Winter Chicks Moved To New Quarters

The weather gave us an opportunity to move the "Winter Chicks" to their new home outdoors this weekend, so we took the opportunity to put them in the transition pen. This is the pen where the ducks spend the night, along with several of our younger roosters and hens. The rest of the flock can spend the day, today, looking at them and talking to them through the fence. Then tonight, the ducks will waddle in and hopefully spend a peaceful night with them. In the morning, the gate will be opened and the young ones will be free to roam if they wish.

This is always a scary time for the flock owner, as you won't know until the evening if they all come home, or if some are out under a bush, frightened. So far, every group we have put out in 16 years, has come in that night...... but it is still scary until they are all in!

Not only was the weather right, but new hatches forced us to make room! Right on schedule, Muscovy duck eggs have started to hatch. There have been three new ducklings since last evening. So we needed to play "musical brooders" and kick everyone up one room, so that the ducklings had the warmest brooder. These ducklings are our first successful Muscovy Duck hatches so far. All the others died in the egg, or shortly after coming out.

I have been watching, when I have time, some of the videos from "50 Ducks In A Hot Tub" on YOUTUBE. It is very interesting and while he has less experience time-wise with ducks, he has HUNDREDS more ducks than we have ever had, so I trust his information. He says that many ducklings run into trouble as the try to pip out and need help. Chickens are just the opposite, so we would let the ducklings struggle until it was too late. Two of these three needed help and got it, so now there are three little fluff-muffins sitting in the warm corner all cozy!

Over the next five weeks, some 50 more will be hatching, or at least trying to develop and hatch, so we need to keep the brooders ready!

Anyway, enjoy the video! The last 9-10 minutes are just the chicks scratching around!

Winter Chicks

WINTER CHICKS

For hundreds of years, people had a rhythm to poultry keeping. In the Springtime, they set eggs to hatch, raising them during the time they needed the most nutrition in Summer, when there was lush grasses and plentiful bugs to eat. This kept the feed needs low. The hens would start to lay in the Fall, about the time when the roosters were distinguishable from the hens. The young roosters became food, while the hens PROVIDED food in the form of eggs. A laying hen was worth feeding through the winter, so she got the feed.

As grass & bugs dwindled in the late Fall, the oldest hens, the ones who ate the most because they were the largest, also laid far fewer, albeit larger, eggs, or none at all. These were "spent hens", or what the grocery stores used to market as "stewing hens". They were big, but tough and had a LOT more flavor than young, tender birds. Buying these in the old days, or killing yours now, gives you a tough, tasty bird that is suitable for stewing, fricasseeing, turning into soup, or any cooking method that was low & slow. Cooking in this way also saved fuel, as the meal would cook throughout the day, heating the house as well. We do this here on those days when we have to keep a fire in the wood stove all day!

Come the next Spring, the laying hens would either get broody, or the farmer filled the incubator and the entire process started again! An entire food movement has been created over these cycles in all potential foods. Those promoting it have trendy new names for it, like: eat local, or locally sourcing, but it is actually a return to the way people lived before fast transportation gave us produce year around. It is also, a better, less resource dependent way or eating!

Our ducks & chickens always lay eggs year around. With the big new incubator, we thought we would get a jump on Spring and hatch eggs all through the Winter. So we set eggs non-stop beginning in October.

Now you would think that the eggs would not know it was Winter, but you would be wrong! We have learned that fertility is low in these Winter eggs and viability is also very low. We have been getting around a 60% fertility rate, a 50% viability (live hatch) rate and about a 25% mortality rate (closer to 75% in the ducks). So it is not a real good way to produce birds, but if you have the eggs and can stand seeing the dead chicks, it will give you some birds for the next year.

Thus far, we have hatched out 20 chickens and five ducks, though one duck may not survive to adulthood. Four ducks are out in the flock now and the first 14 chicken chicks are being put out in the dog's yard every day and brought in at night. It is still too cold for these 5 week old chicks (pullets & cockerels) to stand the 30ish degree nights. Above, is a photo of three Leghorn/ Dark Cornish crosses about 10 days ago.

