwhelm them even now, so I've taken the precaution of laying wood chips down in the pen the meat hybrids were living in.

Before laying the new surface I also took out the top 5cm layer of soil from the central part of the pen where most of the droppings had accumulated. (This removed soil is now happily growing beans, tomatoes and other seedlings in a few garden beds.)

Surprisingly I've ended up with 8 pullets, so of the 20 bought, only 12 are cockerels. Given that some of the female ISA browns had almost certainly been removed, this is a pretty good average.

I'm still going to be watching them for cocci signs, especially now that rain is forecast and warm weather is already here. But they've been off medicated starter now for a couple of weeks. Thus even though this pen is my dampest and is the one I'd be most concerned about in terms of oocyst build-up, I'd be surprised to see any harm now.

The cockerels are staying in the tractor, as unless I can find homes for some of them, their destiny is the table. As usual I get a bit attached to the handsome little things, and it's worth putting in the effort in case there are any breeders around who want utility above looks. Commercial hybrid roosters can increase egg laying in a backyard crossbred flock, though it's rare that anyone wants to bring in their good points without going to a purebred first. But still, it's worth a shot. I remember when I was looking for a commercial layer cockerel and either couldn't find one at all, or couldn't find one that hadn't been exposed to respiratory disease. And these birds have the further good point (for anyone with similar core values to mine) that they've been reared on pasture with, since their fourth week of age, natural vitamins in preference to artificial ones.

Best of all, I can see from the rich green shine in the black birds' feathers and the good rate of growth in all that the diet of ground, cracked and sprouted grains with soy meal, oilseeds, minerals, grass and kefir is agreeing with them.

incubation update: 3 days from hatch

2011-09-22T18:38:00.000-07:00

UPDATE:

Whatever you do, don't attempt what I've photographed below. After taking this shot and writing the post, I began to notice that the temperature in the incubator was dropping. Each time I opened the lid it dropped even more, stabilising a degree lower each time. I felt it was a dodgy thermostat but I now believe the plastic mesh box used to separate the later-hatching eggs was to blame. I think perhaps somehow its presence upset the dynamics of the incubator and played havoc with the thermostat. I can't be sure of this of course -- it may have been dust in the wafer that coincidentally became dislodged as the mesh box was removed -- but it's better to be safe than sorry.

I've got 2 lots of eggs in the incubator, staggered a week apart. I just thought I'd set out what I did and why, so anyone else looking at staggering a hatch might have some extra info to go by.

Not that I'm expert at it! However I do know that if the hatch is staggered by only a few days, there can be problems with the excess humidity of the first hatch affecting those that are just about to break into the air cell. I've usually had zero hatch in the later batch if they were only a few days older and tried to break into the air space when there was a lot of excess moisture.

The first batch in the incubator are due to hatch on Monday (in 3 days' time). However there were some temperature problems (too low) for a few days so I'd expect them to be a bit later than that; perhaps Tuesday. (I did lose some eggs during periods of low temperature and have already taken them out after candling.) Unfortunately the incubator has proved very temperamental. I suspect the wingnut and screw that set the wafer thermostat are a bit loose, and hence tend to jiggle when the lid is lifted while turning eggs. After deciding this was the case and taking extra care when lifting and setting the lid, I've seen no more temperature drops.

The second batch (9 eggs) is due to hatch a week and a day after the first. These eggs are now being turned by hand while the others are allowed to keep still; to stop any jostling and to make sure I turn all the ones I should be turning, I've set them into their own little mesh basket inside the incubator. Made of plastic gutter-mesh, the basket should help keep the more delicate later-hatching eggs safe from being jostled, contaminated with hatch-debris and so forth.

This is the worst time in the whole incubation period for me — a habitual fiddler, I have to sit on my hands. But at least now the temperature is holding!

Fingers crossed for some happy healthy chickens.

When is it time to say 'enough' with meat production?

2011-09-21T16:35:00.000-07:00

One final post mortem find, and the end to my keeping of straight meat hybrids...

On both sides of the breastbone of one of the meat hybrid girls I found an area of green discoloration which had also affected the bone itself. This was deep mid-centre of the breast in the tender core muscle that lies against bone. The dead area appeared symmetrical, about 5cm long and 2.5cm wide. In between the bone was dark and eaten right through, connecting both areas of necrosis.

I saw no tumours or true lesions, and no sign of an injury or wound, just necrotic tissue. This perplexed me very much until I found references to something called Deep Pectoral Myopathy. I looked at various sites including www.worldpoultry.net (http://www.worldpoultry.net/diseases/deep-pectoral-myopathy-d95.html) and others. I believe this is what the poor girl had.

Apparently, due to intense selection for breast meat, areas of deep breast muscle may not receive sufficient blood supply, particularly during wing-flapping. Afterward the dead muscle tissue can turn green. Complications such as gangrene are also possible (explaining the eaten-away bone; or to my mind the bone itself may have lost blood supply in the same manner as the muscle, thereby producing bone necrosis).

While it's reassuring to know I didn't cause this issue as such, it's a pretty distasteful find. I can't imagine what pain this bird must have felt when flapping her wings. Meanwhile selection for enhanced meat characteristics goes on, with GM chickens not too far away.

We're told that unless we continue to increase food production, our food systems will be unable to provide for the world's population in the near future. It's hard for me to imagine how the meat bird could possibly be asked to do more for humanity in this regard.

Meat hybrid pullets update...

2011-09-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

The heavyweight girls are only 24 weeks of age, but I feel the time has come to make a humane decision.

Yesterday one of the girls sustained a bad leg injury, possibly triggered by the rooster's added weight during treading. She was clearly in serious pain, and when I had a close look I could see that her hock looked abnormal, with a hard knot above the joint, and the joint itself was too loose. After I'd put her down I saw that the tendon was completely severed from the leg bone. There was no way she could have healed or had a good quality of life.

However I also noted that her liver was enlarged and friable, as well as being an unhealthy orange colour. She was extremely fat, with a huge amount adhering to the underside of her skin as well as filling the cavity. These obviously point to fatty liver syndrome, which is fairly common in commercial birds (both layers and meat hybrids) due to a combination of high food intake and the kinds of diets we rely on to meet production goals.

A few weeks ago I had to dispatch a leg-stricken bird, and also one a couple of weeks before that; both birds had slight liver discolouration but no signs of fatty liver or enlargement. In today's bird the liver was in appalling shape; I would say close to rupture. The difference in colour to earlier livers was astonishing.

In order to bring the birds into lay and help with shell quality I began 4 weeks ago both increasing feed amounts and adding commercial layer crumble and meat bird finisher (with extra shell grit) as well as soy meal to the diet. This resulted in a net decrease in the amount of whole grain (albeit sprouted) being fed. Although laying improved, the health decline in these 4 weeks has been incredible.

I'm not sure if this decline is merely due to a protein increase in percentage terms. Yes, meat bird finisher is higher in protein than layer feed and probably a fair bit higher than my sprout mix. However protein in general doesn't produce fatty liver syndrome; and I haven't found any literature describing soybean meal as a cause. In general fatty liver is put down to a diet high in quick-burning carbohydrates. Fatty liver syndrome is also, in my reading, more strongly associated with the use of artificial methionine against natural methionine; notably, meat bird finisher is high in the artificial form.

What else can I say? This has been an interesting and at times upsetting project, but I don't feel deterred from continuing with half-leghorn offspring (presuming some hatch). Earlier today I felt rather discouraged and indeed a little sickened by the poor birds' plight. I felt it would be cruel to produce chicks from these birds. However having thought it through (and writing it out here helps me do that -- apologies for any errors or omissions, but this is a work-in-progress) I can see that the excess fat and liver degeneration are dietary. These birds are programmed to overeat, and hence dietary issues appear more strongly in them than in other birds. I'll simply need to be more careful with what I feed in future.

But of course the whole project might prove too hard if the offspring of these meat hybrids suffer similar issues in terms of reproductive health. If I have to use commercial meat bird finisher to increase protein so the birds can lay at all, I'm walking a burning tightrope. But I've gone this far and have eggs set, so for now I might as well keep walking.

No cocci symptoms in layer chicks! Yippee.

2011-09-12T17:30:00.000-07:00

So far, so good! These layer chicks are growing more and more robust and active by the day.

When first bought they were clearly showing signs of early coccidiosis, albeit very mild. This means they'd had some exposure before arriving here, though none was very sick. All came good after a day or two with a warm night-hutch and medicated starter.

After a few weeks in a brooder I'd seeded with older layer droppings they went onto a tractor on ground that I'd used to raise the meat hybrids. I left them in the tractor on the same ground for a week, longer than intended but still with commercial starter alongside other food. I left them there this long as I wanted the grass and weed cover eaten down. By the time it was close to ground level I moved the tractor.

Remember, the hybrids were on this ground when they showed cocci signs, so I'm going to go all-out and say these layers have now been quite heavily exposed. What they haven't been, however, is overwhelmed.

Some factors may be at play here:

- they're still consuming medicated starter. However I've noticed that they much prefer my home mix containing kefir, to the extent that I've barely had to add to the commercial starter hopper at all. I'd say they're only eating minimal amounts of medication, if any.

- the kefir may be providing some anti-coccidial benefits. Milk has long been used in this way, though I don't know to what degree it is generally effective. However when my meat hybrids developed coccidiosis they weren't having much kefir at all, as I hadn't begun souring skim milk for them. It remains possible that the kefir is a good preventive.

- the weather has been quite a bit drier than when I put the meat hybrids onto the same ground. However there have been two days of light rain and I would have expected to see some coccidiosis by now if the chicks were going to show signs. As well, the weather while raising the meat chicks was quite a bit cooler than now (warmth is important to oocyst ripening). Thus I'm not sure weather has been an important factor.

- these chicks may have been effectively 'inocculated' by their earlier mild bout of cocci. However only a few of the chicks seemed to have symptoms when I bought them, and I'm not sure the exposure was large enough to develop a full immune response. Still, it's quite possible that this alone explains their hardiness now.

It's hard to make judgements from all this, except that I can say that the combination of the above seems to prevent coccidiosis! Obvious, I know... Graduated exposure has always been the key to cocci prevention, however one achieves it (e.g. ionophores work by allowing some exposure but limiting it so the bird still acquires immunity). But still, 20 chicks aged about 6 weeks in a tractor on dampish ground for a whole week without cocci and with only very minor use of ionophores isn't bad.

The next step is to stop leaving chick starter out for the birds, and move fully to unmedicated feeds, whether I use my own mix or add in commercial meat bird finisher (also 18%) to cover my nutritional bases.

incubating time...

2011-09-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I've got about as many eggs as I think I'll get... That is, a full dozen from the meaties and umpteen from the layer x anconas.

I believe it's time to fire up the incubator! Yippee.

I could wait for more meatie eggs, but they're only laying 1 or 2 per day between the 4 of them... Unfortunately their laying systems aren't up to the task, particularly with making shells. In another 2 weeks I'll have 15-20 eggs, but meanwhile this dozen will have gone stale. So might as well get cracking!

I've been storing them in our coolest room in egg cartons, tilting them at 45 degree angles and changing their orientation once per day. This helps stop the yolk sticking to one side of the shell membrane, as can happen when eggs are left for a while in one position. To make sure I end up with as many fertile eggs as possible I'm going to absolutely cram the incubator full, leaving out the auto turner.

My incubator is a simple Hovabator, nothing to write home about, but I've had good hatches in it before. Actually this one is brand new but I've got no reason to suspect it won't work. Even so I'm firing it up for 48 hours to make sure the setting is stable before I put the eggs in. A few plastic bottles full of water can act as a heat sink in that time, giving a better indication of how well the thermostat is coping.

I know this isn't natural chicken incubation, so it's probably making some people wonder at the title of my blog. However the small foam incubators are reasonably power-efficient (average about 24W without the turner), and because the meaties have a very short lifespan (let alone laying lifespan) I need to set as many eggs as I can right now. There's no telling when their systems will pack it in, much as I wish they could just go on enjoying life. Unfortunately they've been bred to self destruct.

However I'll be hoping to brood naturally when the chicks hatch. If I don't get a broody hen in time I'll simply cold-brood. That will at least cut down on the amount of energy that gets used in the process of creating new chickens! And later in the season there will definitely be broody hens I can use as sitters as well as brooders. It's just that I have to act now, while I have fertile meatie eggs.

Now back to the auto turner and those eggs I'll be setting... After candling at day 7 I should be able to discard any infertile eggs and make enough room to insert the egg turner if I really want to. If it's not a drama to keep turning eggs by hand I'll simply keep doing that (a lot depends on how busy I am in the next few weeks; I have some retaining wall projects going on.)

So that's where I'm at, folks—two days away from setting a bunch of eggs. Heaven forbid I accidentally drop that carton of broiler x leghorn eggs... They took a lot of effort from all of us to produce, and if there's one thing that makes me feel better about even the gammy-legged girl (who's still in the hospital cage on cushions), it's that she might have offspring with more survival chance than she ever had.

chick feeding

2011-09-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd give a rundown of what I'm feeding the layer chicks. They're now 4-5 weeks of age, and have been on commercial starter entirely. They've been on the ground for some time, out in the tractor. But it's time to wean them off medicated feed. I don't like it (it helps breed resistant organisms) and I don't want to continually seed my backyard soil with resistant coccidia. I'd rather keep medicated starter for use in cases where birds that are raised without medications actually develop a need for it; indeed in the past I've treated mild coccidiosis simply by using some medicated feed.

So here's what I'm making up for the chicks now, using my handy 'Sprint' grain mill. First I make up the dry mix:

wheat 60%
corn 10%
peas 5%
sunflower seeds 4%

The above grains are milled coarsely together. Then I add:

lucerne chaff (alfalfa) 5%
soy meal (full fat) 16%

This dry mix is then formed into a crumbly mash using kefir (as a methionine supplement as well as probiotic and B vitamin tonic). I also add a pinch of salt and a larger pinch of seaweed meal.

Excluding the kefir, the mix above averages out at around 18% protein. On top of this the birds are on fresh pasture including clover, chickweed and other beneficial weeds.

At 5 weeks of age the birds can easily handle 18% feed. Technically the kefir lowers the percentage slightly but only because much of it is liquid (which tends to pass through, as birds don't absorb a lot of liquid in their colons, unlike some other animals). In fact I feel kefir enhances the birds' digestive system and probably makes up for a percentage point of protein in its own right.

Now I'm not feeding the above mix completely to these birds; they're still getting commercial chick starter to pick at for the next little while. This will be a gradual shift over the course of a couple of weeks, and I'll move the tractor every 48 hours and then every 72 hours during this time. This should help them get used to being on the ground without medication.

I've noticed in the past that having more than a handful of birds in the tractor can put more cocci-pressure on the system, with oocysts building up too quickly for them to handle, and in that case all it takes is a sudden period of warmth and wet weather for things to get out of hand. At the moment I have 20 chicks in the tractor. That's probably as many as I want in the one spot while I'm reducing medication in this way.

Next time I raise chicks (which will be soon, as I've now got a full dozen meatie eggs), I'll start the tractor on different ground so the home hatched ones aren't picking up much of the cocci oocysts these current chicks have shed. And I'll also be going medication free from the start, with an emphasis on management. As I found with the meat chicks earlier, I'll have to pay attention to the weather, crowding, timing of movement from the brooder to the ground, and many other factors. But I know now that these things can be managed. And as another benefit of doing things this way, there's always medicated feed as a backup. I won't be robbing that medication of any of its potency by using it all the time.

I'm not trying to push my feed recipe in any way, shape or form... I do things a little experimentally here, and can't vouch for a perfect result every time. But I am starting to feel more confident that I'm supplying what chicks need, and I'm also learning that feed recipes are a moveable feast. In fact, I believe that one of the keys to health is in varying the diet, for instance seasonally, or when certain ingredients become available. At the moment I'm able to source full fat extruded soy meal, and I feel it's a useful supplement (full fat soy meal from local beans isn't yet GMO).

So on the whole, while it's easy to get hung up on protein percentages, I feel some give-and-take is not only possible but wise. And at the moment, with both breeder pens producing fertile eggs and the layer chicks happy on the grass, I'm pretty much where I want to be.

Layer cockerels for the table?

2011-08-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

Finding a high number of cockerels in a cheap chick purchase isn't necessarily a disappointment. What layer cockerels have going for them more than anything else, I feel, is an ability to forage. What meat they do end up having is usually of terrific quality because they've had ample exercise.

So at the moment I've got 20 layer chicks in a tractor, and it appears I have mostly males (probably 17 out of 20, if not all). While I was expecting a poor ratio as these were kindergarten-hatched, I wasn't quite expecting that many. But it's not a problem when I know from experience even the boys can be useful as long as they're not compared to genuine meat birds.

So they'll be pastured from now on (they're 3 weeks old and have their own little mobile 'igloo' for use in the tractor) and will be processed at around 15 weeks or when they begin to crow or fight too much. Fighting of course makes for stressed meat. I won't expect a great quantity of meat, but I'd expect them to have great flavour.

Meanwhile I'll go out now and take some photos.

Here they are, a little camera shy!

The blue object to the right is a tarp-wrapped 'igloo' made of bent mesh (to form a C section). The picture is looking at it from the side. To keep the sides from splaying I've c-clipped an elevated floor out of the same stuff (Bunning compost panel mesh). This also keeps the chicks off the ground at night, so even if water seeps down through the tractor (which is on a slope), the chicks can stay dry while they sleep. On top of the mesh floor is a piece of foam matting of the type campers and yoga trainers use. The ceiling under the tarp is also made out of this type of foam matting, so it's quite insulated; and there's a rear wall under the tarp.

The chicks had been cold brooder trained a week or two after I got them, so by the time they went out into the tractor they knew where to go when chilly.

point of lay meat hybrid: update

2011-08-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

Updated update: Another egg! This one is perfect, laid by one of the big pullets. She sat in the nestbox half the morning, but the egg is an ideal pullet size (not too large, with good shell).

I feel like an anxious midwife...

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Another update. We're having a few trees taken down (dangerous trees such as old giant plantation pines that have developed a lean), and unfortunately all the noise and thumping is taking a toll on the meat hybrids as far as laying goes. They're quite unsettled and are spending the whole day perched on a mound in the corner of their pen.

As a result of stress the soft shelled egg laying is at epidemic levels! However I'm still seeing no signs of discomfort or internal infection, though the long it goes on, the more likely that is.

So the grand tally of usable eggs so far is... Two! And one of those is probably a double yolker. Alas, this was never going to be an easy project.

I'm beginning to feel it's time to start making a backup plan for the event that I don't get any chicks at all. That was always a possibility, though I felt the whole thing was worth a crack. But a second option for disease free starter birds may be looking at obtaining indian (cornish) or malay games via fertile eggs, and following commercial practices as far as dipping them in an antibiotic solution. This won't guarantee MG (the chronic respiratory germ) -free stock, but it would make it quite likely.

So I'm not quite 'back to the drawing board', but I do want to have a backup plan resolved before spring heats up. That means sourcing eggs and finding out where I can obtain dipping-grade antibiotics suitable against MG. Perhaps my local vet...? In case that doesn't sound particularly 'natural' ('the natural chicken', after all, is my blog name), I'll just add that goshawks are also natural, but I prefer to defend against those. I feel the generations that hatch without MG will have every chance to live much more natural lives without having to rely on antibiotics later on, so it's a case of limiting the use...

---------------

Just a quick update. Yesterday I noticed one of the girl was having quite a bit of trouble breathing, and today I felt it was time to end her suffering. She had a good life until the last couple of days, so this has been a fairly quick demise. I don't feel it was cruel to keep her going this long, but another day (or even a couple of hours) probably would have been.

As usual I had a good look inside and found no signs of disease, tumours or infection. That's good because at least she didn't have EYP (egg yolk peritonitis). However inside her laying tract was a fully formed shelled egg of beautiful shape, and behind it were a row of varying-sized yolks. She was literally about to start laying. What a shame!