There are some 65 duck eggs in the incubator now, at various stages of development. I candled one duck egg two days ago and say the chick moving it's beak around. Soon it made a small crack in the egg. But it started about two days early, so it is alive, but resting now, waiting for Nature to cue it to finish the job. Once a duck starts, it can take two days, or ten minutes to break out, so this one is doing fine now. If my numbers are correct, I should get only 15 ducks out of this hatch. But with ducks going for $7-15 each from a hatchery, it is still a worthwhile venture, but we will see!

Duck Day

One of the scariest days for a poultry breeder, is the day when they release young chicks into the main flock. As breeders, we have watched the eggs in the incubator develop into chicks that painstakingly break their way out of the egg. The wet, clumsy, helpless chick must rest as it dries out, sometimes after a two day ordeal of breaking out of the shell. A few do not survive after the effort.

After that, the tiny chick seems to take forever to grow. Then one day you look at them and they are "teenagers" and nearly as big as their parents! Soon after this, the day comes when they have to be introduced to the main flock, covey, gaggle or whatever term is appropriate to the species.

Today was THAT day for our young, fawn Indian Runner Ducks. Less that a year ago, their parents arrived here as three day old chicks.

Shipping poultry here is a horrible ordeal, most likely..... though unproven..... due to poor, careless handling at the El Paso, Texas airport. THREE shipments of Muscovy & Runner ducks were sent before WE gave up on getting the number of ducks we paid for. We had an unprecedented 70% mortality in the shipments..... normal is below 5%. Debbie & I could not bear to see the duckling the hatchery had fussed over, die due to some machismo idiot's tossing the cases around on the Mexican border!

The ducks that survived to adulthood, FIVE out of TWENTY we ordered, have been wonderful, animated additions to our poultry flock. We keep Runner Ducks as "yard ornaments". We do not eat them, though we collect their eggs to eat and hatch. It is always an odd, funny sight to see a line of these ramrod straight ducks running across the yard!

Despite being less than a year old, our three hens laid fertile eggs and we were able to hatch five of them this Winter. One is still very tiny at just three weeks old, but four others have made it to young adulthood.

For the last four days, we took them outside after the morning chill was gone and put them and 14 chicken chicks in a large livestock waterer for the day. At dusk they all came back in.

But there was just something about the ducks that seemed to tell me that they needed to roam, to be free. This morning, we took the four ducks out to the duck pond. The other ducks were off foraging, so I put them on one of the steps. One by one they first jumped into the pond, swam to the other side and got out and started "discussing" this new experience.

After a minute or so, one of the two mature drakes, maybe the sire, waddled over and sort of herded them around a bit. Soon, the other four adults joined him and one hen gently urged them into the pond, where all nine frolicked for the rest of the day, climbing out only to allow the youngsters to dry off and rest. Instinctively, the adults knew the young ones did not know to use their oil gland to waterproof their feathers. However, we soon noticed that the dominate hen & drake would grab the youngsters one by one and pull at their chests where the oil gland is located, as if to try to educate them as to where it was and what it was for!

Like all magical days, this one had to end. At dusk, the adults were reluctant to leave the pond. Every other evening, they would walk, absolutely straight upright, into the pen for the night. However today, the youngsters, who had no knowledge of the pen, were trying to sleep on ground outside of the pond, which is vulnerable to predators right now. But the dominate drake was NOT leaving the babies and the others were NOT leaving the drake.

Debbie & I made a line and started herding the youngsters. The adults followed, then ran to lead and in a matter of seconds, there was a line of well-postured little "soldiers" heading for the pen, led by the dominate drake.

Once in the pen, the children played in the mud, of course, for a while, ate, drank and then explored the pen until they got bored and laid down for a rest. As I write this, they are all nine snuggled into a half of a clamshell dog crate for the night, safe and happy to be a flock of desert ducks!

NOW, there is the baby still inside in the brood pen and some 40 more duck eggs in the incubator to have to face "duck day". Still, I would rather plan on releasing the chicks into the flock, than worry over a golf tee time, ski lift, stamp collection, or where we will eat dinner (at 3 in the afternoon), as so many retirees do!

"Processing" Chickens

Here at the Eco-Ranch, our poultry serve three purposes. Of course we love to watch them and we collect, eat & sell the eggs...... but we also kill and eat the poultry. With so many people now keeping chickens, mostly hens, eating the birds is a decision that each owner makes, depending on their thoughts on "processing", butchering, the birds. I would never fault someone for keeping their poultry as pets and pet birds, at least hens, will not only provide you with hours of pleasure to watch, but tasty, nutritious eggs as well!

We will eat meat and since we will, we either try to raise what we will eat, or buy/trade others with the same feed ethics we have for their meat. This is what we did last Fall with three hogs that I butchered here and was able to have some 300 pounds of handmade sausage to sell to our friends locally.

Most Westerners are disconnected from their food source and have little idea of what is involved in butchering an animal. Most who have experience, have it from hunting deer and the overwhelming majority of these folks "butcher" the butchering!

Again, killing and butchering your livestock is a personal decision. However, we have found that the way we raise our poultry not only makes it an inexpensive way to obtain our protein, but the entire experience is a fun and rewarding one...... at least until the "moment" arrives... I hate killing anything!

Anyone who has watched any of my videos (http://youtube.com/ecoranchusa), has heard the incessant crowing in the background. We had far too many roosters for a while. I did this on purpose though, because you cannot tell the quality & temperament of a rooster or hen, until they are nearly a year old. Since we are hatching our own chicks now, it is important to have not only good looking & producing birds, but good TEMPERAMENTS as well!

I killed about 15 that were obviously not going to make the "cut" a while ago. Today, I set out to get rid of the rest, give the hens a break from the "gigolo parade", lower the Winter feed bill, put food in the freezer and most importantly select the best roosters to propagate our flock! We had counted nine that needed to go, particularly three that had developed the nasty habit of raping the duck hens (a fairly common thing). There are probably 3-4 more that can go as will, but these nine were the goal.

I was able to process just eight of them today. Debbie does not ever eat the chicken skin, so I don't bother to scald and pluck, unless I am smoking birds, or preparing a Holiday bird. One big problem with a mature bird, is that the skin does NOT want to come off easily! 6-10 week old Cornish Crosses will skin in seconds, but an 11 month old DARK Cornish peels like a coconut! That is why I could only process eight today.

However, from those eight, here is the breakdown of cost, versus amount of food provided. One note too, many people are not as fussy as we are regarding what the birds are fed and other things, so their cost of raising the birds will be a bit less than ours....... but I say the quality and quantity of the meat will be less too.

At any rate, the eight roosters laid no eggs of course, so they were a complete cost liability. The cost of feeding them for 11 months came to $14.00 each; some of the birds were hatched here and some cost us $2.75 each as day old chicks, so let's say this batch cost $15.50 per bird to raise. Each bird probably gave us at least three new chicks. That reduces the cost some, the same as culling a hen that is laying, is cost-reduced by the profit from the eggs she laid before culling...... but to keep it simple, let's say the roosters cost me the $14.00 each to raise.

I am retired, so my labor has no value subtracted, but if you were figuring the cost, allow 30 minutes per bird in total handling time, at whatever rate you assign yourself. Most chicken house employees earn around $8-10.00 an hour.

Each bird provides us with meals for two from the legs..... which are huge when the bird is this size, thighs.... same size, breast and the broth for soup is another entire meal. The wings are 1/4 meal and the breast tenderloin another 1/4 meal. So we get 4-1/2 meals from each rooster. That brings the cost per meal to $1.15 (for each of us) for the protein source for the meal. Additionally, there are NO steroids, antibiotics, hormones or 20% "broth" added to these birds. They are completely natural!

Now, we couldn't raise and sell THESE birds and make any profit, but that is not always the goal. You need to feed yourself first! These older birds are larger and far more flavorful. The age, coupled with the exercise they get, creates a very dense meat that you cannot eat as much of as you can a grocery store "frankenbird that has been shot full of "broth". You eat less and the bird goes further!