Then again the process of passing an egg would probably have spelled the end anyway. Her cavity was very full of fat and this seems to have put a lot of pressure on her cardiac and respiratory systems. Unfortunately the balance between giving meat hybrids enough feed that they can produce eggs and not so much that they get overweight is very hard to achieve — though it's rather encouraging that she came that close to laying. Even if I only get half a dozen fertilised eggs I'll have something to work with next generation. Here's hoping for the few remaining girls...

I might just post a reminder about why I'm doing this. I found dual purpose purebreds very poor on the production front, particularly in terms of meat. And as I found even with the malay x leghorns, they weren't quite able to meet the table weights I wanted on a home mixed diet, though they might have done so capably on commercial grower feeds.

An ideal bird would be one that can produce a good amount of table meat to feed a family of four, without being so prone to overweight that it can't survive to breed. It would also need to be low-broodiness (for egg quantity), and have all the other characteristics we've lost in most of our utility purebreds: early maturity; good laying ability; good foraging ability; fast moult; hardiness; and good feed conversion.

I'm a long way from the survivability target, no doubt about that. But that near-lay egg in the deceased girl's cavity gives me hope. I feel that I can just obtain even a couple of leghorn crosses from the remaining girls, and put them with other healthy layer-purebred crosses, I feel I'll be close to achieving all my targets in just a couple of generations.

Remember too, I'm not looking to make supermarket meat and I'm not looking to force a bird to lay an egg a day for eighteen months before it drops dead of layer fatigue. I'm happy to carry birds over winter and to maintain animals with high feed requirements. I just want to come at this with MG free stock that still have the desirable production traits. And then I can cull for health and vigour, and let the production values settle to something realistic.

Ancona and leghorn cockerels

2011-08-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

The two cockerels I kept (a leghorn and an ancona) are shaping up nicely, and both are obviously fertile (with blastodiscs inside every egg). I'm happy with their size and growth, so I feel they haven't been set back too badly by the lupins.

Here they are having an afternoon singalong.

If the experiment trying to cross a layer type with the meat birds fails, I'll probably pick up some more leghorns and put them in with the white chappie above. Leghorns are notoriously flighty, and most people find the white ones boring (these were the original dual purpose birds when industrial chicken farming began to take off), but I like their looks, and find that they readily tame down when treated properly. They're still flighty when something flails or bangs, but this is a useful survival instinct when goshawks are around. Best of all, in my experience flighty males only rarely turn aggressive toward their keeper. It can happen with leghorns, but it isn't particularly common.

Feed store chicks...

2011-08-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

UPDATE:

Good news so far. The hunching and wilted looking red pullet youngster below is looking much better today. I've ended up setting the lamp up and also moving them all to a bigger brooder, and the difference is amazing. Best of all -- no bloody poop! Not a single one. And that was without treating them with a coccidiocide.

I've given them plain commercial chick grower plus a little soy meal to increase the protein to chick starter levels. I've also put kefir in the drinking water, at about 30%.

I also threw a handful of adult pen soil into the brooder, as I set it up on a completely new floor (two wardrobe doors lying together).

I'll see how they go, but they're looking good so far, all things considered.

-----------------------

A quick trip for chaff has turned into a chick rescue.

On the side of the feed store driveway was a hutch swarming with chicks from 1-3 weeks in age. There was no lamp above the unit, and the nest area was just sheet metal with no insulation, so one chick was already dying. The cage was also very soiled.

I could see a few signs of mild cocci (pale faces), but no bloody droppings were visible.
These are commercial blacks and ISA browns, with either some leghorn x or perhaps male ISA browns in the mix. They were apparently hatched in local kindergartens where hatching eggs has become very popular. The chicks have been either donated or sold (probably donated) to the local feed store by whoever runs the hatching business, and are unsexed. I feel there's a good chance they haven't come into contact with anything nasty except the cocci (which is everywhere), and so I picked out 6 of the healthiest looking to take home.

However after setting them up in the brooder, I felt guilty about the remaining ones having fewer live bodies to help them keep warm, so I went back and bought the rest. The woman in charge let me have the lot for a low price; I don't think she wanted to set up a brooder lamp and she was obviously upset about the dying one. Thus I've ended up with 20 chicks, some of which will be males, and some of which are looking a little pale.

Quite pale and a little hunched, this girl clearly needs treatment. She's been kept on dirty ground that's had many chicks on it before, and in all probability (given that she was on commercial chick starter) the cocci strain she's bumped into is immune to common coccidiostats.

I do need extra layers for next year, so this wasn't entirely an impulse purchase. Roosters are also welcome here as I'm often looking for healthy layer types (nobody likes to raise them to adulthood, so they can be scarce as hens' teeth when wanted). If too many turn out to be roosters, the extras will become table birds after a decent life on healthy food and a respectful humane death. I'm comfortable with all that.

But the stress of moving has upset them, and I'm now seeing bloody droppings. So it's not an ideal purchase, but it's a fact that I've made worse ones. (I remember, for instance, remote-buying 6 brahma chicks from Mudgee that were meant to be 12 weeks old and show quality. When they arrived they were 5 weeks old at the most, wrong-combed, and had respiratory disease.) These birds do have a couple of things in their favour: they were hatched at kindergartens and most likely won't have been exposed to too many other birds; they will have come from commercial eggs so will most likely be MG (mycoplasma gallisepticum) free; and the girls will be good productive birds when they mature.

For now I've got them in the mesh brooder under the enclosed carport, and the nestbox is thoroughly hay-stuffed and has the little 5w heat-pad turned on. If the chicks don't seem to know how to go inside to warm up I'll set up a lamp, but they seemed willing to use the nestbox compartment at the feed store. I'd say they were only beginning to chill because there was no insulation and it was just sheet metal. Not great on a cold day!

So there it is... Twenty chicks, and a bag of chaff.

GM chickens?

2011-08-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

A forum recently brought up the issue of GM (genetically modified) chickens. I haven't read into this very much as I find the concept depressing. But here are a few of my personal thoughts...

The first is a question. Why?

Why do we need to allow such tinkering? Commercial meat birds are already so affected by the profit motive that they can barely survive to reproductive age. The majority have short lives of great discomfort. Why do we need to go further?

The second is a concern about potential disease transmission. By that I mean simply that nobody has ever convincingly explained to me how putting cross-order genes into a living organism won't lead to increased disease susceptibility. Is it possible a rat carrying some genes from jellyfish might help disease organisms that ordinarily harm only one order of life-form to cross species? I don't know; it's never been discussed by those doing the gene splicing. But if a disease that only ever affected one order of life-form suddenly becomes able to infect a whole new order... Do I need to say more?

The third concern is allergies. How do we know gene splicing won't cause allergens that affect individuals to sneak into a wider range of foodstuffs? Will we see higher rates of allergy? Incidentally higher rates of allergies have already accompanied (though I'm not saying 'been definitively caused by') the increase of GM products on our shelves.

The fourth concern is labelling. Will GM chickens be labelled so that people who for whatever reason want to avoid them can? I doubt it because it hasn't happened with other GM foods.

Here are some of the common arguments in favour of GM science:

We can't feed the world without GM. But when countries produce surpluses, do these automatically go to feed the starving? Nope; never have. Why should GM production overcome distribution (and goodwill) shortages? It simply won't happen. Furthermore, if we need to splice genes in order to survive as a species, won't we simply escalate in population to a point where GM science can't help us? As soon as we meet global population needs, global population will climb still further. This isn't an argument for population control by forced means (much less starvation) but it is a solid reason why GM arguments don't wash.

Man has always practiced 'genetic engineering' or 'genetic modification'. Utterly wrong. We have never crossbred chickens with tomatoes or sea creatures. It hasn't been possible. GM is a wholly new technology.

Some life forms have always practiced gene-swapping; it's perfectly natural. This may be true of bacteria and viruses, but it isn't true of the organisms currently undergoing gene splicing. In any case natural gene-transfer — for instance between disease-causing bacteria or viruses and benign forms — has had a slow process of evolution over thousands or millions of years, which is long enough for any negative impacts to be weeded out. Remember, evolution doesn't just mean survival of the 'fit'; it also means death of the 'unfit' (or unlucky). Do we really want to see evolution in quicktime?

Man evolved from nature; therefore GM is natural. I've read at least one comment along the lines that 'God created man with the intelligence and resourcefulness to invent gene splicing; therefore gene splicing is God's will.' There are some strange beliefs in the world, but this takes the cake. Murder is quite reasonable using the same logic.

I really don't know very much about genetic modification, but I've read fairly widely (as a layperson) on biology and animal husbandry. I also know one thing: as long as we have mysterious childhood syndromes that nobody is investigating the environmental causes of, we need to be highly suspicious of whatever goes in our mouths.

Say 'no' to GMO...

meat hybrids and laying

2011-08-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

We're at the crucial stage now, and I'm finding it a struggle. Not as much of a struggle as the birds are, but here goes...

The meat hybrid pullets are now at 20 weeks of age. Apart from the one with major leg trouble a few weeks ago these birds have all stayed active and mobile. I'm letting them out once every couple of days under supervision; I'd do it daily only the goshawks are very good at noticing. So far, so good.

The combs have all reddened and the girls have been squatting for some time. Unfortunately a week ago the first two eggs that appeared were soft shelled. Even more ominously no eggs appeared after that for several days. And then yesterday egg material was expelled freely.

Not good.

The trick at the moment is balancing the birds' high energy needs (so much muscle needs a lot of feeding) without adding to fat in the cavity, which is going to cause problems with laying. They mustn't get fatter but they must get enough excess protein and energy to produce eggs. However with shells not being developed properly there's a third element: getting the mineral absorption right.

I believe this isn't a supply issue as the birds are given 3.5% shell grit in the feed, and there is also an ad lib hopper in each pen. Phosphorus in excess amounts compared to calcium can cause soft shelled egg laying, and it's true that milk has an improper ratio, but I'm only giving kefir once a day at about a cupful per 10 birds. Perhaps the skim powdered milk is higher in phosphorus than even straight milk, but even so it shouldn't cause this effect at the amounts I'm feeding; not when the layers are doing well with good hard shells on the same diet. It's not a vitamin D issue (D is required for the absorption of calcium) as their pen gets sufficient sunlight. I'm left with either a virus like EDS (Egg Drop Syndrome), which doesn't make complete sense given that they've come directly from a hatchery and haven't contacted many other birds; and gut issues affecting absorption.

What to do next?

First thing will be to slightly reduce protein so the laying stops for a short time (a week or two should help). That gives them a breather, though some may keep laying internally, which will be a bad thing in every way. EDS is improved by a break from laying, typically during a moult. Sometimes I feel a break can give the shell system time to catch up to ovulation as well.

Secondly I'll worm them. I haven't done so yet because they haven't shown signs of needing it (no diarrhoea, no weight loss), but they will almost certainly carry parasites, and these birds would very definitely have been bred without parasite resistance in mind. They might well have a few too many worms that are inhibiting calcium absorption by damaging the intestines. The layers of course aren't showing these problems, but whereas layers are bred to last 18 months before starting to fail (in the commercial setting) meat hybrids have only been bred to last 8-10 weeks. For this reason I feel their immune systems are likely to be massively more under par than those of their comparatively long-lived cousins.

Lastly on the thin-egg front I'll switch to commercial pellets (layer feed) for a while. This can be useful to find out if the mix I've been giving them isn't ideal. Actually they've been on half commercial mix for a while, given the problems I've had post-lupins (trying to source high protein feedstuffs) so this isn't a major change. And as I said the layers are doing quite well on the same feed. But it's worth a shot in case I've missed something.

So that's the current picture... A balancing act in the extreme! I hope I can sort out the laying as they really are friendly handsome birds. They're too huge for their own good, but they're inquisitive and quite gentle. They seem to know that their huge size puts them ahead of other birds when it comes to shaping up for a tussle. They're just a neat no-drama creature that's unfortunately been bred too far down a particular line.

How many pens do I need to raise chickens?

2011-08-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd do a round-up post of the setup here so anybody starting out can see what (in some situations) can work well. I remember feeling very confused when first starting to breed chickens about exactly how many pens and cages I would need.

There would be many improvements I could make, namely in terms of handling parasitical worms organically (i.e. more land to pen-rotate), but this is what I've got, and it's working well.

1. Incubator or broody hen. I know, obvious...

2. Brooder tub with lamp for chicks drying off and getting started (day 1-2). I use the largest tub I could find and it holds up to 50 day olds in the laundry with a single 40 or 60W infra red globe (depending on ambient temperature). I find with infra red lamps the tub can gradually overheat, so it's vital to keep checking. During this time I add probiotics and a tiny amount of healthy adult droppings to their food/environment. Slow exposure to coccidiosis seems to work best started at day 1 and including a range of protections such as soured milk.

3. Larger brooder for 2 days old to 3 weeks. I use either a cold brooder (see other posts) or a lamp. This brooder is also seeded with a small amount of adult hen droppings to make sure cocci exposure happens early. At 3 weeks artificially raised chicks start shedding high numbers of cocci oocysts and need to be moved so the brooder doesn't get 'seeded' with massive numbers that could harm the next chick batch. I have 3 brooders but only use one at a time, depending on how many chicks I have and how much work I want to do.

4. Tractor for 3 weeks to 10 weeks. During this time I shift the tractor regularly to keep the birds on grass and limit exposure to cocci. However I gradually slow this down, i.e. after 1 week on the ground I shift the tractor only every 2nd day, and after that every 3rd, 4th, etc. If grass disappears I always move them no matter what, even if it's a day. This tractor is nearly 4m x 2.7m so it's a good size.

5. Grower pen for 10 weeks to 16 weeks. During this time I select future breeders. The birds have usually become cocci immune before arriving in this pen.

6. Adult pens x 2, both with separate access to a sound-reducing night-shed (divided down the middle). This means I can keep 2 separate breeder flocks.

7. Broody hen pens x 2. These are sheds with mesh fronts that are used when a hen wants to raise chickens. I have a small ratproof one and a larger non-ratproof one. At 3 weeks the hen and babies are moved to either the tractor (if it's free) or the larger shed. I wouldn't need these if I was happy to artificially raise chicks all the time, but I often prefer leaving it to the hens.

8. Quarantine cage. I also use this cage as an overnight cage for the odd table cockerel to be processed early next day. It's a 1m square (approx.) mesh cage that I can take anywhere, e.g. onto grass if I'm wanting to use it as a temporary tractor. However it tends to stay empty unless I acquire a new rooster and want to make sure he's healthy.

I guess that's quite a lot of pens and cages, however it's not a huge setup in itself. But it works for me.

Making nestboxes on the cheap...

2011-07-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

It's easy to convert something into a nestbox. Here is one I whipped up yesterday, for the meat hybrids. Since they can't go up the ramp into the night-shed, and their own roost area isn't ideal for laying in, I had to make something that could stay outside. Plant pot plastic is useful for this type of thing because it lasts a long time, unlike some of the more brittle plastics (like ultra cheap dog kennels).

The whole thing consists of 3 large tub-style plant pots sitting in a row, open to the front. The pots are screwed (heads facing inwards, sharps pointing out into the timber) onto the front piece of wood which acts as a stabiliser and foot-hold as well as retainer for the nestbox litter; and there's a second piece of timber sitting underneath the 3 pots near the back, which they're also screwed onto. The whole thing is a rigid unit.

At the front I've cut holes in play mats and screwed them to the pot rims. There's probably no need for this but it helps keep any driving rain out by limiting the opening size.

Lastly I screwed on a piece of folded corrugated metal. The screws point inwards but I've clipped off the sharp points. The fold goes over the back to stop rain coming in any of the plant pot's drainage holes. (I've left the drainage holes open but you could always plug them with silicone or even some spare corks.)

Since the birds' weight (if 3 hop in at once) might be too much and overbalance the unit by pressing down the front, I've also added about an inch and a half of fine gravel underneath the litter in the nestboxes. This tends to weigh the unit down and help stabilise it, given that it's fairly light otherwise. It also helps flatten the curved 'floor' of each nestbox so the birds are more comfortable when they have to stand up (as they do when in the act of passing an egg).

So there it is, an hour's work, not much to look at but the big white hybrids can't use normal nestboxes because of their stupendous size. They've already started sitting in this one.

Crossing commercial hens with heritage breed roosters

2011-07-29T16:42:00.000-07:00

This year I'll be putting an ancona rooster over my five layer hens. The aim is to produce a good layer with a bit lower likelihood of reproductive problems than the commercial birds; yet a better laying ability than the anconas. They should also be fairly striking to look at.

Another project involves a leghorn over commercial meat hybrid pullets to cut back some of the excess weight gain and aim for heavy bodied but survivable birds.

Of the two projects I expect no troubles with the first, but probably quite a few with the second. For starters, even on limited twice-day feeding, the meat hybrids are enormous and probably have quite a lot of fat in the cavity. This always gets in the way of laying, and can cause heart issues. For now though they have good red combs without the maroon/purple tinge that can come as the heart develops an insufficiency. They're right at point of lay and have started squatting; I'm just waiting to see the first egg.

The first generation of the meat hybrid cross may also be too quick growing and heavy bodied to survive into maturity. However if I cross those birds to the ancona/layer cross (using Nulkaba layers instead of ISA browns for temperament reasons) I should get some interesting dual purpose birds.

The idea of both these projects it to water down something I see as a negative in the commercial birds. With commercial layers it's propensity to develop reproductive problems like internal lay, ovarian tumours and sheer exhaustion at 18 months. With the meat birds it's the massive overweight, the short lifespan and the likely weakened immune systems. By outcrossing both of these types to defined heritage breeds whose characteristics I know (having kept the same bloodlines in the past), I can hopefully retain all the characteristics I need.

These include good feed-growth ratios (without being too much for the bird's health); fast maturity; acceptable table birds by 16 weeks; good layers; and reasonably long lifespan; good vigour and immune systems. I don't want or need the massive growth of the meat hybrids, so of the two commercial strains those are the ones whose genes I intend to water down the most. Thus I'll be crossing them to a second generation layer type (the ancona x commercial layer most likely) to further reduce meat.

The results will be enormously varied at first, but if I breed only from the best then I should be getting somewhere in a couple more generations. If the whole thing fails I suspect it will be due to some of the inherent weaknesses in commercial birds; then it will be time to go right back to heritage birds and start over (Indian game and leghorns or similar should produce a decent dual purpose backyard bird).

But as I've said in the past, there are significant down sides to heritage breeds, one being that while commercial breeders have cleared their flocks of Mycoplasma Gallisepticum, it has tended to linger in many flocks that have been breed by backyarders down the years. (On the other hand the birds may have better immunity and milder germ strains, so it may show up less frequently or only due to major stressors.) Secondly Indian game are in general poor layers, so they're a harder bird to work with in terms of getting the numbers. They're also remarkably broody prone, which can be a hindrance as often as it's an asset.

Still, there are plenty of things to like about all the birds I've got at the moment. And if the meat pullets come into lay successfully and the leghorn cockerel develops as he should (both he and the ancona are really starting to shape up now, with a diet of half meat bird finisher and half sprouts with kefir and so forth), I'll be happy indeed.

Housing roosters quietly (part 2)...

2011-07-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

Still not much progress on the spare rooster cage... That is, I whipped up a decent cage in about an hour using the compost panels (sets of 4 mesh squares), but haven't been able to join the play mats in such as way as to make them sufficiently sound-retardant. Individually they're not big enough to cover a full side, so there would be lots of joins where sound can escape.

By the way, you can see that I've made 2 doors. One is for easy egg or food/water access; the top door, which is larger is for shifting and removing birds. These panels aren't quite predator resistant enough for most backyards, as predators can easily reach through; however with a cover on they and either pegged down or floored, they should work well in many backyards. I'm lucky enough to have a good flock guardian so I can get by with only mild precautions. Raptors are my main issue so before using this cage I'll be adding some finer grade mesh.