We can however, raise chicken that cost us less to bring to market size. For our system though, the per bird profit would be around $2-4. At my age, it is a lot of work for the money, so we primarily are feeding ourselves, selling the eggs and on rare occasions, chicken or duck sausage.

However, as more people start this "New Homesteading", many avenues open for bartering farm goods between farms. I have chickens, Joe has pigs, Sally has steers, Sam has vegetables and so on and we all swap foods and farm products around, eat better and save hard cash!

By the way, we don't eat any organ meats, but the hearts, gizzards, livers, lungs, testicles and meat removed from the bones of the soup broth all get cooked with rice, run through the grinder and each rooster will provide our 8 small dogs with a day's dog food for another $2.00 saving!

I am tired tonight, but quite happy knowing where my food comes from. Try it!

 A GREAT FEED QUESTION!

 On my YOUTUBE channel (http://youtube.com/ecoranchusa) someone asked a really great question today and I wanted to share my response with everyone, so it is below. By the way, if you like this blog, please send everyone you think may be interested the link! I don't get ANY money from more views....... but that is why the information I provide is fair, honest and accurate. Everyone needs access to it!

"When will you be doing a video on feeding chicken fodder? I'm seeing a lot of videos where people are feeding their chickens wheat or barley fodder almost exclusively along with providing the Oyster shells. Many of these chickens are only eating 10%-20% of grain mixtures, if any at all. Is this safe for chickens since there is little or no premix vitamins and minerals in their diet?"


Here in Terlingua, our main store sold "chicken scratch" as "chicken food". The employees did not even know they were not selling a proper diet! Only recently did the store finally begin to sell a more balanced, if cheaply made, "layer feed". Area flocks survived, but several people marveled at the fact that our birds laid eggs all winter with no appreciable decline.

So poultry can be "starved" and still produce eggs and marginal meat. However, the lack of premix, or vitamins & minerals will catch up to the flock owner in reduced egg production, poorer quality eggs, bone development issues, lack of fertility and chick mortality.

There are vitamins & minerals in fodder. However, if the ground the flock lives on has minerals, or the birds range outdoors, they will in most cases get enough vitamins & minerals to be healthy. Problems arise with coop-bound birds, or birds in areas like this desert, where there may well be a shortage of minerals in the soil AND little greenery with vitamins. Grains should always be available, as this provides a balanced, varied diet! Look at pre-mix as an inexpensive insurance policy for healthy development!

I would say that if a flock owner raises live chicks to maturity with less than a 5% mortality rate, the diet is safe. Anything over 5%, even 6% is too much and there is a problem. Poor leg development will be one indicator, but also, healthy chicks dying for no apparent reason is a HUGE indicator. Rather than wait for expensive, cute chicks to die or have to crawl around, it is best to add a premix. It is NOT very expensive at all! One bag of ABC pre-mix cost about $50 with the shipping and will treat 1000 pounds of feed.

I won't do a fodder video until I have a facility to grow fodder in: our greenhouse. However, I am a HUGE believer in fodder and/or pasturing chickens! This is how they evolved and this is what they need!

As I have repeatedly said as well, maggot traps, mealworm farms and soldier fly larvae farms are excellent and should be part of EVERY flock owner's feeding regime! We had some of the healthiest poultry I have ever seen, when we lived in north Florida. But our birds free-ranged and ate HUGE amounts of insects ( we lived in a hardwood swamp) and had over 15 acres of Pensacola Bahia grass to graze on, in addition to my grain feed mix.

In addition to oyster shell or other calcium carbonate, a real grit like granite or ground limestone (which is calcium carbonate, but yours may not be what poultry needs) MUST be available to the birds. The better they can grind up their food, the less PURCHASED food they require. In fact, we fed a 100% ground diet to the birds in the commercial houses, mainly because the finer the grind, the less energy is required to process the feed. Same goes for every flock of every size, the finer you can grind the feed the better it is digested! Investing in a grist mill ($400 and up) is one of the best investments you can make for your flock!

I hope this helps!!!!

Spring Is Chick Ordering Time!!!

Spring  is normally the time when people order their chicks for the year. Here, we are hatching chicks all Winter and really don't need to order more chicks, but as a help to area residents who really don't have a lot of money to meet the minimums of 25 chicks, we offer to combine their orders with ours. It works out good for everyone.

We really wanted just some Mallard Ducks, Chinese  & Dewlap Toulouse Geese this year. However not so many people ordered chicks through us, so we ordered a few exotic chickens for "yard ornaments" in order to meet the minimums. So we will have a few Phoenix and Golden Laced Wyandottes strutting in our yard this Fall!

Years ago, before agribusiness changed well, EVERYTHING, folks would order chicks in the winter from a hatchery (unless they hatched their own) and raise them through the summer on bugs, grasses and young plants. Come Fall, the chicks would start laying and would lay for roughly a year before they went into their first molt. The chicks would molt in the Fall of the second year. Flock owners would then decide who lived through the Winter (and the 2-3 month molt). The lucky ones would start to lay again in the Spring, roughly and their eggs would be fewer, but larger eggs. They would get to live for several years before being culled.

The unlucky hens became "spent hens", or hens that were of no real use while in the molt AND on Winter feed of expensive grains. Some of the old girls would fall into this category as well, depending on many things. The spent hens became "stewing hens". If you are under 40, this means little to you unless you grew up on a farm, but when I was young and up to the mid-70's, stewing hens were in every grocery store! These were very large chickens and usually cost a bit more per pound than the fryers They were quite tough if you tried to fry them, so you stewed, fricasseed, or made soup out of them. Same by the way, with mature roosters. These birds were large, but tough. However, the flavor was like nothing you youngsters know as "chicken" today!

Well now, "spent hens" are sold to commercial soup makers, TV dinner makers, bouillon makers, MacNuggets and a host of other commercial "human chows". Stewing hens are rare!

But "in the olden days" Fall and early Winter meant chicken soups, fricassees, stews and an assortment of chicken dishes that called for low, slow cooking that would render the tough old birds, tender!

Come Spring, the new chicks arrived with the bugs and fresh grasses and the cycle continued! Here, we are trying to do exactly that again and use the cycle of new growth and bugs to lower our feed bill. However, as old, retired people now, we do love to watch the poultry in their yard, so I could not resist getting a couple of "yard ornament, eye candy" birds!

If you are serious about having an operational poultry, or just chicken operation, you need to learn this cycle and follow it in order to get the best return from your poultry expenditure. Culling is tough! Selecting birds to die, that you have interacted with for up to a year, or more, is hard. Harder still to kill them! But such is the farmer's cycle of life. These birds exist because YOU brought them to your farm. The way to feed yourself, is to honor their lives by being as humane as possible with them, particularly when it is time to kill them. Watching a couple videos of how commercial chickens are treated at slaughter, helps you to understand, and to follow through.

Since I mentioned the commercial processors...... yes, much of the time the animals are treated barbarically! Poultry, sheep, cows (steers), fish and hogs sometime suffer or are treated horrifically..... chickens and hogs particularly.

We have to remember though, that there are some 320,000,000 people in America alone that need to be fed. Through the 20th century, we allowed AND this was required to occur, in order to provide enough meat for us all. There is a better way. Provided enough of us undertake the task of animal husbandry AND provided that agribusiness does not buy your local politicians and "convince" them to pass MORE laws restricting our ability to provide our neighbors with quality animal products! 

For now, order your flock and start your cycle! No one can stop you from growing your own food.... yet!

CONTINUING WITH FEED.....

When I was talking to my new friend in Cambodia about poultry feed, he said something that surprised me. He stated that the villagers he knew, did not know that poultry could eat "greens". He thought they had to eat a prepared feed mix!