Still, if I can find big enough sheets of material to glue the play mats onto, I could then form a four-sided roofed cage-cover that wouldn't be hard to lift and replace.

At the moment I only have the two mature cockerels and both are sleeping in the night-shed, so it's all fine. The night shed already has insulation (see my earlier post).

What I'm trying to do is find a way to keep spare roosters, as choosing which rooster to keep before the crowing ramps up isn't the best way to retain good breeders. Sometimes these birds end up having a temperament or health problem that wasn't obvious at the time of selection, when they were very young. Or sometimes they might not prove to have the characteristics I want. At 16 weeks it's a bit of a guessing game.

I'll keep searching for a way to make the cage-cover, and let you know if it works. If it does, it might be a cheaper way to keep roosters quiet than building a purpose-built shed, and it would always be flexible and easy to store (just undo the c-clips and flatten the cage).

Changing the diet to remove lupins

2011-07-10T00:47:00.000-07:00

After more reading and more thought, I've decided to stop lupin-feeding (raw or cooked). The following article (a PDF) describes a study in which growth inhibition and other problems appeared even at 10% inclusion levels among broiler chicks. ps.fass.org/cgi/reprint/80/5/621.pdf Apparently some of the problems disappeared after dehulling or heat-treating, but the retarded growth and some skeletal abnormalities remained.

It just goes to show how widely you have to research if you're a layperson trying to formulate a ration on your own. The net is brilliant, but unless you know the right key words, you can end up googling the same old same old. It took me hours to find the above study and it seems very clear that lupins shouldn't be fed to chicks in replacement of soy. I wish I'd been able to find more information when first looking into lupins, as the basic agricultural information suggests that it should be perfect in replacement of soy.

I can however look back over the two years spent on this project, and see that some of the issues I've tended to ascribe to genes or to mealed feeds like meat meal may have in fact been due to lupins. The study in the above link suggests that there may be unidentified toxins innate to even sweet lupins that cause systemic effects in young birds.

Obviously I feel pretty bad about this. I've gone outside 'the lines' in trying to formulate my own feed, and with the best of intentions I've in fact been unwittingly cruel. But I feel to give up on the whole home-feed project and go back to fulltime commercially formulated feeds would only be a shift, not a fix. Remember that my reading on artificial methionine hit on studies that showed other forms of health damage (cardiovascular disease, fatty liver, etc). Artificial additives abound in commercial feed.

What I may do now is review my whole diet and try to reach my protein goals differently. I still don't want soy meal because I won't be able to avoid genetically modified soy (unless I find an organic producer). But exactly how I'll manage the protein levels I want without using lupins or soy is a bit of a question right now.

Give me time, give me time. Apologies to anyone who has taken the lupin feeding experiment as a guideline — hopefully you haven't taken it to an extreme. But my birds appear healthy generally so I feel a change in diet will remove any of the setbacks I may have caused — I hope this is true of yours too.

Best wishes everyone, and I hope I can find a new way to keep my chickens natural.

liver damage from lupins? Graphic pictures

2011-07-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

UPDATE

The following article needs to be seen in the light of more recent discoveries as I continue trying new feed formulas.

While I talk a little below about the dangers of lupins, I've since seen far worse liver damage (fatty liver) in birds fed commercial meat bird finisher for a couple of months. Indeed the results from commercial meat bird finisher were so dramatic that I now consider it a kind of poison, far worse than lupins.

Isn't that interesting? Toxins in lupins seem to have been responsible for a few slow growing birds and some liver blemishes, but commercial meat bird grower (high in artificial methionine) appears to have turned livers into yellow mush in a far shorter time. Fatty liver syndrome often results in liver rupture and the bird bleeding to death, so it's a terrible condition.

Meat bird finisher is meant to be fed to meat birds only for the last week or so. No doubt it's formulated to ensure the greatest weight gain with no regard for bird health (after all, the birds are considered terminal). But if the feed causes such liver harm in the birds, what does it do to humans when the meat of those birds is eaten?

My question turns upon whether D methionine (an artificial substance) remains in the carcass and goes on to cause health problems in people? As with my earlier post on methionine the questions relate to cardiovascular disease, liver triglycerides and perhaps even dementia.

I just wanted to add these notes because the following story otherwise appears to suggest that lupins should be avoided at all costs. I now see the whole situation a little differently, because if bird health matters, and if human health matters, I don't believe we should be feeding commercial meat bird finisher at all.

Many and indeed probably all feedstuffs are a balancing act between toxic effects and nutritional benefits. For instance even sunflower seeds contain mild toxins that limit their inclusion levels; so do many green feeds, peas and other useful feeds.

But it seems to me only natural feeds attract cautions about toxins and inclusion levels. Looking at what I've seen I'd say meat bird finisher should come with warning labels.

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I'm sorry to post these, but some people may be curious as to what I meant by 'liver streakiness' in birds on the lupin diet.

Mind you the streakiness may also have to do with toxins from the grains, which can easily be infected with mould without showing signs of damage.

Below are a series of photos with some discussion. I post it partly to show what I mean for anyone curious about my former posts, and partly because it's useful for me to keep an online record of what I've been seeing in my birds.

However before I post the pics, a caution: they may be upsetting to anyone not used to seeing organs.

Also before I post, a word of explanation: these came from the lame pullet, whom I dispatched this morning. She seemed worse despite a day on soft matting, and was unable to shift from the spot. I couldn't find much swelling but it seems most likely she had ruptured crucial ligaments that control the leg. She was in obvious pain and with her heavy weight I didn't feel a bad leg injury could be managed.

Now for the pics. First, the positives. One: the liver comes to a nice fine sharp edge. Liver enlargement is best observed at the edge of the liver according to Cornell University's diagnostic site. I'll go with that — no liver enlargement. (Ignore the white patch, it's just something that was adhering to the bag.)

The spleen looks about normal. Any 'discolouration' is just reflected from nearby surfaces; the spleen was a nice granular dark purple.

The heart looks perfectly healthy to me (for a deceased heart, that is). There was no liquid surrounding the heart and no signs of ascites or problems in the lung tissue.

Now for the negatives. Firstly there was a predominance of fat, which was unexpected given that I couldn't find much fat when feeling the bird's body. But of course chickens like to hide the fat in their cavity. (Ignore the word 'like', I mean 'are forced'.) I've never seen this much fat around a gizzard before. The organ is completely submerged on one side:

Flipped over it looks like this:

It is a little gross, but remember these birds are engineered to overeat and put on weight. One of the issues with a diet devoid of artificial vitamins and mineral premixes is that birds may overeat just to obtain sufficient micronutrients. However remember too, this bird is 15 weeks of age, 3 times the lifespan of a normal broiler. This may mean that the diet is a little low in some essential nutrients, or it could merely mean that I've been supplying them with a little too much food to keep them in good health. I'll back off the food a little and see how the remaining birds go.

Now for the liver, which is the area I'm concerned about. You can see the faint streaking (or marbling) in the organ, with some patches faintly paler and more tan-coloured than the rest. Livers should be a uniform colour:

This, I feel, is a sign of probably toxins rather than a syndrome like fatty liver (despite the prevalence of fat elsewhere). Below is a shot of the gall bladder; you can also see the liver discolouration in the background. As far as gall bladders go, this one is about normal, if a tiny bit large (but then the bird was enormous). Again, it's the discolouration that's a concern, because I've seen it before.

It's a shame I don't have a whole lifetime over again — I would become a nutritionist. But it's hard to know what your adult passions will be when you're leaving school! Ho hum. In the absence of a good grounding in animal physiology and nutrition science, I'll just have to keep reading whatever I can find, hopefully avoiding anything that's not well researched and well grounded, and learning as I go.

The streakiness may indeed be from mould toxins in either the lupins or the wheat. Or it may be that the early diet of uncooked lupins was too much for the chicks and their livers were damaged (although I would have thought they'd improve once the lupins began to be cooked).

More thinking, more reading, more research required...

Feeding lupins to poultry: some observations (and thoughts)

2011-07-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

Just some update shots. These boys are nearly 15 weeks old. They're possibly a little on the small side, but this could also be a matter of their living next door to the hefty meat hybrids (which would make turkeys look small). The only other concern I have about them is the slight pallor (almost a yellowing) of the combs. You can see it toward the rear of each comb. Their feathers are beautifully glossy and both birds are active, friendly and have terrific appetites.

Thinking about the yellowish combs, one concern is whether the lupins have higher than expected levels of toxins. Australian sweet lupins are supposedly low in anti-nutritional compounds, and can be fed raw, but apparently lupins from WA are almost always infected with a mould that (via its toxins) causes liver disease. (See www.agric.wa.gov.au/OBJTWR/imported.../lupins/Lupinbulletinch13.pdf.) As some of the livers of the meat hybrids were quite streaky, I'm concerned about the combs in case they're a sign of jaundice. Then again the faint yellowing might be the chilly weather or something else entirely.

According to Wikipedia the alkaloids and other naturally occurring toxins in the legume produce neurological damage rather than liver disease. As I'm seeing no signs of neurological damage I might as well cease cooking the lupins. EDIT: See end of post. The question remains whether mould toxins are causing liver damage in my birds.

Other sources mentioned that the mould toxins tend to be confined to stems and leaf matter. This is unlike wheat where mould toxins are able to permeate the entire batch from even very low levels of fungal infection. Apparently only discoloured lupins have been found to have undesirable levels of mould toxins. Having looked more closely at the lupins I would say there is very little stem material (perhaps 0.1%) and only a small percentage of discoloured beans (roughly 0.5-1%).

Furthermore, if any of the birds were going to look jaundiced it would surely be the meat hybrids, which eat massively more of all the feedstuffs the birds are getting. None of the girls are showing any comb discolouration at all. I know this is tempting fate, but the bird below is typical of the meat hybrids (with the exception of the one currently in a cage for a foot/leg problem), and I feel the bird below is the picture of health:

Here is a side shot of one of the girls, showing their enormous body size.

It's hard to imagine they could achieve this growth (without huge fat accumulations) on a diet that kept harming their livers. The birds all (even the cockerels) behave normally and have good bodyweight for size. Perhaps I should trust that and just keep tweaking the diet according to any new information, without giving up the entire project. After all, if we can't learn to sustain our animals without relying on mega-science, how will they survive if things change?

EDIT:

A change of heart. For now, I will keep cooking the lupins. Diets containing up to 10% lupins are associated with wet, sticky droppings, though according to the above sources this doesn't harm the birds. But having just realised how firm and healthy looking the birds' droppings have become since moving to the cooked version, I'm wondering if the slimy droppings mean something more ominous for chicks raised on lupins? After all, it's unlikely the research was done on small chicks. (Incidentally sorghum is an example of another common poultry feed that can depress growth in young ones.)

Even though my birds are close to maturity, it makes sense for me to continue the processing if it helps their droppings seem more normal. As I've said earlier, it's easier to cook lupins than it sounds, and I can always move to the extruded lupin product from my local feed store if I get lazy. In particular I'll keep cooking lupins for the youngest birds, and see how my next batch of growers fare in terms of overall health.

Lameness in meat hybrids

2011-07-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: See below main post.
------------------------------------
Alas, one of the girls has just developed severe lameness. She's in so much pain she doesn't want to stand at all.

When I picked her up she feels a bit too heavy for my liking -- while it's good that the home-mix diet is allowing them to develop a lot of muscle (she's not fat, just very solid), the huge weight will make recovery hard.

There does seem to be a lump on the foot pad, and I feel she may have cut it on something. The former owner of this property used that part of the yard as a rubbish tip, and it's possible the girls have scratched up some glass or sharp metal. After checking her foot more closely I'll examine the yard.

At the moment I've got her in a cage on a soft mat. When she's feeling a bit more settled I'll wash the foot and have a closer look. Bumblefoot is treatable but to be honest in such a heavy bird it may be kinder to cull. Chickens this heavy simply can't spend a lot of time on one leg, and often when there's an injury, the other joints are put under such stress they get damaged as well.

But I'll take a closer look later today, and decide what to do. It may be a simple cut that just needs cleaning and some time on soft clean matting. I'll also limit the girls' food a little more so they're not putting on quite so much weight. In a few weeks' time I'll be able to open the doorway into the rooster pen, and then all the birds -- including the girls -- will get a little more exercise.

----------------------

UPDATE:

Unfortunately this isn't as simple as a cut foot. Her foot is perfectly fine (in fact it's the non-limping foot that has a small scar). Neither foot is red or swollen.

It appears the lameness is in the hock or higher. These birds were all vaccinated for Marek's, but I'm aware of arguments that vaccinated birds can shed the live virus, and can also develop symptoms. Given the fast onset, and her huge weight, I feel it's much more likely to be a tendon problem due to weight-stress. This is a big problem in meat hybrids kept to adulthood. She may even have hurt herself getting down off the 5-inch-high roost.

Whatever the case, I feel it may be best to put this bird down (checking for any obvious internal problems — something I do out of habit) and concentrate on limiting the diets of the remaining 6. It's a shame as she was quite close to point of lay and her comb was reddening nicely. On the other hand she's gone along for nearly 3 times the lifespan of supermarket meat birds, and I know she's been cared and had a low-stress life till now.

How to identify a corporate troll...

2011-07-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

EDIT: 'how to identify a corporate troll' added below the main post.
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I'm just an ordinary person and I have no links to corporations of any sort. You won't see ads on my blog because I don't want the clutter and have no interest in making a few dollars on the side. This is a blog for the love of keeping chickens, and for the love of sustainability.

Yet time and time again I bump into people with an agenda on chicken forums. Actually 'people' is the wrong word: I mean identities. In itself an identity isn't a bad thing; you'd have to be able to spot that my name isn't exactly a real name. Erica Bandanna is a made up name, sort of Australian (Eric Bana) and sort of freedom-minded (the bandanna). But I express my agenda with everything I say and do. It's about aiming for sustainable, independent, enviro-friendly, happy, healthy backyard produce and pets.

Identities I dislike are finding newer and newer ways to persuade interested members of the public to take particular views on particular commodities. The one I had a strong reaction to today used a discussion of a flock with mycoplasma gallisepticum to veer into what I felt to be an attempted promotion of vaccines. When I gently veered the other way (pointing out that biosecurity works well, that MG is easy to eradicate by depopulating and purchasing from clean flocks, and that some vaccines can spread the very diseases they attempt to control, the example I gave being tick fever) the identity quietly left the thread and started a new one talking about vaccines.

Yet even there it didn't begin with 'aren't vaccines terrific' — that might have been too obvious. Instead it began as a cheerful discussion by someone who wants to learn, asking what kinds of things other people vaccinate for. All very neutral and chatty.

And, I feel, an example of this at work:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/may/14/greenpolitics.digitalmedia

I've always had a live-and-let-live philosophy. If some people want to compromise the quality of their information by developing bonds with corporations, let them. I'm reasonably immune to anything not backed up by not only good science, but good philosophy. But during my last close relationship with a chicken forum I wasn't as aware of corporate trolls as I am now, and I found myself frequently confused at the sneering attitudes of some of the identities I gently disagreed with. Somehow despite my open attitude (vaccines are fine, but here's another way... commercial wormers are fine, but here's another possibility that may be worth trying...) I kept finding myself on the back foot, defensive and not sure why. To make it worse I was using my actual name, and only later did I realise that may have been a bad idea. I don't believe corporate trolls would do a home-visit to scare someone, but it was unsettling to realise how many of these anonymous people I'd annoyed.

Of course now I know why I felt so insecure, and feel I can spot a hidden agenda (most times) from a mile off. But that doesn't stop me from disliking the attempted manipulation and wishing it didn't go on.

Alas, these things are part of the modern world. In fact they were (in lesser form and lower numbers) a part of the earlier world too, when political agents would send a letter to a local paper calling themselves 'Concerned Citizens' or 'John Bloggs', or when fake candidates would set themselves up for election only to steer people's preferences toward a major party. Nobody can prove these fake candidates are anything but genuine; fewer can prove Concerned Citizen is a corporate troll.

All we can do is keep researching and keep comparing information against our own views, our deeper philosophies and our personal situations. In the meantime, I hope others develop an ability to spot corporate trolls too... Because eventually you'll get so quick at spotting them, you won't get past their chatty, I'm-just-an-ordinary-humble-fellow introduction to let their views in. You may even find them amusing. After all, anyone who has to pretend to be a nobody to be a somebody is surely a bit of a nothing...

Me, I just want to find ways to breed durable chickens without major reliance on poisons, questionable additives or fake vitamins. And I want to share the experience in case it gives anyone else ideas they can use. Given the high numbers of corporate trolls who try to control discussions without appearing to do so, I feel it's the least I can do.

----------------------------------

How to Identify a Corporate Troll:

- Do you find yourself subtly undermined when you post about organics, non-use of meds, alternative therapies or anything outside orthodoxy?
- Do you occasionally find yourself being sneered at even though you feel your post was innocuous and uncontroversial?
- Do you wonder why some people get so riled up over what seems to be merely another way of doing things, especially if you weren't attacking their view?

Heads up! There's a troll in the area!

Unfortunately trolls are very hard to pin down. Firstly, behind every identity is (most likely) a real person, with some degree of personal interest in the field. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing what they do. If it's true that trolls are often employees rather than senior officials then it makes sense that they'd have some diversity of outlook, and some could even be rather 'nice' as people.

To 'see' a troll you don't use your main senses, you have to go 'underground'. You have to see them through their tactics!

- They may start innocuous threads on subjects they pretend to know little about, such as vaccines, in order to find subtle ways to dismiss every non-vaccination point of view. For instance, they might say, 'Oh, yes, I've never been into vaccination, but I just had my entire flock wiped out by a preventable disease! Can you tell me, is there any other way I can be totally sure this won't happen again, except vaccinating?'

- They usually heat up quickly when people dig in with even mildly anti-corporate or pro-independence ideas. Often a well reasoned post questioning reliance on something corporate suddenly dissolves into sneering. For this reason I suspect the ones who really express disdain for something mildly off-the-grid may be trolls. Let's face it, the rest of us don't get quite so personally het up unless we're personally attacked!

- Like all bullies they rely on associating someone else with unpopularity and negativity, while they portray themselves as part of a clever majority. To this end, they may use various identities at the one time in order to come across as a majority view and to intimidate honest individuals. But the more influential trolls (e.g. occasionally a moderator may be a troll) will raise an army of followers to promote the orthodoxy... There are many ways to be a bully!

- They raise feel-good topics in order to surround themselves with an air of goodwill and humour. Links to kittens playing, photos of their cats or dogs, pictures of them 'at home' with their arms around children all work well. Since normal people do this too, it's not something you can rely on unless you've seen them use the above tactics as well.

- They post idiot-topics pretending to be organic or 'alternative' in order to sound so incredibly stupid people will sensibly avoid that line of thinking at all. Naturally the 'good' members and moderators will jump on this silly idiot to correct them, thereby demonstrating to all the value of 'right' thinking. Any time I see someone posting that you can cure every known disease using X or Y, I suspect a heavily disguised troll.

- The worst kind of troll is also a moderator. However in this case they tend to depend more on their coterie than outright bullying. They foster an army of loyal believers who jump on non-orthodox players and cut them out of the game. Apart from this they use every other tactic in the book, and are probably quite busy inventing new ones!

Happy troll hunting!

Housing roosters quietly...

2011-07-03T01:36:00.000-07:00

Always an issue in my neck of the woods -- neighbours love the earthy sound (and are far enough away not to be disturbed) but Darling Husband is super sensitive to crowing.

I've already knocked up a fairly well sound-insulated building, but there'll be times when I want more cockerels or want to keep an older rooster aside.

However do I have the money to invest in (yet) another proper shed? No! Yet do I want the flexibility to be able to keep more than a couple of roosters even if they don't get on? Yes! Can I free range all the roosters during the day? No! Goshawks goshawks goshawks... So whatever I use to hold roosters needs to be a day and night thing.

The answer, it seems to me, is to attempt to make smaller night-boxes that with some small adjustments would also make safe day-pens for individual birds. Even better if these can be moved around the yard to keep the roosters on fresh grass. In other words, I'm talking about tractors with some kind of flexible cover for use at night-time.

Now when I was growing up we kept a cockatoo in a large moveable cage, and at night the cage would be brought up to the verandah and covered over with a fitted blanket to keep the bird quiet until people were awake in the morning. By day the galah would nibble grass stems and generally gaze at the sky (probably wishing for friends).

I'm planning to modify this system to suit roosters. Rather than have sound-insulation fixed to the rooster box, what if I make a cage over which slides some kind of sound retarding cover for use at night?

Now there are a few tricky issues I have to solve. Firstly, roosters in small night-boxes with soundproofing can suffer from a lack of ventilation. Given that chickens have a higher metabolism than mammals, a small fully enclosed box can be dangerous indeed. However if you have too many air holes you defeat the soundproofing. A cover that fits loosely enough over a cage to allow the bird to gain air might be very poor at soundproofing.

Secondly, the cage needs to be big enough to contain an adult standard sized bird in comfort until he's wanted for breeding, yet not so big that it's impossibly heavy to move around, and hard to sound-deaden.

Thirdly, ideally it needs to have an open floor so the bird can access grass (which is a very good way to keep a tractored bird happy despite confinement). A floor may end up being necessary, depending on what predators are around.

Now for what I plan to do. I'm not doing it yet (I'll report on that when I get started, with photos and a how-to) but here's the idea.
1. 2 sets of Bunnings compost panels ($26 each).
2. 2-3 sets of Bunnings kiddies' play mats ($14 each).
3. Using c-clips, join the mesh compost panels to make a 1x1.2m (or similar) cage with a roof.
4. Waterproof the top of the cage by fixing a roof of some kind -- it can be tarp, sarking, insulation blanket, or even alsonite or sheet metal. (NB this kind of tractor will be hell in full sun, so the insulation blanket isn't a bad idea as a roof.)
5. Using glue and/or other methods (stitching with whipper snipper cord or using studs of some sort), make a cover that fits the cage snugly with a little spare room so it's easy to slip on and off. Double layers of the kiddies' play matting would perhaps be even better for sound insulation. This cover needs to go on all four sides of the cage as well as the top.
6. Drill 4 x 1.5cm holes near the bottom of the cover on 2 sides, for ventilation. This may not be necessary if the cover isn't flush with the ground, i.e. air can still flow through.

Now to use the cover and cage together. At night, feed the cover over the cage (which should be pegged to the ground or else should have a floor to stop digging predators). In the morning, whip the cover off and hey presto!

What other possible issues can I think of off the top of my head? One springs to mind -- what if the weather is very windy and the cover manages to lift off? I suppose that could happen, and I'm not sure what I could do to prevent it, but I'll give it some thought. Another possibility is that it's too hard to get the cover to sit close to the ground and therefore stop enough sound. Lastly I can't be sure the kiddies' play mats are perfectly safe in terms of the chemicals they exude over time -- one would hope, given their intended function, that they would be, but I've hit toxins in play objects before. The play-mat-covers might also weather badly or might break too easily... All of this needs to be thought through and tested if the mini-rooster-tractor is to work in the way I hope.

Remember, this is a set of thoughts, not a how-to... I do have to do the testing before I proclaim this a workable idea. But imagine if it did work... I'm sure many would-be rooster owners would be very happy to know it's possible to keep roosters without night-time distress and without spending a fortune!

Now to start trying out my ideas...

extruded lupins for poultry

2011-06-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

I just came across a new product at my local feed store yesterday, intended for horses: extruded lupins.

Given that several of my meat hybrids had some liver streakiness at dispatch, I feel it may be worth trying the pre-cooked product.

However I don't know if the lupins have been treated with anything else or if they're suitable in terms of piece-size for poultry to eat, so I'm not sure if I'll invest in them just yet... Nevertheless I thought I'd mention it in case other people want to give it a try.

By the way, lupins (not lupini beans or 'lupin beans') are very similar to soya beans in terms of amino acid content and crude protein. Where Americans grow soya beans Australians tend to grow sweet lupins. Unlike soya beans they don't have high levels of anti-nutritional compounds/toxins, but they still do have a small percentage that probably varies per crop. Given that I'm using legumes as a staple, I think it makes sense to start cooking them to reduce those small percentages to as low as possible.

In light of this idea I'm starting all my birds on a new modification: all the lupins I feed will have been cooked first. Again I simply boil them up (simmer for 45mins-1hr) and store them in the fridge over the next 4-5 days as they get used. It's not a chore at all, or at least it's a good chore: there's something enormously satisfying about knowing it's good for the birds. And unlike the extruded product I'll know how old the home-boiled lupins are before they make it into the feed containers.

As you're probably aware if you looked at my feed recipe on other posts, it's basically sprouted wheat, corn and peas mixed with lupins, black sunflower seeds, molasses-water-soaked lucerne chaff, yeast, seaweed meal and salt to make about 18% crude protein. This is their all-day feed while in the evening they get steamed rolled oats (human grade, i.e. porridge) soaked in kefir made out of powdered skim milk, sometimes with added cooked lupins or mince. However lately all the birds have been a bit fussy about the lupins, so I feel supplying them pre-cooked will bring back some of that appetite.

I may go for the extruded variety at some point, supposing I get tired of cooking the things. After all, it's a fair bet they're safer long-term than whole raw legumes. Anyhow, it's all part of the experiment. :)

making a low perch for meat birds

2011-06-22T23:37:00.000-07:00

Meat hybrids aren't much into perching. And a good thing too, as if they jump down from anything over a few inches in height, they're likely to break a leg.

However resting on the ground is a recipe for health problems. For starters, sitting on top of fresh droppings will cause ammonia burns to both the skin and the lungs. Then there's the issue of matting feathers, rot and fungal diseases.

My particular pen isn't well designed for these birds, as it's right at the bottom of my yard, and draws moisture from everywhere else so it's damp year-round. The shed, which has no floor, is also quite leaky and tends to flood with rain.

The answer I came up with wasn't to demolish and start again — while a raised concrete floor in a drier spot would be ideal, it would break the bank. Any kind of perch fixed into the shed would make it difficult to scrape out droppings, so I also had that to consider.

The answer was to make a moveable low perch the birds can step up onto.

All I did was make a rectangular grid out of timber fence palings (smoothest side up), which are quite wide and suitable for perching. Narrow timbers would of course press deeply into the birds' feet and keelbone, since the hybrids are so heavy. This simple rectangle with struts sits up on half a dozen bricks so that the birds are raised out of the damp by several inches.

Underneath I've put some loose straw which I can remove and replace when I muck the shed out. This isn't greatly necessary but does help absorb ammonia. Even though the perch is easy to remove (just lift and pull out) it doesn't tip up when a bird first hops on top because it's quite heavy in its own right. Lastly I've made sure all corners and edges have stable bricks beneath; the whole thing is not rigid, but solid.

Since doing this I haven't had to muck out daily, and the birds' undersides are staying clean. It's surely a bonus for their health when they're not sitting in droppings all night.

The 7 girls are looking very well, and they even do the flapping run most birds do from time to time when they want to have a stretch and run around. I had visitors recently who actually admired them! They were surprised to hear they're supermarket meat hybrids; I think they imagined I had some special new breed on the go.

Meanwhile I've found homes for 2 spare ancona cockerels, so I'll be breeding with just one ancona and one leghorn come spring. But it's quiet times at The Natural Chicken because it's deep mid-winter (well, one day after solstice), I have no adult breeders, and although all 5 layers are laying daily they're all infertile, which just doesn't seem as much fun.

But there'll be time to set eggs when the youngsters are mature. For now, it's maintenance, maintenance, maintenance...

anconas

2011-06-18T19:58:00.000-07:00

Just a few shots of the 11 week old anconas. They're a striking bird when they start moulting into adult feathers.

As it happens though, I'm only keeping the cockerels. Being a bit of a stickler for productive (as well as healthy) birds, I'd prefer to cross these with the red layers I got from a local hatchery to make a fine layer that has some claims to being pretty.

The red layers are softer natured than ISA browns but have a very similar laying ability (and probably reproductive dramas after the first laying season). I feel the cross with anconas will most likely be a more durable but still good laying bird.

However it is tempting to continue these birds as a purebred line. They seem particularly good foragers with a nice ability to camouflage (giving them a possible edge if I ever do free range in future). Next season I may look around for some non-related anconas so I can stick a few purebred pullets in the pen. But I'm wary of being too seduced by the whole 'purebred' thing, because in so many rare breeds it seems to go hand in hand with poor productivity, low vigour and even uncertain internal conformation (such some light sussex I bought a while ago that continually seemed sick and failed to thrive, then proved on eventual autopsy to have no gall bladders).

I've bought anconas from the source I bought the current birds from before, and they grew up to be wonderful, hardy birds. This may be partly because the breeder is an old-fashioned type who selects for a range of things (not just looks), but it may also be because he's got sufficient numbers of birds to maintain a diverse gene pool. Whatever the case, I feel they're a handy bird to add into my backyard mix.

Kefir for chickens...

2011-06-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

My kefir grains seem to have adapted well to powdered skim milk. Currently I'm making up an evening treat for 25 chickens of about half a litre of kefir, half a bag of rolled steamed oats and anything else I wish to add by way of protein (sometimes cooked lupins, sometimes a little fresh mince or high protein food scraps). This gives about a quarter of a cup of afternoon treat per bird — a quarter of each bird's daily ration, except the meat hybrids, which wolf down more overall.

Skim powdered is quite cheap at around $6.50 for powder to make 10 litres. Ten litres of kefir goes a long way when used as a supplement (around 20 days). The oats as I've said earlier are $1.19 per 900g bag, and I use half a bag per day. In total for this supplement for 25 birds I'm paying just under $1 per day, or $1.50 if I add about 250g of pet mince (which I do roughly every 2nd day, not all the time).

I've also found a new butcher selling pet mince without preservatives for $2 per kilo. Again, using this as a supplement rather than a whole-protein source, it's not a bad price and it also isn't terribly fatty (a thing to avoid with mince). The butcher assures me it's lungs, hearts, offal etc with fat added for texture, rather than just fatty scraps.

This is most definitely not the 'cheap' way to feed chickens. In the old days I would have had a dairy and plenty of meaty bones and other farm scraps. The chickens would have been out all day picking up horse dung and finding plenty of B vitamins and probiotics into the bargain. And mostly the chickens would have been foraging for themselves, so they would have thrived on little more than grain.

When we move out of this block with its huge overshadowing tall trees and zero understorey (perfect prey territory for goshawks), I'm going to free range more, and that will naturally cut costs. However for now the plan remains the same: keep feeding an all-natural diet, aiming to supply essential amino acids and minerals in as natural a way as possible; and watch the birds like (but only a little bit like) a hawk. :)

dressed weights of home fed meat hybrids...

2011-06-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last day I could set aside to process chickens for some time. It was also their 11 week age mark. Actually they could have gone on for another few weeks without problems but I've got a busy time coming up, so despite wanting them to have a longer life I just couldn't delay it.

Processing went fine. I caught them singly with a handful of feed and made sure the area was cleaned completely between dispatch. This stops them seeing any sign of what's to come — chickens are quite visual and, despite what some people believe, they do watch and will show signs of distress when another member of their flock is culled.

After dispatch each bird was singly processed by skinning, eviscerating and then washing down. The parson's nose was removed at the start of evisceration (I don't use it in most recipes anyway) and this made removal of organs much easier and cleaner. Livers and gizzards were cleaned and put aside for further use such as making paté. Hearts, spleens, legs (I already have a freezer full for use in stock), a few gizzards, and anything that slipped out of my hands and touched another surface were fed to the dog, who hovers nearby at dispatch time.

I found the birds had a wide variety of weights, from 1kg up to 1.8kg dressed weight. These weights are far lighter than meat hybrids I've raised to similar age in the past, but it must be remembered that they weren't fed synthetic methionine as a bulking agent and also had a cocci setback. They're still a lot heavier than my other crossbreds at the same age. Indeed my malay-leghorns didn't reach this weight range until week 16. Remember too that skin + parson's nose probably add an extra 150-250g.

Now for a couple of evident health problems. The smallest bird appeared to have two issues: one was a flaccid gizzard with signs of a couple of ulcers in the gizzard wall and an enlarged proventricular attachment (possible runting/stunting); the other was a pea-sized tumour inside the cavity (possible marek's).

Three of the next smallest birds also had flaccid gizzards, one or two erosion sites, and lax proventriculus with enlarged attachment (again, possible runting/stunting). Two of these also had faintly streaky livers, though no liver enlargement.

All the other birds (there were 21 in total) had good solid gizzards and digestive systems, but about half had faintly streaky livers. Again they had no liver enlargement (the way to tell this is to look at the edge of the liver, which should come to a sharp line; enlarged livers tend to have a plumped, pillow-like edge) and all other organs appeared normal. Remember I'm not an expert in any of this, and can't do close pathology, so these are 'gross' observations at best. However I do know that there should be no streakiness in the liver. My guess is that the naturally-occuring toxins in the lupins were a little hard on the birds' livers (when fed raw); or else that the grains were mildly affected by mould toxins. As the feed was all properly stored and very fresh (none older than a few weeks), and the sprouting was all carefully managed, such mould would have most likely been present at purchase. The third guess would be that the livamol and/or meat meal (both fed in small quantities up to about week 4 or 5) contained toxic amines (as noted in earlier research on runting/stunting syndrome) and these toxins had some liver impact.

Oddly, of the three birds with possible runting/stunting, all were smaller-framed than their counterparts, but equally well if not better fleshed. This may suggest that whatever had caused the earlier stunting had begun to disappear or improve.

Possibilities seem to include a virus (they were raised in the same tractor as the earlier sussex, one of which also showed runting/stunting symptoms), genetics (the sussex may have had broiler genes), amino acid imbalance (a strong possibility, though I can't find sufficiently detailed information on how amino acid ratios affect the gizzard if the birds are well-muscled and feathered and show no other symptoms), or something like mould or other toxins in the feed.

There is simply no way to decide between these possibilities, even given the observation that the runted birds began to improve after a certain point. For instance, if it was to do with an adenovirus, perhaps their immune systems improved as the birds aged. An amino acid imbalance (if there was one) may have been corrected by adding soured milk in greater quantities, as I did after about week 5. Removal of soy meal, meat meal and livamol (any of which may have contained toxic amines) may alone explain the improvement in the grower stage. Lastly (if this isn't complicated enough) I began cooking the lupins at about week 6 or 7, out of a concern about naturally-occurring toxins in the legume being perhaps higher than generally believed.

Next part of the project is, of course, to taste-test the results. I'm not concerned that the streaky livers imply anything wrong with the carcasses; in fact even the couple of stunted birds are well fleshed and appeared basically healthy inside (with the exception of the one with a small tumour, which I don't like to keep for eating). However I did only keep the well-coloured livers for paté; the rest will also be dog food.

If I find the meat to be absolutely delicious, I might fine-tune the diet and keep going with the earlier plan to crossbreed the meat hybrids with layers to develop a stronger, healthier, better foraging, tastier meat bird that does well without synthetic inputs. After all, none of the birds appeared to be in any discomfort despite those very faint liver streaks or the couple that weren't growing as well as the rest. Only the cocci bout left me feeling unhappy with my own management, and if I raise these birds under hens in smaller numbers (and don't put them in the tractor just as it starts to sheet with rain) I believe I can reduce the likelihood of it.

The biggest change if I did this again would be to do only what I've done in the second half of this project: i.e. include no meat meal or livamol, but do include more soured milk and cooked rather than raw lupins. The mealworms may well have bred in sufficient quantities to provide some more protein as well. If I do this without changing much else, but still see birds with gizzard/proventricular issues and/or streaky livers, I'll be in a better position to decide on a probable cause (e.g. mould toxins from faulty feed). But that's for down the track.

Meanwhile, on to the next part of this long and fairly arduous project: finding tasty ways to honour the meat that those birds gave their lives for...

Some growing anconas...

2011-05-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Final result is 5 girls and 3 boys. Still not a bad ratio!
.................................

Just a few ancona shots. Seems I have 5 or 6 girls and only 2 boys. One of the 'girls' is very faintly in doubt, but still that's a good ratio.

I only want to keep a boy or two, so the rest will be for sale. Hopefully they'll go to a nice home and become excellent layers for somebody.

You can see all these birds have a substantial comb for their age. That's an ancona trait: big combs. Later in the girls these combs will flop over. The big telltale sign for sexing at this age are the wattles.

The obvious boys do have fairly flared red combs, but also their wattles are quite large and dangly. None of the ones below have that, so I'm calling them girls.

Later (if it stops pouring) I'll go down and take some shots of the clear cockerels, for comparison.

All sexing is under 100% accurate, but the big combed birds I find a lot easier...

Maybe natural chickens aren't meant to be a staple meat?

2011-05-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

The more I try to feed chickens naturally but economically, the more I see the vanishing point.

To obtain protein from an animal, you need them to have either a marvellous ability to turn vegetable matter into meat (cows, sheep), or a marvellous supply of full-profile protein. Commercially, supplying the extra amino acids is done using artificial versions derived from petrochemicals. These may have population health effects, but that's no concern to the producers, it seems.

What I'm finding is that it's easy enough to supply a full protein profile without relying on fakes, but it's not easy to do this economically. If I ran a dairy, perhaps... But on a home budget on a mere acre?

Mind you, I'm not comparing these chickens to supermarket ones in terms of cost-to-raise; that makes no sense. What I'm comparing them to is the effort in raising another meat like lamb. I'm starting to sense that chicken meat (needing protein from animal sources) is and should be an expensive meat after all! It should be more expensive than lamb because lambs, having the wonderful rumen, can derive everything they need from vegetable material (with a few minerals etc thrown in).

Now I can also understand why in olden days chicken meat was a luxury... Raised naturally in a large group, it is expensive. Raised naturally on free range with a high bug population... Well that would be different, but there would be losses to raptors and so forth, so even that will entail a cost.

Fortunately I didn't start doing this to make cheap chicken meat. However I do feel my attitude evolving, the more I experiment. I don't feel tempted to give up and buy supermarket chicken, but I do feel a need to step back and rejig what I'm doing. Natural, yes, no question about that — as natural as possible given that I don't live on a highly arable acreage. But maybe natural in the case of chickens means lighter, better-foraging birds with occasional pot-cockerels rather than a meat production line?

In a way this dovetails neatly with what I believe anyway: we need to respect where meat comes from. Cheap meat will always have something wrong, whether it's nutritional (cheap petrochemical-derived food) or in terms of sustainability (over-fishing and toxic waters). Yes, I do believe it's time to rejig where chickens fit into the scheme of things...

Fattening meat birds...

2011-05-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

We're at the 9 week mark with the meat hybrids. All are doing well despite heavy rain and mushy ground, and have been off coccidiostats for over a week. (Even then they were on very minor amounts, with about one part commercial grower to nine parts home made.)

There are a couple of birds noticeably smaller than the others, but none are unwell or failing to thrive. These may have been slightly damaged by the cocci bout earlier. However now that they're off medications and not developing symptoms I can pretty much feed them what I please, which means I can start 'fattening'. (The hen chicks of course will be fed an ordinary ration as I want them to breed.)

At the moment I'm giving a morning feed of the sprout diet as I've mentioned before: wheat, corn and peas (sprouted), sweet lupins, lucerne (alfalfa) soaked in molasses water, yeast, seaweed meal, salt. Greens come from the ground under the tractor. This feed tends to last them most of the day.

During the day, I leave a big round tub in the house and slowly fill it with the following:

- table scraps — high protein, no raw peels or fibrous waste; just anything nutritious.
- half a bag of steamed rolled oats — $1.13 for the 900g bag, but this is spread over two days between 40-odd chickens (including the layers). If I have plenty of home made fritter/bread/pancake scraps I'll cut down on the oats.
- soured or leftover milks including kefir made from reconstituted skim milk (though powdered milk doesn't work very well with kefir... But I can usually get it to go some of the way).
- carrot-ends, bean tips, swede ends, potato peels cooked up in a pot — these are only a minor element of the mix, as they're low in protein. Potato skin, however, is fairly high in methionine.
- lupins that have been boiled in a big pot — about twice as much by dry weight as the oats.
- About the same quantity of soaked or sprouted wheat as the oats, to supply amino acids for protein building alongside the lupins.

Does it sound difficult? It is if I set out to 'do this' as a chore. However I find that putting a pot of lupins on to boil takes almost no time at all if I'm already in the kitchen. I leave it on a low heat, lid on, for about an hour and stir if I feel like it. Everything else is just a bit here, a bit there — mostly it's done while I'm cooking anyhow. I cook enough lupins for 2-3 days and store remainders in the fridge so for the next few days it's just a matter of taking some out. Fortunately we have absolutely huge storage bowls.

Or I might do it this way:

- pet quality mince, thoroughly rinsed in hot water, then drained in a sieve. About 300g for the whole flock seems to keep the layers in lay and the meat birds growing. It costs about $4 a kg, which I suppose is fairly expensive, but as I say it does 40-odd birds.
- a full bag of steamed rolled oats.
- kefir or whey or skim milk, lightly soured.

In older days, this is what they did to fatten birds:

- put each cockerel in its own small elevated cage inside a shed, with an opening for its head to fit through. Below the opening is the feed trough. These were called 'cramming cages'.
- mix up half steamed rolled oats and half skim milk into a slurry.
- feed the birds this mixture for 10 days without supplying extra water, and then process the birds.

However in older days, skim milk just as likely came from the farm down the road, i.e. fresh. Modern skim milk powder seems very hard to grow souring organisms in... Though I'll keep trying as it would be a neat way to turn a fairly so-so product into something healthy and non-digestion-upsetting.

So there you have it: my current fattening regimen. Hopefully it won't 'fatten' literally... But if you want muscle you have to supply protein. And given commercial feed's artificial methionine content (see earlier) doing it this way isn't a bad option.

The old 'grass is deadly for chickens' gag... Works every time.

2011-05-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

If an insidious forum-moderator wanted to steer all his members away from home-grown and into feed-store-bought produce, he could do worse than run the 'grass causes sour crop' line.

Not only do the chicken-health-conscious have to avoid feeding grass clippings to birds, they have to avoid putting it as litter in the pens.

There may be a case for the 'grass is dangerous' claim, but you'll notice that people who claim it very often have a high interest in advocating antibiotics for illnesses, and in shushing anyone who says they've used it safely for years by saying 'that's purely anecdotal' — as it happens, so is the argument that grass causes crop impaction (instead of saying it may be faulty crop/intestinal flora combined with fibrous feeds).

I'm not going to say grass clippings are good pen material because they're not — they cake together like pancakes and you can slip on them when the ground underneath is muddy. But when you have nothing else and especially if you can mix other materials (like leaves) through, you can stop the pancake effect and help reduce the amount of manure building up on the surface of the ground.

As for feeding lawn clippings, I'd tend not to only because of the mower gases and oils that would have spread through the grass. Certainly birds starved for green pick may gorge on the lawnmower clippings and make themselves ill. But I can see little harm in having piles of clippings everywhere if the birds are also given fresh green feed and have a variety of foods to help them develop stronger digestive systems.

I think I've written on this subject before, so forgive me if I sound like a harpy. But I do see the authoritative voice coming up often and I also see new chicken owners frightened into spending a lot more at the feed store than they may need to. The fact is, there is no better way to get natural vitamins into a bird than feed something fresh, whether it's greens or protein. So do be careful about using clippings, but don't avoid grass altogether, and if you're uncertain about safety, do what I do, and cut it with scissors!

What's the ideal litter for an outdoor pen?

2011-05-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

I've tried many things, but here's something cheap and readily available if you live near a pine forest.

I've been cursing our property's pine trees ever since we moved in. Their needles kill everything else, and there are often beads of sap that stick incorrigibly to everything they touch. Then the trees themselves are overgrown and tall, providing a habitat for goshawks to then swoop down on unprotected birds. Lastly they overshadow our block, making it hard for us to develop an understorey.

But now I've found a cost-reducing use for them:

What a fabulous pen floor they make! They're non slip, a pretty colour, and the droppings tend to drain through when it rains instead of piling on top.

They're slower to break down than many other litters like straw, and I feel there may be some antiparasitical properties as well.

They're also quite soft underfoot, so a heavy bird like the hybrid above can walk comfortably. In fact I've even put pine needles in the night-shed for a comfy floor and nesting material.

Our area has a reasonably high rainfall, and there's nothing worse than a slushy pen. However pine needles seem very good at keeping the mud away from the surface, and are quite fine to walk on even in the squelchiest weather.

Last but not least... In my 'neck of the woods' they're free. Having spent $14 for a bag of sugar cane mulch earlier in the year, this is a big saving. And I would say they're a much better choice.

So instead of cursing the trees for their various drawbacks, I'm feeling lucky they're here.

By the way, I'm sure many other trees can be used in this way — last year I was gung ho about eucalyptus leaves and she-oak (two native Australian trees that also like to kill everything that tries to grow nearby). Both also have antimicrobial properties, though eucalyptus leaves aren't particularly nice to walk on. The springy, spongy feeling of pine needles underfoot is certainly a pleasant change.

And after all 'the natural chicken' isn't just about the birds themselves, but about raising and growing as much as possible at home, including the mulch.

managing roosters with only one soundproof shed

2011-05-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

The rooster shed is working well at reducing noise; actually I should call it a 'breeder' shed.

It was an old cubbyhouse that I've lined with extra boards, some old real estate signs (glued to the ceiling) and some carpet. The back of the door was doctored by gluing neoprene over it. The neoprene (wetsuit material) overlaps the jamb so it helps stop sound bleeding around the door edges when the door is closed. (As you can see in the photo the door is slightly ajar.)

A hatchway at each side faces onto two different pens. Originally I did it that way (putting a sound-deadening hatch at each window) so I could alternate use of the pens to keep the ground from developing a huge parasite problem. However as I raise more birds I'm finding that I want to keep several roosters, not just one.

This brings up the obvious issue: noise. I can't very well have a sound-deadening shed for one rooster if another 2 or 3 are crowing loudly outside. Yet roosters often don't get along when they're with girls.

So the answer I found was to divide the sound-insulated shed in two and use both pens (one housing juvenile cockerels, the other the rooster and hens). Here are the separate hatchways opening onto each pen. You'll notice that each side has a roost just inside the window ledge.

The division inside the shed was made of some c-clipped mesh panels that keep themselves upright (they aren't fixed to either wall) by being a bit kinked (like a concertina) and having one end folded to form a perpendicular brace. (In plan view it looks a bit like an L.)

The end of the 'L' is tucked behind some nestboxes to help keep it steady.

On the other side the division only just reaches the wall and isn't permanently fixed there either. I hook it to the wall both top and bottom so there's no chance birds can squeeze through. Meanwhile I use this section as the doorway. As all the panels are c-clipped I can fold the divider out of the way whenever I want.

At night, all the birds roost in the same shed, and if the crowing is too loud with the hatches open, I simply close them. The structure is big enough to supply air all night, but there are also vents (which were part of the original wall) and they don't seem to let too much sound through. As the shed is fairly dim it's unlikely I'll see bad squabbles between a rooster and cockerels when both lots are inside. I can always place some shadecloth down low on the divider panels if that happens.

It may look fiddly, but this represents about $50 of investment and took an hour to set up. The galvanised panels came in sets of 4 'compost panels' for $26 from Bunnings. Yet making the divider has solved two problems at once: how to keep more than one cockerel and how to keep the noise down (by using one shed as two).

Just as a side note, keeping a lot of young cockerels in a pen of their own is only possible if the birds are either naturally placid or have been raised together, and a few of the highly aggressive breeds will never suit having an all-male pen. But given that I only keep placid birds, this lets me at least double... heck, triple or quadruple!... the number of adult males I can keep before I start seeing (or hearing) problems.

Feeding meat hybrids: update

2011-05-23T18:22:00.000-07:00

Well, the tractor was getting a little crowded, and I wanted to begin watching the female birds' diet a bit more closely, so I've removed 10 pullets into a large pen and kept mainly cockerels in the tractor.

All are doing very well on about 80% home mix, 10% commercial grower and 10% scraps/mince/kefir/rolled oats or whatever else looks good. It's a bit ad hoc but growth is pretty even and more to the point the birds all look well.

To keep the pullets from developing leg problems, I've given them a shed with no roosts. However so they're not sitting on the litter I've added some log offcuts and a spare tyre. They can perch on these easily without being so high that getting up and down is difficult.

Eventually — here's hoping — they'll reach point of lay and deposit the odd egg in the middle of the spare tyre. I've kept 10 pullets but expect only half that number to reach laying age. If they all survive into lay (which would be great) I'll obviously need to add another couple of nests.

This pen abuts the one currently holding anconas and leghorn x chicks. As it happens they're the same age as the hybrids, but you wouldn't know it to look at them. When the hybrids reach sexual maturity I should be able to let an ancona rooster visit them through a little hatchway during the day. At night (due to noise/neighbours/cranky husband) I'll have to put the rooster back in the night-shed. But that won't be difficult.

It's the generation after that which I'll be most interested in. If I breed the hybrids to an ancona, I should get some black-speckled birds (not that I know or care about colour genetics) that lay reasonably well but more to the point aren't overweight at a young age. Perhaps rather than using the anconas I'll put a leghorn x cockerel over them instead. That would mean slightly better laying, as the leghorn x come from utility strains and are very productive. The males from that mating I would want to put with the ISA browns — that will keep egg laying utility high, but would add some colour so the birds are slightly less visible to goshawks. (That's another reason to use the anconas instead.)

All of this crossbreeding may end up in the wastebasket, or may end up producing long lived but productive dual purpose birds. If it ends up in the wastebasket I suspect it will be for reasons of ill health — meat hybrids are notoriously susceptible to Marek's. (Despite being vaccinated, one already had signs of some type of tumour disease — see one of my earlier posts.) But if I can maintain a balance between moderate weight gain (as I said earlier I just want a slightly weightier carcass at 16 weeks), good (not extreme) laying ability and hardiness, I'll be very happy indeed.

If not, of course it will be back to the drawing board, and I may go back to the malay-ISA or malay-leghorn. They were very nice birds and the malay-ISA I used as a broody has just gone back into lay despite it being mid winter. She's only been off the chicks for a couple of weeks, so that's pretty productive... If I could just have gotten those cockerels 400g heavier they would have been the perfect dual purpose bird!

Changing feed

2011-05-21T17:42:00.000-07:00

It can be very hard to get commercial-raised adult birds to switch to a new diet. Just recently I bought a handful of layers at point of lay from a hatchery, and found that they wouldn't attempt to eat any of the home mix. Over a few days they gradually took a little of it, but I would say they were eating about half a normal amount of feed for the first two weeks, and as a result laying was greatly delayed.

The prevailing advice is to do a half-half mix for a week to gradually change birds over to a new feed. However I didn't want to buy a bag of layer pellets just to do a one-week withdrawal to a new feed. Besides, my other birds do well on varying feed.

Accepting variety is a vital part of keeping birds healthy on a home mix. There are times when an important ingredient becomes unavailable (recently I couldn't buy yeast) and so other ingredients need to be added to make up for whatever vitamins are going to be missing. There may also be times when an available feed is of poor quality. And of course price sometimes dictates a change. As a result the home feed isn't a fixed diet but a constantly shifting, constantly changing thing.

The key to being able to vary the feed in this way is to get the chicks used to variety very early on. They have to get used to not only each individual ingredient, but also the fact that the mix itself changes over time. Happily this seems to work.

The only shortcoming is that chicks whose feed includes whole grains etc may be more vulnerable to coccidiosis when the owner is relying on medicated feed (not management) to keep parasite numbers low. If you add non medicated ingredients to a chick's diet, you reduce the amount of coccidiostat each bird eats. Not everyone may be interested in reducing reliance on medications. In that case I would suggest only adding a very small amount of extra feeds, e.g. by way of an afternoon 'treat'.

In the meantime rest assured, when birds are weaned off medications they can still be introduced to a varying natural diet, though the process takes time. My new layers are now eating the mix quite happily, and three out of four are laying (the other is taking a break until the day length increases).

We're not meat, we're chickens! (Unless we're being nasty...)

2011-05-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

I often feel the term 'meat hybrid' is slightly cruel. It isn't of course, but I can see why mass scale farmers might be tempted to view them as meat even while they're alive. They do some silly things sometimes (like nearly flattening one another in their race for food).
But I still think they're sentient in some way. They have personalities, even if they don't carry those differences to an extreme (in a prey animal that flocks together, individuality is a curse). And who's to say this fellow isn't thinking?

Stepping into the tractor is always an adventure. Firstly they crowd at the front so much it's hard to find a clear spot to tread — I have to carefully nudge them away with my feet. Secondly they like to try to eat anything that presents itself — fingers, bucket, toes — and if it's not edible, some of them will square up to the stray object (such as the feed scoop) and try to start a boxing match. Yet they're quite nice creatures, and I haven't seen any of them squaring up to one another.

The layers are a slightly different story when it comes to both temperament and making pets. Since these are to be breeders I've had to be a bit firmer when it comes to aggression between the birds (they're not aggressive at all toward me). One of the leghorn x (the white birds) was really making life hell for the others, so I've removed him. It doesn't make sense to raise cockerels to adulthood before dispatching if they're going to harm each other. Fortunately now that he's gone the remaining cockerels are getting along quite well.

The removed bird was processed into healthy dinner for my beloved flock protector. Although only 7 weeks old and a layer, he still provided my dog with her complete daily meal, and nothing was wasted (except the feathers, head, feet and intestines). I feel it was a fairly good result from a non-ideal situation.

So that's today's round-up, with ups and downs (and probably some contradictions)...

layers doing well, time for mealworms?

2011-05-19T02:55:00.000-07:00

The layer chicks are the same age as the meaties, i.e. 7 weeks. It's so lovely to pick them up and find that, despite a diet of only 50% commercial feed, they have as much feather and bodyweight as any layer could. I'm also happy with their behaviour and feel their nutrition has been close to just right.

If I could add something to their diet, it would be more fresh meat. However that's not going to happen with mince at $7 or $8 a kilo and pet mince fiddly to feed (because of the need to rinse/heat to remove preservatives). Never mind. As they go on, I'll find ways to keep up the amino acid supplement while they get a basic protein percentage from the mixed legumes and grains.

Meanwhile I've invested in a $10 container of mealworms. I've never kept mealworms before, but I'd bought a bag of bran from the feed store as a chick diet ingredient, and figured 'why not?' Vegetable peelings, old flour, skim milk and bran seem to be all the mealworms want in life... Hopefully I can let their numbers build up to a level where they're able to be fed to the chickens daily.

Worth a shot, anyhow... I'll keep you posted. Hopefully they won't do a 'worm farm' and vanish on me...

Tractor life

2011-05-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

The tractor seems to be working perfectly now. I shift it every two days: by then the meat hybrids have thoroughly soiled the ground. They seem to be enjoying the sun and the grass — it's such a lovely sight when they take a break from eating to sunbathe.

They're now 7 weeks old (plus a day or two) and while there's a fair bit of variation in size, none is looking seedy. I did roll the tractor edge over a cockerel accidentally this morning — I couldn't see past the tarp as I was very slowly dragging — but he doesn't appear to have been harmed. Thank heavens! This didn't start with a desire to save money but to raise healthy chickens as humanely as possible.

Their feed is still 50% commercial grower and 50% home mix (sprouted wheat, corn and peas; cracked sweet lupins; sunflower and lucerne with molasses water, seaweed meal and the one I always forget to mention, salt). On top of that I add an afternoon treat which is high in methionine — 50% soured or skim milk with rolled oats to soak the moisture up, and 50% pet mince which has been rinsed thoroughly in hot water to remove sulphur dioxide preservative. They wolf it down, but then they wolf everything down. :)

You can see what the daily feed looks like behind the dozing birds in the photo below:

They really eat a lot, and drink a lot:

Their growth rate is just about what I want. By that I mean, they aren't gaining weight so fast that they won't be able to walk in another week or two. A couple are quite big but the majority are nicely balanced and even hop up into the upright feeder sometimes. I like to see birds that can perch if they want to (even if for safety's sake there's no perch there).

The photo below shows one of the heaviest cockerels... I think 10 weeks might just about be a maximum he'll get to before leg issues occur. But I'll be happy if all the cockerels make 12 weeks and in a few cases 14. As for the pullets, as soon as I've made the meat selections, I'll start increasing the time between morning and afternoon feeds so they do a bit more foraging. At the moment feed is available all day, and I'm relying on its higher fibre content (compared to fully commercial feed), slower progress through the digestive system, and more 'satisfying' nature to keep the birds' weight from skyrocketing.

They're sleeping on the ground under the tarp, as the cold brooder was taken out some time ago. No more mats, either — they don't need them unless it's raining so heavily that water is trickling underneath the tarp. Temperatures at night are getting down around 5C, with a frost about 3 days ago (so it must have been near zero celcius). I'm happy with how they look, and in fact when I went out to check on them on the coldest night the area under the tarp was surprisingly warm. They have such high metabolisms they really crank out the heat.

But just on the subject of looks, as you can see, the feathering is still patchy on some. Here's the worst one:

It looks bizarre and the fact that I had a similar issue with the sussex was what made me review the diet for methionine. Having said that, the layer chicks raised partly with the meat birds above feathered properly.

Still, as things go I'm quite happy with the balance between growth and chicken health. In future I'll only brood 15 (not 30) to reduce coccidiosis issues, and I'll pay more attention to weather reports as well as seeding the brooder gradually with adult droppings. The fact that these birds had to be shifted to new brooders three times (because they outgrew each one) meant that each new brooder run was also probably devoid of coccidia to start with. Thus when they hit the ground under the tractor they were hit with a massive increase in oocysts (especially when it rained). Well, that's my thinking, faulty as it may prove to be...

Then again, if I get breeders from this batch and manage to hatch offspring that are a little lighter and healthier, then I probably won't get meat hybrids again. That's the plan! :)

cocci update

2011-05-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

I seem to have gotten the meat hybrids through the cocci bout. All but one are still going well and appearing completely healthy.

The one I lost was obviously very sick and unable to stand or walk. He was culled and given an amateur post mortem. The ceca (two long 'horns' coming off the main gut) were both full of dark blood. Clearly he had severe cecal coccidiosis. However there was an unexpected post mortem finding, and that was a large grey tumour or growth under his breast. It was the size of a broad bean, which is large for a chick not quite 5 weeks old, and quite hard, with a covering of many blood vessels. I don't know what to make of it beyond presuming it was a type of cancer, but hopefully there won't be sequels.

For the other birds, treatment was mainly a coccidiocide (sulphaquin — which is no longer able to be purchased) but I also moved the pen every 24 hours to new ground, and gave them all 2 days on pure chick starter (medicated), then slowly changed the diet back to 50/50 commercial/home mix. Now I'm moving the tractor every 2 days. I'll gradually extend the length of time between moves.

I've also taken the layer type chicks out of that pen and put them with the ancona chicks, while taking the malay x 'mother' back into the layer flock. The mother had to go back to the flock because she would have killed the layer type chicks that had been raised among the meat hybrids (remember she rejected them earlier). However 5 week old chicks are quite good at accepting others of their own age and size. Meanwhile raising all the baby layers together is better in terms of keeping an eye on their diet and health. If I'd left them with the meat hybrids they would probably have been starved out as the meat birds grew (and layers at 5 weeks on do like to roost, whereas the meat birds shouldn't).

All the chicks are on 50% commercial (medicated) chick grower and 50% home mix. The medicated grower component will be reduced in the next 2 weeks. By week 10 I mean to have them on an entirely natural diet (though not organic due to price and sourcing issues). By 'natural' I mean fresh natural greens, occasional bugs, grains and legumes, oilseeds, probiotic soured milk, fresh or mealed meat, yeast and shell grit. This contrasts to commercial feeds which have petrochemical-derived methionine to make up for the amino acid shortage in the wheat-soy base.

I've become aware that I may not have enough methionine in their diet, so I've started to increase soured milk. Signs of lack of methionine were that the meat hybrids (just like the sussex) have been feathering a little more slowly than I expected, especially around the rear end. The sussex did feather up eventually, but I do feel a bird should be fully feathered at 6 weeks.

I'm also trying fresh pet mince, but this time I'm soaking/cooking it first, to extract some of the preservatives that destroy thiamine. Ironically cooking also destroys thiamine, but this only affects the meat. I take it that if you feed sulphur dioxide laced meat it also destroys thiamine in the other feeds given at the same time.

By week 12 I'll roughly sort the keepers from the freezers. Keepers will be well grown but active. If all the birds still appear happy then I won't process any. Why hurry? If they're doing well, haven't overgrown their legs and basically seem to be enjoying life, then I'll be happy too. If they look happy but a bit crowded, I'll move some to another pen. No drama. By the time they start to crow, however, I won't have much choice — I have neighbours to think about, and only one sound-deadening rooster shed (which I've divided in half down the middle so I can keep a mature rooster with hens on one side, and young growing cockerels together in the other — each shed side has an exit to its own pen).

Eventually with the meat birds I plan to get down to a manageable bunch of healthy-as-possible girls, which will stay in the tractor. When they begin to lay, I'll start putting a rooster in with them during the day, and collecting and setting eggs. A majority of the offspring should be a lot longer lived and healthier than the meat parents, and should be genuinely good dual purpose birds.

After I get to the stage of having healthy heavyweight dual purpose birds that don't go broody too often, and also lay quite well without reproductive problems, I'll look at crossing them to some of the purebred utility dual purpose breeds. I should be able to introduce some fancy colours and other traits (for instance cochin or brahma would help with temperament). But that's for the future, if I make it that far.

This is all trial and error — as you can see, I've made errors in the past (e.g. cocci). The methionine question is still up for grabs. But so far I don't think any major damage was done. Even if my birds stay slightly slower to feather than normal, as long as they're growing well methionine may not be a dramatic issue. In any case I don't want birds that put on meat as fast as the hybrids — such fast growth is a product of industrial farming, and can't really be sustained without it.

Happy anconas, happy malay x ISA brown mum!

2011-05-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

Time for something a bit more up beat... Just thought I'd include a few shots of the malay x ISA brown mother and 'her' brood, all coming along nicely.

Below is a good comparison shot of male and female anconas. (Note: they're not 100% purebred.) However you can see the gender differences fairly clearly: the pullet (left) has a much lower stance, smaller legs, and a smaller, narrower, duller comb. There's room for error on all these observations but at this age it's a fairly reliable guess.

And a quick note regarding coccidiosis: these birds were in a small, very wet pen during the rainy spell. The above pen is much drier. I moved them after the meat birds started to show symptoms because I worried these guys would too... But they haven't needed medications and are still going well on a 50/50 diet.

Today I saw the malay x mother encourage one of them to eat a whole sunflower seed (which it did). If the chicks are trying larger whole grains then in theory they'll develop stronger gizzard muscles. Having processed quite a few birds, I feel this is true.

Cocci seems to be under control, birds back to normal...

2011-05-05T17:48:00.000-07:00

The two days on sulphaquin seem to have been enough to eliminate cocci symptoms in those birds that were starting to droop. All are active and eating well again.

I wouldn't say they're 100% healthy, but healing takes time. The two birds to the right of this photo were the worst affected, and will take longest to get well. However they were eating happily this morning, and perhaps look a little further under par due to the cold (it's quite chilly and breezy where the tractor is at the moment). Still, I'm happy enough with their progress. Coccidiosis can be very fast to take down birds and the two pullets to the right probably suffered the most.

At the moment I've got them on a 90% commercial starter diet — this contains a coccidiostat to keep the parasites from getting out of control. I'm just going to do this for a couple more days and then start to reduce the medicated feed again, in preference for a more natural diet. This weaning will take place fully over the next one to two weeks. Hopefully my mistake with moving the pen infrequently (plus heavy rain) was the only real trigger for their illness, and I won't be risking their health by continuing with the dietary change.

So here's the plan in detail. Watching closely for coccidiosis, I'll start withdrawing the medicated feed once more, and slowly reintroduce cracked corn, millet, protein meals, lupins, lucerne (alfalfa), sunflower seeds, sprouted grains, kefir, oats and meat (bandsaw dust from the butcher, or common mince). I'll also be adding very small amounts of seaweed meal for minerals (seaweed meal is too high in iodine to be fed in large amounts), and a pinch of salt (birds do need some salt, though I always forget to mention it).

The aim is to have 6 week old birds on a fully natural diet (that is, natural but not stringently organic), with processing time set for around the 10-12 week mark instead of around 7 weeks as with commercially reared birds. The point of that is to enhance flavour, protein complexity and therefore nutritional status of the meat, while letting the birds enjoy a tiny bit more life... Meanwhile I aim to keep 3 or 4 of the best pullets to attempt breeding from later on.

Worth a shot? We'll all have to wait to find out...

Meanwhile he's a comparison shot of the layer chick (front) with one of the meat birds. As you can see, the meat cockerel has that slightly more 'tucked' look while the layer didn't seem to suffer coccidiosis at all.

Details of most recent cold brooder...

2011-05-04T00:41:00.000-07:00

This post is just to show some details of the latest brooder version, which I'm using in a tractor. However I need to add a very strong caution about following my lead: be sure that no rain can seep underneath the nest area (a tray full of litter for the birds to sleep on may help), no draughts can blow through from any direction, and the ambient temperatures are not going to be even a little bit Siberian (though of course this depends on the age of the birds). In fact the best place to use a cold brooder like this one would be in a cosily sealed shed, with clean dry litter all over the floor.

As with all cold brooding remember too that the trick is to balance insulation and warmth against ventilation (alongside the ability to expand the brooding area as chicks grow). It's not rocket science but neither is it a total cinch get right first time. The safe thing is to remain vigilant until you know what you're doing. And also as with all cold brooding, chicks have to be taught to use it.

Here are some details of the unit. It was incredibly easy to make, and took my birds from the day they turned 3 weeks of age (when they outgrew their former brooder and run). I feel this is the right age to try using a brooder like this one, because the birds have some feathers and are that bit more hardy, and this brooder is really quite airy. Furthermore the metal legs can tend to dissipate heat away from the unit, whereas a wooden-legged brooder might not... (To stop that I've got the curtain running around on the inside of all metal parts.)

Anyhow, here is the basic skeleton (as a sketch):

It's basically a rectangular mesh box. Two of the extended sides form supports for an open area underneath. However these mesh sides aren't quite strong enough in themselves to keep the unit from flexing, so I've added 4 makeshift 'legs' made of cheap brackets wired to the box base. You can see how they sit below:

The height of these legs and hence the height the box of hay sits above the ground is dependent on the height of the chicks. For very young birds all cold brooders need to have their insulation (or ceiling) as close as possible to the chicks. My birds, being older, could cope with a space under the box being about head height while standing normally (younger birds would need a slightly lower ceiling, so they have to duck when entering). Naturally the area enclosed by the fringed curtain (or the perimeter of the legged box) also reflects the grouped size of that particular number of birds. There can obviously be some leeway with this; you don't want chicks to be packed like sardines so that some spill out through the curtain and others can't breathe.

I've put some fairly thick material as a curtain all the way around this brooder (attached by c clips to the base of the box), and along the front where chicks come and go I've cut the fabric into strips to make a fringe:

When first starting out with this kind of cold brooder it's vital to make sure that chicks can go nowhere else except into the nestbox — that is, they can't pace up and down the sides looking for a way in and eventually chilling. If the run is the same width as the nest area the birds will happily learn to go through the curtain into the warmer area under the hay.

The hay in the box on top isn't packed firmly, and is about 10cm deep:

As you can see from the above photo I've got the hay sitting on a layer of shadecloth so it doesn't all fall through the rather wide mesh.

The tarp on top of the unit wouldn't be necessary in a cosy shed, and in fact is a bit of a drawback. That is, as the chicks breathe the hay is meant to breathe too, allowing water vapour from their exhalations to rise up and dissipate without wetting the hay. However with a tarp on top the hay can get damp quite quickly. For this reason I've got the sides of the box above the layer of hay quite open, with the tarp pinned so that it really only covers the top, not any of the sides. The tarp is partly there to stop any moisture falling into the hay from above (my tractor isn't 100% waterproof on top) and partly to stop chicks scratching all their insulation hay out during the day (which they would otherwise love to do). However in a dry shed you could just lay a sheet of mesh on top to discourage scratching.

Remember this cold brooder is being used for birds around 3 weeks of age... However it's getting down to about 5C (last night was even colder) so I'm pleased to say it's working well for birds at that age.

Just one more thing: I've seen similar brooders to this one being recommended for younger chicks. In particular I remember one made of timber, with wing-nuts that allowed the 4 legs to be lengthened or shortened depending on the age of the chicks. I'd be a little careful using this kind of brooder in really low temperatures — I feel they can be a little too airy for really young chicks. But on the other hand chicks do need ventilation, and it's very easy for my other cold brooder (the square timber box version) to become filled with dampness and ammonia from a couple of nights' brooding.

Ultimately this is an art for people with a bit of free time and a great willingness to fiddle and fidget... But I must say, when the chicks emerge at a happy run exactly as they do from under a hen, it can be a very rewarding way to brood. :-)

Down to one light sussex... Misadventure!

2011-05-02T02:57:00.000-07:00

Never count your chickens... Not even after they've hatched.

Just on sunset, I lost a light sussex in the weirdest way. I took them all a snack but daylight had faded early, and both the light sussex had already gone to roost.

Thinking there was still enough light, I called them out and put a little bit of food on the ledge just below their hatchway. It turns out this was a deadly thing to do!

Trying to get to it first, the two birds went for the hatchway at the same time. The little bloke fell backwards into the shed while the larger one came outside. I wasn't too worried as the hatchway itself is only about 40cm above the floor — it's not a long way to fall, and I seem to remember that chickens have wings.

About minute later he still hadn't emerged, so I went in and had a look — he was up on the roost heading for the hatchway, and seemed fine. Then he came outside, climbed down the ramp into the pen and went over to the feeder to get his share. A few seconds later he stepped back from the feeder and fell over, spasmed a few times, went very pale and died.

Just like that — gone. I don't even know what to make of it! I've had several breeds including heavy ones, but have never lost a bird to a minor fall. But somehow the jolt must have ruptured something, perhaps his heart or liver. I won't know because it was too dark to do a post mortem, and frankly the last thing I wanted to do was cut the poor fellow open.

So there we have it — sudden sussex death syndrome. His brother will be a bit lonely now — and he's the one with odd wingtips, so not a great breeding prospect.

Quite an odd and unsettling day!

The sussex maturing... With odd feathers.

2011-04-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

These are the two light sussex cockerels I kept for possible breeding. The smaller one is above.

However the largest of the two has very odd feathering on his wings — almost 'angel wing' (though that's a waterbird phenomenon).

This is him below:

And again (bad photo but you can see the way his wingtips curl out if you look closely at the left hand wing):

It's a little like photos I've seen of helicopter disease (malabsorption syndrome or infectious runting-stunting or whatever you like to call it), however this bird is definitely not stunted. He was the largest of his brood.

The only other thing I can attribute it to is genetics... Remember the sussex (show birds) all hatched with down abnormalities, and these seemed to be associated with feathering abnormalities as well. Meanwhile a brown layer that hatched among the brood feathered normally.

Diet may be connected, but I wonder sometimes if I'm too quick to blame diet for any glitches I see... Certainly the number of warnings I've read about only feeding commercial feed makes me feel I'm out on a limb. At any rate the sussex have been different from all my other birds.

I guess I should try to keep in mind the basic goals: breeding hardy birds that can sustain themselves and help sustain the family without having to employ nutrition scientists or buy fake food. If the sussex can't thrive on a varied diet without rocket-science nutrition then perhaps they aren't the right birds for here.

Rain! Spoiling chicks' outing... Updated.

2011-04-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

Update: saw a droopy chick this morning; sulphaquin added to the water. Pen also moved. Remainder appear normal but I might as well treat the lot.
Gradual exposure wasn't managed well this time around.

See further update below original post...

............................

This is the seventh day of steady heavy rain, and it's taking its toll.

For the first time I've seen a sign of possible coccidiosis — a chick with blood-tinged droppings. None of the birds is sick or hunched, but things can move quickly once coccidiosis is there.
It's time to go back to basics. I may have to medicate the bleeding bird but in any case I'll move the tractor to fresh ground (i.e. ground that hasn't had chickens on it before).

If I move the tractor daily onto unexposed ground I should be able to stay ahead of the parasites, since coccidia have a 48 hour interval between being deposited on the ground and becoming infective.

However I'll have to make sure no new birds are tenured on this spot in the near future, as where the tractor was sitting is now probably quite heavily seeded with oocysts. It's a little reminder that 30 meat chicks is a high number, and I would probably have been smarter choosing to only brood 15 — or else be a bit quicker with managing pen movements.

Having said that... there were a few reasons why I didn't move the pen earlier. The first is that the chicks were quite young and I didn't want them to get stressed by a sudden move so soon after getting comfortable. Secondly the temporary cold brooder I set up in the tractor was pegged to the ground and partly supported by the tractor structure (via bungee cords), so I wasn't able to move it without dismantling the whole thing (that was silly but I was in a rush). Thirdly toward the end of the week I caught one of the many lurgies my girl brings home from school, and everything became a bit much. To top it off the rain turned the various chook pens into stinky mush.

This morning, feeling better, I've moved the tractor to fresh ground and spread mulch on all the worst areas in the adult pens. At least that's the two worst jobs out of the way. :-)
Here's the pen in its new position. Tomorrow I'll move it again.

Now for the revamped portable cold brooder... Later this morning I went to Bunnings and bought a set of 4 compost bin panels made of galvanised wire mesh. Using these I rigged up a better cold brooder which consists of a rectangular box on top of 4 legs (the legs are wired onto the box and are made of galvanised brackets). The whole thing cost less than $40 but will be useful if ever I'm brooding a large number of fast growing birds in future (I'll post a photo shortly). Best of all it's a complete unit and very light so it's easy to move — just pick it up, take it out of the tractor, move the tractor, then put it back in. It's also large enough to accommodate all 30-odd birds for another 3 weeks if need be (though they're feathering very well and probably don't need much of an igloo any more).

Around the edges of the base of the box I've hung dishclothes cut into a fringe so birds can come and go between the legs. In the shallow rectangular box (with no lid) that forms the top of the cold brooder I've spread about 8cm thick of hay; on top of that I've sat a tarpaulin. The hay breathes out through the sides under the tarp, but it's also quite airy because of the loosely hanging curtain fringe.

As for the coccidiosis, that's something I'll be watching very closely. If I see birds looking unwell I'll medicate (I have a bottle of sulphaquin in the shed). But so far they're eating well...

... and drinking well.

It would be better all round if I can manage the coccidiosis away before it's too bad; but whatever the case, it's the chicks' health and comfort that matters, and I don't see the point in being hard line about medications.

But so far I don't feel they need that kind of intervention.

I do, however, feel that artificial methionine in chick starter is best avoided — at least until someone with a research capacity settles the topic of whether dementia, heart disease, artherosclerosis, fatty liver and other conditions (associated with higher blood methionine) might be connected to what we feed our meat birds.

..................................

Further update:

After adding sulphaquin to the water, I noticed by the afternoon that there were about 5 droopy chicks, and even the healthiest birds looked just a tiny bit off colour. However by the next day (second day of treatment) the droopers had all improved, and on the third day (which was plain water) I could see no cocci signs in the birds, only in the droppings, which contained remnants of shed intestine.

I'm feeding them a majority medicated starter and backing the grains off somewhat. When the digestion is upset, whole grains can be a bit too much of a challenge. The birds seem to think this too, as they're definitely preferring the commercial feed right now.

Having exposed them to adult droppings while in the brooder, I was expecting that the chicks would have a little more immunity than they proved to have. But perhaps that drenching downpour would have set back any growing birds — certainly I would have kept them in the brooder longer if I'd realised heavy rain was on the cards.

In future I think adding handfuls of adult pen soil to the brooder, and gradually increasing the amount, may be a way to prepare them for the tractor stage. But I've also been leaning toward natural brooding for some time now, having bred and kept a few sitting-inclined hens. The fact that none of the hen-raised anconas has developed cocci is significiant, I think, especially since their pen was even wetter during the downpour than the ground under the tractor holding the meat birds. While there are fewer anconas than meat birds (hence a lower droppings rate) their pen is also much smaller, so these droppings are quite concentrated. For some reason these chicks are doing extremely well with the same diet (half medicated, half home mix).

In future I'll be keeping chick numbers around the 15 mark, I think — it's much easier to manage that number without them outgrowing the brooders and much easier to regulate cocci loads when I set them a new challenge (such as tractor life).

And as I've said earlier, I'll brood naturally where possible. The health of the anconas under their malay-ISA hen seems to make that a no-brainer if I want to keep medication use low, but still have healthy birds.

Chicks seem healthy... Diet is 50% home made, 50% commercial.

2011-04-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

Just a status update.

Two days ago I began to fear that even the new larger brooder wouldn't cope with 30 meat hybrids and their rate of growth, so I made up an el cheapo cold brooding hutch and set it up inside the chicken tractor.

Wouldn't you know it, an hour later it began to absolutely pour! Only half the tractor is covered, and it's very open to weather — not a great situation for 3 week old birds (not to mention the 3 layer chicks that are probably only 2 weeks old).

But I needn't have worried. After having to put them in the new igloo on that first night, I found that they used it automatically from then on. They are getting a bit wet in the open, but not wet enough to chill, and they huddle in the cold brooder happily if they feel cold in the day. As usual they emerge at full tilt and eat themselves stupid.

What a relief! I must say I wouldn't have moved them until after the wet weather if I'd known it was coming.

Now for the diet update — over this week I've been reducing the medicated starter in favour of the home mix. It's now at 50% commercial. I don't want to do it too fast this time as I'm concerned about their gizzards being able to handle harder grains. I'm still adding very small amounts of meat and soy meal, but the basic protein content is coming from legumes. Later in the day they're getting a small amount of human grade mince mixed with oatmeal and kefir or similar, to supplement with animal proteins.

Cracked corn and millet are the (unsprouted of course) grain element, then I'm adding other ingredients like lucerne, sunflower, livamol, yeast, lupins, etc as per the usual diet. The protein content is around 20%. Recommended meat hybrid diets are more like 22 or 23%, but I suspect this is purely for high production and growth rates — and I don't actually want that. I want the birds to live a little longer in peace, without going off their legs or developing cardiac failure. A tall order given the breed, but let's see... (It's worth adding the note that artificial methionine is associated with cardiomyopathy.)

Next item on the agenda is a grain cracker — the chicks aren't keen on the whole sunflowers, and I can't find a supplier for fresh sunflower meal unless it's doctored with various vitamin premixes (such as the horse supplement I came across). I might invest in a grain cracker to make the most of things like whole sunflower seeds (which chicks aren't keen to try yet).

Over the next few days I'll be cutting out commercial starter altogether. I'm seeing no cocci signs but of course the birds are a bit too young to show the most common signs. The ground has been very wet so almost certainly they're under challenge, especially given the higher than usual number of birds.

Sitting among them trying to get them used to the new igloo was really strange... They're not at all identical in personality, and there was one meat hybrid boy who wanted to come and sit under my hand.

I wish I could free range them completely — but not here, not with the goshawks. Then again they seem as happy as chickens can be, scratching in the dirt and running about. Let's hope it lasts for several weeks longer yet.

What do you do with home grown?

2011-04-20T01:56:00.000-07:00

Tonight's dinner for four is 2 of the home grown sussex cockerels gently baked (lid on) in spices and then topped with lemon sauce (juice of 2 lemons, garlic, paprika, tumeric, cayene pepper, salt, sesame oil, chicken pan juices, cornflower).

Skinned chicken is a little more delicate to cook with than skin-on, but if you cook with a lid, add about 30ml water in the beginning and don't overheat you get a very nice result. In this case the birds were halved, lightly seasoned and cooked at 165C for about an hour and forty minutes, then topped with the sauce. After trying the meat before adding the sauce I was very pleased with the flavour, which was a lot richer than I expected for such young birds (11 weeks).

In the past I've mainly fed table birds a commercial diet with a bit of extra grass and maybe some of the sprout diet for extras. The sussex were raised almost entirely on the home sprout diet. I'm inclined to suspect the meat flavour was because they ate a natural (if not organic) diet rather than grains fortified with artificial methionine, though it's too early to tell (especially after only two have been processed!). Perhaps after I've dealt with some of the meat hybrids at a similar age (11 weeks — depending on how well they're still getting around and how they're enjoying life) I'll be better able to tell whether the flavour is consistently better for natural food.

Of course it sounds almost stupid to think it wouldn't taste better... But you never know. :-)

Racism? My hen doesn't like white chicks.

2011-04-20T01:15:00.000-07:00

My malay x ISA brown has been broody for a few weeks, so on the weekend I went to a local auction and purchased a dozen chicks for $28 from someone I've bought from before. Unfortunately one died on the way home (it was badly pasty-bottomed and had obviously been sick and weak for some time) but the remainder looked perfectly healthy. That night, after brooding them with a lamp for the day, I put them all under the hen, who seemed to take them quite well.

However the next day I noticed quite a lot of cheeping, and found that the hen had decided that 3 of the chicks were not 'hers'. These 3 chicks were all fully white or white with a faint tinge of brown. All the chicks the hen decided were 'hers' were anconas (which are mostly black). Basically she seems to have decided the white chicks are interlopers.

I've heard of game hens being racist in this way before, so I wasn't suprised. However having just got my 30 meat chicks to use a cold brooder I wasn't keen to raise 3 chicks under a lamp. Frankly it would have been a huge waste of energy and an extra burden on my time. And yet what else could I do? They were only half the size of their meat cousins and I couldn't imagine what would happen to them if the bigger birds decided to attack.

Yet with breath held and readiness to take them back out I did put them into the cold brooder... And miracle of miracles, not a single meat chick harassed them! The little ones are now completely integrated and seem to be using the cold brooder in exactly the same way as their big friends, which are at least twice the size. It probably helps that the youngsters aren't day olds but look closer to a week in age, and they're feathering fast enough that staying with the 'herd' isn't a big problem (chicks with fewer feathers than the meat birds would chill more easily as they follow the 'herd').

What a stroke of luck — this could easily have gone a horrible way. And it's not perfect to raise layers with meat chicks as they're always going to be outgrown and have to fight harder for food, but as the meat birds get heavier I imagine the wiry fast layers will compete quite well.

So now I have 33 in the cold brooder and 8 under the hen, all doing well... And the chicks are all on medicated starter this time (which I'll keep up for another week then reassess). Hopefully weaning them onto the sprout diet a little more slowly will allow all the birds' gizzards and digestive systems to keep up with what's being fed... And hopefully my problems with the poor sussex and his runting-stunting-type illness (below) will be a one-off case now that I'm cutting back on meat meal.

We'll see! Meanwhile both the hen and the cold brooder (with its 33 growing bodies) are making my life a lot easier... And I don't have to worry about power outages. :-)

cold brooding again!

2011-04-20T01:01:00.000-07:00

Back to cold brooding — as usual I wanted to limit external inputs like heat/light but still raise healthy chicks. And as usual while there have been issues (not least being that the meat hybrids outgrew the original cold brooder in a week), it's working fantastically so far. By 'fantastically' I simply mean that the chicks are no less robust, healthy and active than chicks raised under lamps, and yet they now basically look after themselves.

After they became too big for the original cold brooder (the timber box with little door and inner mesh circlet), I did a little extra work on the design. Remember that that 600mm x 600mm box was their square nest enclosure; there was also a detachable timber-walled run, which was about 620mm x 1200mm. (You can see the original cold brooder under my 'how to' to the right.)

To make a new cold brooder, I used the old one (timber box plus run) in a new way. Basically the old timber-walled run is now the actual nesting area, and the old nesting area is now an insulated roof. In this version the insulation is mostly above the chicks rather than around the sides. (More on the nest setup later.)

If you look closely you may be able to tell that the double-storey-looking section to the far left (with a lid and weight on top) is my old box brooder on top of the old boxed run. These now abut the new run (which is hard to make out in the photo because it isn't continuously meshed on top, but has a central lift-up lid framed in old timber planks).

It looks ugly, but it cost nothing because I had mesh offcuts lying around and our old farm shed is full of planks and other pieces of timber. Some people would prefer to buy the materials and frame something nicely, but I don't mind the rough look and I do enjoy using waste material (especially hardwood).

This setup has no floor but the floor of the shed is concrete, so there's no danger of anything digging in. However because this shed also gets some run-off through it during drenching rain, I've elevated the run and the nesting area on a couple dozen planks to form a basic sort of floor. This is a possible point of vulnerability if a fox dislodges the planks, but even if it did, the unit is a little too heavy for a fox to then flip over to get at the chicks.

Now for details on the all-important nest area. In the photo below, it's the section to the right. You may be able to see that just below the box sitting on top of the lower section are tufts of hay that mark out where the nest actually is (ignore all the hay spilt on the ground below). In other words the nest area is only that square section just below the upper box.

This style of cold brooder contains all the insulation in the box above the nest, with the box meshed below so the insulation can't fall into the brooder. I've also packed a little loose hay between the insulation-holding roof box and the meshed top of what used to be the old brooder run below.

The basic principle is a three-sided timber box with a fringed curtain along the front and all insulation contained above the chicks, in the upper box. A more standard way to make this kind of cold brooder is to use a predator-proof and weather-proof shed and make the nest area out of a 4-legged box with a fringe of hessian or other fabric all around. Being all around gives better ventilation and air supply; in my version above, chicks in the back of the brooder might suffocate if the majority crowd near the fringe. To avert that I've made sure there are a few gaps around the edges where the upper box meets the lower one (the area stuffed with loose hay). I've also made sure the insulation inside the upper box (which only comes up about halfway) is very loose, allowing a degree of ventilation through it as well. Thus chicks deep inside the brooder can still breathe.

Like all cold brooders, the insulation needs to be quite close to the chicks' backs and the chicks need to be closed in at night for a while until they associate going through the curtain with getting warm (you can use a temporary board across the fringed area and take it away when the chicks need to come out; just be careful not to limit ventilation). To make sure chicks' backs are up at the insulation I add extra floor material and (as with my earlier cold brooder) take it out as they grow. A simple timber strip on the floor at the entrance (or on all entrances if you use a 4-fringed brooder) will help keep nesting material inside until it needs to be taken out.

In the photo below you may just be able to make out some of the fringed curtain that hangs across the entrance to the nest compartment.

As I've said before, you know the cold brooder is working when chicks emerge at full tilt, looking happy and active exactly as they do under a lamp. However until chicks learn to come and go from the insulated area it can be quite hard work to have to keep putting them away and letting them out again. In this case though, my chicks have learned to use the fringed brooder very quickly, perhaps helped by a few design features such as the narrow 'foyer' before the curtain.

When I say 'design feature' perhaps it's more honest to say 'accidental design feature'… It was a result of the original timber-walled run being longer than the brooding box currently being used as its lid. The fringed curtain needed to be placed directly below the rim of the upper insulated box. This left a small section of the old timber-walled run sticking out (before joining onto the wider new run). A better way to describe it might be a bit of a 'bottleneck', if that makes sense. But this narrowed area has proved a bonus because the chicks like to huddle in the 'foyer' as the day grows cool, and huddling there as a group eventually forces some of them through the curtain into the inner compartment. When they realise it's warmer inside, their happy cheeps soon draw others inside, and the chicks quickly learn that going through the curtain is a good idea.

These chicks are 2 weeks old. They've been cold brooded in the above brooder for the past 5 days entirely without extra heat and without having to be taken out and put in the nest area. I'm finding the setup very low maintenance at the moment. Funnily, the day I shifted them to being fully cold brooded (up to day 9 they had a lamp during the day) we had a lengthy blackout and a cool snap that sent temperatures down to 13C at midday, which is cool for this climate zone. It was the overcast chill that I think taught the chicks what to do better than I'd been able to. Without sunlight streaming into the run area (as it normally does) they broke the association between the run area and heat, and resorted to the cosier nestbox. Associating light with heat is a real problem for chicks reared under a lamp initially, and sunlight being generally warm can also confuse them and stop them learning to use the nest. The lack of any other option than cold brooding also stopped me from being able to switch the lamp on out of worry that they wouldn't survive. There now — a lesson all round! Chicks can learn to use a cold brooder quite capably if they're forced to do it.

Now they're using the cold brooder very well indeed — as soon as they start to feel cold, they go up near the curtain and gradually move inside. Huddling isn't the sign of danger we've been taught when raising chicks in a heated brooder. In that situation it probably would be a sign of inadequate heat generally. But huddling is an essential part of cold brooding.

Another important note about all cold brooding, but especially with high numbers of chicks, is that the nest area litter needs to be checked daily for moisture content. This is because chicks defecate on their bedding and that, combined with their respiration in such a small area, will tend to make the litter increasingly moist. This is especially a problem with meat chicks because of their high metabolism. I probably don't need to say that damp litter is not good for insulation (in an artificially heated brooder the litter tends to stay more dry). Thus about every 3 days, I open the top of the nest area by lifting off the upper box and opening the mesh door below, and I exchange mucky litter for clean dry litter. I've also put a lid on top of the upper box to help stop condensation from our shed roof from dripping into the insulating material and destroying its insulating abilities. In a dry and fully walled shed this wouldn't be an issue, but you can see the lid on the box below. Holes already drilled into the insulated roof-box (from when it was my original cold brooder nest box) mean that the litter inside should be able to vent to the open air to some degree. If this box had no vent holes in its sides, I imagine I'd have to raise the lid on a few blocks above the timber box so that the insulation material inside the box could breathe.

In the photo below you can see both the lid (with its weight to hold it down) and the narrowed 'foyer' area where chicks congregate before moving into the nest area to the left.

So there is it — a lengthy saga but hopefully more information for anyone considering how to do this themselves. I wouldn't suggest anyone cold broods without a good background in raising chicks in the first place, but at least I can say that the balance between ventilation, insulation, adaptability and chick health comes quite naturally with time.

And given the problems with service infrastructure lately — and what seems like profit-motive indifference to individuals — I'm happy to know I can brood chicks off the grid if need be.

Sussex chick demise...

2011-04-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

In the interests of full record-keeping... And because I don't want to pretend to myself either...

Something was badly wrong with the chick, but even after an amateur post mortem I still can't be sure what it was. It didn't appear to be coccidiosis as there were no signs of pinpoint haemorrhage along the intestine; that was a big surprise. However the intestines seemed to contain food at the same degree of digestion pretty much all the way along (chick starter — a uniform pasty grey). He was also remarkably thin.

His gizzard and proventriculus were misshapen, and both were lax and floppy, especially at the junction between the two. His liver was very faintly marbled rather than uniform in colour, though this was subtle. His kidneys looked perfectly healthy and there were no obvious signs of infection; his lungs looked quite normal. However his heart looked distinctly pale and seemed to contain little actual muscle, and there seemed to be some watery fluid around the heart.

All in all, he was a very sick bird.

It's impossible for me to know what happened, but I did find something that mentioned most of the above symptoms: www.wattnet.com/Archives/Docs/701pi36.pdf?CFID=25710...

The article mentions that gizzard and proventriculus malformations and floppiness can relate (among other environmental and contagious conditions) to the breakdown of amino acids in meat meal or other animal protein meals, which produces toxins. These toxins in themselves apparently harm the digestive process, and may have some relationship to the proliferation of enteritic viruses.

A quote:

'High levels of DBAs [Dietary Biogenic Amines] like histamine, 3HT, 5HT, histidine, dopamine, gizzerosine and serotonine, can be found in dietary constituents such as tankage fish meal, corn screening, soyabean meal, vitamin premixes, fats, poultry meal, meat and bone meal. The biogenic amines are [...] considered toxic to animals.'

The condition has apparently also been known as 'malabsorption syndrome, infectious proventriculitis, infectious runting syndrome, pale bird syndrome and stunting syndrome'.

Looking up malabsorption syndrome elsewhere, I get:
http://www.worldpoultry.net/diseases/malabsorption-syndrome-d28.html

It seems that malabsorption syndrome involves the full gamut of causes: viral; genetic; and management. Is that a way of saying nobody knows? Even so, on the management side I feel quite guilty. Once again I find myself abhorring meat meal and wishing there was something better, even as I can't know if this was the main problem.

So what should I do? The 30 broiler chicks are peeping happily in the shed and eating ordinary medicated chick starter. The plan was to gradually introduce sprouts and cracked grains (with protein) over the following week, and do everything the same as for my light sussex. But with one bird out of twelve showing a serious condition that may be due to contagion or may be due to management, I have to question which way to go. And to complicate things further, it may be that the diet was perfectly fine and the birds were genetically predisposed. Remember, only half the eggs hatched, and many had weak legs and signs of fluff/feather abnormalities right from day of hatch.

Perhaps it's best to remind myself why I chose to make my own mixes: commercial foods contain synthetic vitamins and some of these appear, to my reading, to have negative health consequences for people. Even organic feeds may at present contain artificial methionine. I do still want to limit the use of synthetic feeds if I can.

So here's a plan, with minor changes to what I've done so far:

Chick starter for 1 week, pure (with some kefir for probiotics).
Chick starter + cracked grains, sprouts, yeast, lucerne, chopped greens, kefir whey and fresh protein (e.g. mincemeat) for 1 week (half-half) but no meat meal.
Whole sprout/yeast/lucerne/greens/protein diet from week 2 onward, and again no meat meal.

This will be expensive as I have to buy mincemeat from a butcher (typically, $7 per kg). It's very hard to get fresh unpreserved mince more cheaply than that. But I have to get the protein percentages right.

The benefit of not changing absolutely everything this time around (for instance not throwing in the towel and going back to commercial feeds fully) is that I can gain a better idea whether meat meal is a possible culprit. I can't be 100% sure because the current chicks have different genetic makeup to the light sussex, but I can probably settle my own mind to a large degree. At least, if I notice any chicks that are weaker, paler or unthrifty, I'll have a fair idea it isn't the meat meal. And then it may be time to reassess the whole diet.

Meanwhile, plan B (which isn't an alternative but an adjunct): find a cheaper, better, safer protein source for long term home chick raising. Well, that's already been on the back burner. But maybe it's time to kick along a little...

30 broiler chicks...

2011-04-04T02:18:00.000-07:00

Wednesday is delivery day for 30 day olds of a meat hybrid variety. I'm quite looking forward to doing some intensive (well... relatively intensive) raising with once more an emphasis on non medicated feed.

However I'm aware that meat hybrids eat a lot and therefore put out a lot of droppings. This means their capacity to ingest floor litter and their own droppings is probably higher than with layer chicks. Secondly raising 30 chicks in the tractor means far more frequent moves than usual to avoid the risk of coccidiosis (normally I raise 10-15 at a time). Not only do I not want the chicks to suffer, I also don't want to seed the soil with high levels of parasite oocysts. Intensive chicken raising almost certainly does this, and it's quite possible that regular outbreaks of coccidiosis are going to be inevitable if I keep more than a handful of chickens on my not-very-big block. (On the other hand resistance to ionophores is also inevitable, bringing the same situation as above... Take your pick.)

Incidentally, coccidiosis seems to have entirely bypassed my sussex, with one exception: one of the 10 week olds is smaller and weaker than the others. He was the one looking especially peaky the other day. If any of the others were off feed or had pale combs I'd be inclined to say my system had let them down, and the move to the backyard pen (as opposed to the tractor) was too hastily done — I should have increased exposure more gradually. But with the others unaffected and this little one quite noticeably failing to thrive, I'm inclined to say he has something else wrong. I'll give him a couple of doses of sulphaquin, but if he's no better after a couple of days or a week, I'm afraid I'll be putting him down.

I'm sorry if that distresses anyone — like everyone who's 'into' chickens I don't like having a bird get sick or die. The best sight in the world is healthy chickens. But I have a small area, limited rooster housing, neighbours I don't wish to keep awake, and a fairly clear purpose in mind, being the raising and breeding of strong healthy birds to provide backyard entertainment, pleasure and food. A pet with a weakness, or an unthrifty show bird, has no place here.

Back to the incoming chicks. I've been against meat hybrids since the last failure to breed, and even now I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing in trying to get a couple to breeding age while putting the rest in the freezer. But this time I'm working partly for myself and partly for a friend who wants to buy 10 home grown and naturally reared meat birds at slaughter age. She doesn't have time to do the raising and diet-mixing (though will do the processing), but like me she sees this as a valuable project given what's available on supermarket shelves (and more importantly how it lived, died and got there).

You know, if supermarkets stopping plumping chicken meat with saline solution, and if producers stopped feeding meat birds artificial amino acids and synthetic vitamins in favour of natural ones, and if humane practices were incorporated into breeding as well as housing, and if food could be just food with no extenders, preservatives, emulsifiers, colourants, fake flavours, irradiation, pesticide residues and myriad other additives, I'd keep chickens as pets and not have the slightest interest in dispatching them, or growing my own vegetables for that matter. But we live in a world where food has become massively different from all the foods our ancestors and recent relatives ate, while mystery syndromes abound. For me at least, there's no question but that I should produce whatever I can at home.

I guess that's enough soap boxing for one evening... I just wanted to spell out the next part of my miniature farming venture. However I should add that the thing that excites me right now isn't the prospect of healthy meat later on, but the arrival of 30 newly hatched chicks to look after. No matter what colour, shape, breed or purpose, I do love looking after chicks!

All fine on the western front

2011-03-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

There I was panicking as usual... Nothing respiratory, no coccidiosis, just 12 healthy scratching eating chicks.

Today they're tucking into the sprout mix (with yeast, alfalfa and a tiny bit of seaweed meal) and this afternoon a mash of oatmeal, whole kefir and bandsaw dust (on top of available sprouts etc).

The hide in the pen has made a huge difference to their state of happiness! No cowering in the shed, no nervous panting. I wish I'd realised the goshawk was bothering them earlier... Stress alone can kill young chickens.

Never mind! All's well that ends well, and the pen is now well shielded.

More on chicks' health...

2011-03-28T22:07:00.000-07:00

Good news, at least so far. The 3 chicks put into a cage and given chick starter yesterday are perfectly fine today. As their combs weren't very pale and they lacked other symptoms, it's probably not all that likely they were severely affected by coccidiosis. In fact it may not have been that at all.

The remainder are all thriving and the sneezes appear to have vanished, with no signs of mucus or anything else respiratory. In fact, today they all look like normal chicks.

However late yesterday I noticed the chicks all cowering inside their shelter, and realised the resident grey goshawk has probably taken to dive-bombing. With netting stretched above the pen he can't catch the chicks, but he can certainly scare the life out of them when I'm not looking.

Today I made a 2m x 1m bamboo grid and suspended this just below the netting to make a hide in a corner of the pen. On top of the bamboo grid I laid several green bamboo cuttings that have made a nice leafy overhead screen. I also wired more leafy bamboo lengths in an upright position around the northern pen wall (which is the direction from which the goshawk cases the pen, flying low among the forest trees as he scopes through the mesh). Since these sections of bamboo are quite tall and willowy, they bend over just under the netting and form a bit of a concealing arch.

I've always cursed the neighbour's bamboo for getting out of control and covering our front yard, but I'm a bit of a convert to its usefulness. Garden stakes, pen shields, trellises, you name it — I'd never plant the invasive sort, but now it's here it can be a very useful thing.

Meanwhile I don't know about the chicks' sneezing — it's too early to tell if there's an underlying illness — but all the birds are bright and happy today. I'll keep an eye out.

It might seem a little premature to keep blogging without knowing outcomes, but I'd like to be as honest and up front as possible, in case there's any good reason to warn others off what I'm doing. After all, in the absence of a clear 'how to', this is trial and error.

But hopefully more trial than error. :-)

The quarantine learning curve...

2011-03-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

Note to self.
Do not assume 9 weeks is sufficient quarantine.
Or to put this another way: always stress one's chickens before assuming they are free from disease and moving them to proximity with existing birds.

Unfortunately the change to the new pen has brought out sneezes in the little ones. They have had no contact with sick birds, though their tractor pen was stationed under trees, so of course bird droppings may have fallen onto the ground inside the cage. But having raised many chicks in this way, I don't believe such disease transmission is common. What I'm thinking, of course, is that the birds may harbour mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG, the germ associated with CRD).

MG is transmissible via eggs and thus can appear in hatchlings even if they've had no contact with other birds. However it usually remains sub-clinical in a well flock, and tends to show up as an outbreak only when the birds are stressed. Often this isn't until point of lay for female birds, but changing to a new pen is probably the ideal way to make birds show the disease.

Now I don't intend to jump any guns here. I've separated 2 of the chicks and have put them onto commercial (medicated) chick starter in case the slight droopiness is coccidiosis instead of something respiratory (remember, they've been off meds, so the coccidiostats should be quite effective at stopping cocci escalating and giving the chicks time to get over the load they have). The 2 chicks are also on wire and off the ground in the short term to give them the best chance to get over cocci if that's their only serious problem (and if the sneezes are just coincidental). Given that they haven't started to do bloody droppings and that they're still eating, I feel I've caught it early if cocci is the case.

The question of moving to active anticoccidials (Sulphaquin or similar) is harder to decide. In a show or pet situation it would seem unquestionable to use such medications to help these 2 sick birds. However these birds are going to be meat (the spare ones) or breeders (the best male). Furthermore, Sulphaquin may have a slight antibiotic effect on respiratory illnesses like MG, masking underlying disease. In this case, I'd rather know exactly what I'm dealing with in regard to the sneezing. Thus for the next few days I'll watch the chicks closely and try to rely on coccidiostats alone. If they develop bloody droppings and other direct cocci signs then it will be clear they need Sulphaquin, and I won't hold back. However if the respiratory symptoms worsen then that's another story.

One thing is sure: MG is *not* something I want in my flock. It produces a cycle of revolving illnesses when birds are stressed and cannot be eradicated once breeders have acquired it — that is, you can produce a 'clean' flock by using antibiotics on the breeders, dipping eggs before incubation, and practicing impeccable hygiene, but you also have to cull all the carriers. I've bought MG carriers before, and always regretted it. As soon as a grey goshawk swoops or I have to change pens, the birds turn rattly and unwell, and then it's often a battle to get them back into shape.

According to most agricultural perspectives, in the case of egg-borne organisms like MG, it's best practice to cull the entire suspect flock and start again with known non-carriers. I know that seems harsh, but because my interest is backyard production, I tend to follow agricultural rather than pet or show advice. My preference is to keep the disease out rather than put up with cycles of illness and poor production, so culling may be necessary.

Unfortunately, having already put the chicks in proximity to my adult birds, the next couple of weeks is going to be a time of watching and waiting. I'd rather know there's a revolving illness than hide it behind a veneer of temporary (and artificial) wellness. But that doesn't mean I enjoy seeing sick birds — in fact it's distressing and depressing, since my entire approach has always been about being humane.

But I count humaneness in the breeding (for vigour and hardiness) as much as in the treatment of birds. And unfortunately in this case I need to know what's going on.

UPDATE: I've just taken out a third sneezer, so that makes 3 in the sick cage. But the third bird doesn't look unwell apart from the sneezing, so we'll see.

Possibly the world's most ramshackle pen...

2011-03-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

Just whipped up a new pen for the growers. When I say 'whipped up', I pretty much mean 'whipped myself' — I've got so many scratches and tears it's not funny. It all comes from trying to avoid forking out money and therefore having to cut old materials down to size.

I won't say it's a beautiful thing, but it does the job and should be pretty fox-safe. The corrugated iron fencing is in the ground about 20cm — it should be 40cm, but the fence was long built. (Fortunately my neighbours don't mind a pen right up against the fenceline. You can probably see how much they care about their fenceline given the huge overgrowth of lantana and morning glory.) Above the existing low fence are two layers of mesh (one thick animal mesh; the other chicken wire) held up by star pickets. Around all ground level perimeters inside my yard are either low brick retainers or a pegged-down mesh skirt to stop diggers. Up on top, the bird netting is against raptors as we have a few spiteful grey goshawks that happily attack adult hens.

So in the pen are now my 11 growing Light Sussex and 1 mystery bird (looks a bit of a game cross, but she's a lovely deep rich mahogany colour). Here they are stuffing their faces (literally) with some mixed oatmeal, kefir and bandsaw dust. Every few huge gulps they stand panting and adjusting to the new crop tension...

And now for the most ramshackle part, the shed:

You're probably thinking, 'How could she dare show that?' But in a weird way I'm happy to have such a lean-to structure. It cost nothing at all, except a few scratches when cutting the sheet metal. There's no timber to rot, and everything is wired to star pickets or metal rods, most of which are in the ground. I had to be cautious when wiring things together in places where chooks can reach, because chicken toes and legs are easily trapped inside wire loops left out and about. Similarly I had to tuck all free sharp ends away from the interior. As a structure it's gappy, small and dirt-floored, and will no doubt get wet during rainstorms, but it's better than the tractor tarp which is all the light sussex have had for a roof until today.

The good thing about housing growers is there's no need to be too fussy about pythons or small goannas getting in (those creatures are usually after eggs or young chicks), thus wider gauge wire mesh is generally okay. Similarly there's no need to make extra room in the shed for nestboxes. It's just a roof and some rudimentary walls.

So the total cost of this pen was $21.00, which was the price of the netting. Everything else was lying around waiting to go to the tip or hanging on nails in the toolshed. Yes, I know, it looks like it only cost $21.00! :-) But at least now the growers are close to the breeders so they can start making friends through the safety of wire. And having brooded and raised them to 9 weeks elsewhere, I've made sure I'm not going to introduce mycoplasma gallisepticum or other egg-borne illnesses to my clean flock.

So that's the last 2 days' worth of chook keeping... Now for some band aids!

Call me old fashioned, but shouldn't food be real?

2011-03-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

I remain convinced that growing industrial meat hybrids on a healthy diet (including a lot of living foods) is better in many ways than raising traditional dual purpose chickens on commercial manufactured feed (with its DL-methionine synthesised from non-food sources including propane). And yet I feel very mixed about my recent order of 25 commercial meat hybrids from a hatchery.

It's sad, isn't it? Even if you want to raise home grown meat using traditional purebreds, the chances are you're feeding them a form of amino acid that results in increased blood methionine in the bird, is associated with high liver triglycerides, fatty liver syndrome, and in humans elevated blood methionine is associated with dementia. (See my earlier post about artificial methionine.)

I could continue with the dual purpose birds, but it seems that most purebreds have entirely lost their meat characteristics. Unfortunately I've been unable to source Indian game with any reliability, and the light sussex I bought as eggs are proving problematic to raise, with a majority having an extremely slow feather gene that makes them unsuitable for my general needs. So again I've been pushed toward the meat hybrids, which have a few benefits above dual purpose or meat purebreds: they feather quickly; they can lay well; and they have very good feed conversion.

But I would want these genes to be very diluted indeed. I simply don't want meat birds that can't walk or have a good life right up to slaughter at 16 weeks.

I plan to grow the meat hybrids as slowly as possible, and when they reach the latest age at which they can still be useful for meat, I'll process some and keep the healthiest and hardiest as breeders.

Plenty of other people have done this, though I'm sure like me they have mixed feelings about the bloodlines... But when breeding backyard birds you pretty much have to work with what's available, no matter what you'd prefer.

In an ideal world, there would be Indian game that can still lay sufficiently to make them popular and well represented around the place... Alas, many have breeding problems.

The drawing board is looking pretty messy right now!

Chicks now nearly 8 weeks old, no coccidiosis

2011-03-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

Just an update on those strange half-feathered light sussex show birds...

They're about 3 days short of 8 weeks old, and still on the ground in a tractor. I've just moved them to a new position after nearly 2 weeks in the same spot. Yes, I know, that's terribly lazy. In that time there have been numerous light rain showers, so the ground under the exposed front half of the tractor has certainly been dampened several times. I haven't seen even the slightest case of coccidiosis despite that the birds are eating only a home made mix of wheat, corn and pea sprouts, sunflower seeds, lupins, alfalfa, meat meal, yeast, molasses and seaweed meal. They also get some grass, and two or three times a week I make up a mixture of bandsaw dust (from a butcher), oatmeal and kefir.

Now it may be helping in my situation that our soil is very sandy. This drains very well and would tend to destroy coccidiosis more quickly than heavy clay soils. And the tractor is also sitting under large pine trees that drop needles and sap onto the ground (pine sap is a known biocide). But still, it does seem that the combination of frequent probiotics (kefir), soured milk and a wide variety of foods has made a difference to the chance of coccidiosis. Maybe the day one exposure to a tiny amount of adult hen droppings (in the water/probiotic mix) might have been the key.

Remember also that I've had adult birds bought at point of lay suddenly develop severe coccidiosis when put into one of my pens... (I figured they must have been raised to adult age on wire, with no exposure to soil pathogens.) Coccidia are certainly alive at my place, even in areas with pine trees.

Really it seems to boil down to the probiotics and early exposure to small cocci numbers, gradually increasing over time.

When I bought these light sussex I saw numerous growers with clear coccidiosis signs (drooping wings, hunched posture). The breeder relies 100% on coccidiostats along with raising on wire in the first instance, then he gives his growing chicks limited periods of time on free range. Clearly the coccidiostats aren't working even when range periods are kept short. The numbers in the soil must be too high.

It seems possible to me that he has several unfortunate events happening:

1. Coccidiostat resistance among the pathogens. Put simply, the medications in the feed no longer work on his particular strain of coccidia, because the pathogens have been bred to be immune.

2. An overabundance of coccidia in the soil because of the removal (via coccidiostats) of any competing organisms such as protozoa that may feed on coccidia... Just a possibility and I'm only a layperson, so don't quote me! But still, it could partly explain the massive coccidiosis problem.

3. Each chick that he puts down on the ground has imbalanced intestinal flora. Due to lack of competition from other organisms, coccidia flourish in his birds' guts and are therefore shed much more heavily into the soil. The cycle escalates.

4. Of course it seems obvious: he raises too many young birds on the same ground.

Now I hope I'm not picking on a breeder... I felt his husbandry was terrific and his adult birds all looked fabulous. It's just interesting to compare situations, as a reminder that either I've been very lucky this time around, or I've found a way to wean birds away from medications in favour of natural cocidiosis control. Obviously I hope it's the latter but of course I could come a complete cropper in six months or a year!

I hope not — and I'll be moving the grow-out tractor to a new position (albeit one that has had growers on it before, but not very recently) when I next raise chicks. In fact I'll be taking all the precautions I've talked about here, such as moving chicks out of the initial brooder by the 3rd week, giving kefir and a wide range of feeds, and moving them as frequently as I can once in the tractor. The next big challenge will be 25 meat chicks I'm buying shortly to raise organically for myself and a friend (who is into organics but can't put the time into growing birds). Being such fast growers with so many health challenges anyway, raising meat hybrids off medication and using the sprout diet will be an interesting experiment, and things on the cocci front could easily go very wrong given the high volume of feed/droppings passing through each bird. So I'll need to be very cautious with my practices.

Meanwhile I've got 8 week old chicks on damp ground that has raised chicks before (albeit in low numbers), without medications. That's got to be worth a smile! :-)

Raising worms...

2011-03-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

This may amuse others...

I had a feeling my 'worm farm' wasn't quite so much farming worms as releasing them to the environment... Poking through the morass the other day I didn't find one worm! Plenty of beetles, larvae, evidence of rat burrows, oh my!

So the worms have fled the coop, so to speak. :-)

Meanwhile every time I open the plastic compost bin lid I find a host of worms hanging around the rim of the lid. It makes me laugh — worms galore where I don't intend to farm them; none at all in my dug-in worm farm. Whenever I pick up something that's been sitting in one spot for a while (e.g. flower pots) I find worms!

The official 'worm farm' is proving all a bit too much effort for too little return, frankly! So I might forget about organised worm farming and go for something else instead.

The new plan is to find a large piece of heavy flexible material like rubber matting, old (unsprayed) carpet or even sheet plastic. This will be laid out in a large area on top of a sprinkling of kitchen waste. After several weeks I would hope to find a nice nest of redworms living under the fabric.

Well, that's the theory... And based on the number of times I've lifted a flat heavy object off the ground and discovered heaps of worms, I can't see why it wouldn't work. The large surface area (as opposed to a limited worm farm) means I maximise the chances of having worms gravitate toward it and set up home under the sheet.

Of course rats may decide to dig into the fabric (depending on what I use as flexible sheeting), but the whole system is intended to be moved around regularly so that no great pest-nests build up nearby. And it can be laid down over weeds etc to break them down.

Meanwhile I suppose I could peg bird mesh on top of the flexible ground-cover if I really want to exclude rats... But as I'm setting this up away from the chook pens I doubt rats will be a major problem.

It won't look wonderful and it won't be marketable in Bunnings (our major hardware chain). But it should at least turn up some worms! And hopefully the addition of food scraps and worm castings to soil will create improved areas for gardening at a later date.

Now to find a nice flat heavy sheet of something... Rubber matting would be ideal, but old lino might work just as well, with a few lengths of wood (old palings etc) to hold the edges down.

I'll update if this method produces better worm 'farming' than the closed box idea...

Chick igloo size in a cold brooder...

2011-03-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

I've been asked a couple of very good questions about chick igloos in cold brooding.

Remember, the igloo part is the mesh circlet that surrounds the chicks sleeping inside the brooder. Around the igloo is the stuffing that insulates the nest.

So to size: there's a very easy way to work out the right dimensions of this inner igloo for any number of birds. I do it with pen and paper — I draw an oval about the size of a chick, and keep adding bunched ovals until the number is the same as chicks I want to brood. A circle around the whole bunch is the size of the igloo.

I calculate that 15 standard-size chicks at 2 days of age will want an igloo about 20-22cm in diameter and 8cm high. If your igloo is 10cm high then add bulk to the floor and the chicks will be cosier.

It's best not to copy my exact dimensions as chicks vary. The main point to keep in mind is that the igloo needs to be only large enough to fit all the chicks when sleeping together, all touching. As they grow it needs to grow. So the best way to do this is to keep the igloo without a roof so it's only a mesh circlet, and make that circlet adjustable.

What I've done is to cut two strips of guttering mesh which are fixed to the box doorway. These are then overlapped to make an inner circlet of the right size (which is 100% adjustable). To stop chicks getting between the overlap I pin the inner flap to the outer one with a simple wire clip (the wire ends always poke out into the space of the box, not into the igloo where chicks' eyes can be injured).

Below is a loose diagram of what I mean, seen from above. The inner circle is the igloo; the outer rectangle is the box; the door is hanging open at the bottom.

The igloo in this version has no mesh lid attached so there's nothing in the way of adjusting the circlet. However over the top of the whole box (including the circlet) is a larger mesh lid which I can open and shut to add or remove stuffing and adjust everything. The blanket (or sack-cloth) sits on top of this entire lid.

But I just want to add one observation: brooding 15-20 chicks is far, far better and easier under a hen. In fact I haven't used the cold brooder this season at all, because I haven't had many chicks. Cold brooding really comes into its own when you have 30 or more chicks, no broody hens and want to reduce power bills.

I hope this helps. Apologies for my site's insufficient comments display... I'm working on that. :-)

The flock having a day out...

2011-02-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

Update on bare bottomed chicks...

2011-02-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

Starting to make sense. I've spoken to the breeder, and he says he also had some chicks hatch with bare bottoms and extremely slow feathering. I'm relieved to know it wasn't something I did!

Fortunately 2 chicks were mostly fully feathered a week ago, which is more normal. One has a bare bottom, so I'll have to watch offspring if I use these 2 for breeding.

Unfortunately I don't have the patience to look after generations of slow feathering birds, so the others aren't keepers. Never mind; in my experience (which is small but climbing), it's rare to find all the traits I want in one package (which is why I've set out to make my own).

It's a shame isn't it? All I want is about another 400g on my birds at 16 weeks. Meanwhile meat hybrids go off the scale at half that age, and also feather quickly. Meat hybrids also haven't sacrificed egg numbers in any major degree, unlike purebred meat birds like Indian game (Cornish) and speckled Sussex.

I always felt that meat hybrids were a little disgusting to breed from. No backyarder wants to reproduce traits that cause pain or early death. But chicks that can't feather up and are more vulnerable to chilling, picking and other unfortunate results are arguably just as sad. It seems I'm between a rock and a hard place here.

Back to the drawing board! (Lucky I like drawing boards.) :-)

One last post for the day: rats! UPDATED

2011-02-19T22:24:00.000-08:00

Running rat tally: 26 rats caught in 4 nights. Still trapping!

Original post follows...
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Gee I've rabbited on today!

But it's been a pretty chickeny weekend.

One of this weekend's maintenance jobs was to cull back some of the rat population. They've been building up for a couple of months and they don't seem to eat baits (besides which it seems the possums and antichinus inevitably suffer if baits are used).

Rats are incredibly smart, and very wary of any kind of trap. Forget buckets with water and a greased bottle on top; forget snap traps and automatic-closing cages. The rats are so smart, anything that smells dodgy will drive them away, and one near miss with a trap containing a moving part will deter them for good.

Here's where my chick brooder really shines, because it has no moving parts. Earlier in a post I mentioned making a tube of vertical rods to form a cylindrical entryway in the top. The rats can climb in easily but can't climb out because they can't grip the thin rods well enough. This tube can be taken out when the unit is to be used for chicks and put back again (opening the flap which sits on top) when it's going to catch rats.

I'm not sure why this unit works so much better than normal rat traps (even ones with a similar entry-hole), but I've caught more than 20 rats at one time using it. Perhaps the sheer size tends to put rats at ease; or maybe they're vaguely aware that it's a regular part of the chicken setup. Being large, I can also add a lot of food at one time, ensuring that all the bait isn't eaten before most of the rats are inside.

Another benefit of such a big cage (about 1.4m long) with so many hatches is that I can place food and water inside without touching the end of the cage where the rat entryway is. Rats are often deterred by human smell. They seem to have no hesitation in climbing into this particular unit. The only drawback with such a big cage is, of course, that I have to trap the rats a second time in order to dispatch them. I have my methods, but others might choose to feed the rats commercial poison baits while they're confined.

Yet again the unit has done its job, catching six rats in one night. The rats were a mixture of adults and juveniles. That's probably all I'll get out of the feed shed, so tonight I'll move the unit to the silkie/pekin pen, where I've seen evidence of rats under the concrete slab (which was badly made and is starting to break up). Hopefully I'll be able to reduce the population there to only a handful, or fewer. Of course I can't see myself catching all of them. But I find that doing this once every couple of months stops the horrible plagues I've seen in other people's chook yards (evidenced by rats coming out even during the day, because they're so crowded some don't get the chance to feed at night).

I'm sorry, rats! You're smart and amazing survivors... But you're not meant to be here.