At first thought, this IS shocking, but think about bottled water and the huge, inaccurate and expensive snow job the bottled water sellers have done on the entire world! Sure, in much of the under-developed world, most of the water is not safe for those of us from developed countries to drink, but for a New Yorker to be paying essentially $3.00 a gallon to be drinking bottled water that is nothing more than filtered New York City tap water poured into a plastic bottle is absurd! Yet one major bottled water seller does exactly that and "savvy" New Yorkers shun the free drinking fountains for this $3.00 a gallon treat!

So for agribusiness to convince virtually uneducated villagers in Cambodia that poultry needs bagged feed is not much of a stretch and begs my favorite paraphrase: "Shame on you --------" (fill in the blanks with the corporation of the hour)!

So, poultry can eat greens, which is probably how the surviving dinosaurs managed to evolve into today's birds in the first place! Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms is one of the champions of the pastured poultry movement. We personally think that is the very best way to feed your poultry. However, many poultry flock owners do not have the time, space, resources of climate to pasture their poultry all the time. This is why I developed our feed mix. I never will advocate feeding a prepared mix over what Nature provides, so long as She IS providing it!

So greens of almost every kind can be eaten and nutrition derived from it.

I also discussed with my Cambodian friend, using maggot traps. These are essentially buckets with some kind of rotting, or soon to be rotting animal, animal parts, fruits, or vegetables placed in it and hung in the poultry yard. Soon, flies lay their eggs in the "fly food", maggots hatch, burrow out if the holes in the bucket and fall on the ground, where they are eaten eagerly by poultry!

Again, he told me there is almost nothing left of animals used for food (nose to tail cooking), or fruits for that matter! Well, there is always SOMETHING humans won't eat, but the flies will, so I suggested THAT is what be used in the maggot traps.  Maggot traps are not only an excellent source of cheap, easy to provide protein for your flock, they are also great fly control devices! Flies lay eggs, hoping to reproduce, but the maggots get eaten by the flock and as the adult flies die off, the overall fly population decreases.

As far as greens, fruits and vegetables go, some will always have inedible (to humans) parts, or will spoil. THIS is poultry food. Cut grass (not sprayed with pesticides), vegetable tops, leaves, stems and so on, all is great poultry food supplement! Even the stalks of the rice plants in Asia and elsewhere can be chopped small and fed to poultry. What they do not eat, gets raked into piles to ferment, or compost and the poultry will root through that looking for new bugs, sprouts and larvae. They do it here in the desert, so the Asian tropics would be a breeze!

People need to re-educate themselves away from the dis-information that corporations and agribusiness have conditioned us to over the last 50 years or so. We need to question everything and help those too ignorant of things, to begin to question as well.

When I see Mexican mothers feeding newborns Coca-Cola because some unregulated ad campaign told her that she should........ or an American "stocking up" on bottled water because a tropical storm threatens, instead of filling the bathtubs, sinks, pots and pans with water that in many cases is superior to the bottled water and 1/100th of the price...... small poultry flock owner loading up on "Crapolina" feed, walking through acres of grass and wildflowers to carry the bags to his coop....... it angers me!

It angers me not because they are doing it, but because they have been conditioned to do it! In her heart, every Mother is being told that her child should not drink a soft drink as a newborn....... every American over 40 made it there by drinking tap, hose and even lake water with no ill effects. The water is SAFER now, so why the $3.00 per gallon sippy bottle? AND..... every bird got to 2016 by eating seeds, grasses, bugs (and in the case of chickens everything they could get their beaks on), so why now do they need bagged food with a checkerboard design on it?

THEY DON'T! But we need to re-learn many things to survive what is coming from the combination or groundwater depletion, climate change and the stresses from NINE BILLION humans (2050). Hopefully, this blog and others, can help!

COINCIDENCE??

Having just wrote a little about my "secret feed mixture",  it was time to go to the feed store and get my monthly feed for the poultry. While my mix is a custom one I developed for our birds, I did contact all the independent feed mills in west Texas, to see if anyone had a suitable mix already.

When we started our poultry farm in north Florida, the people I worked for actually had MOST of the components in the mix the provided to the commercial flock and for sale to individuals. Since the company added their antibiotics, hormones, steroids and other crap through the water, the actual mix was a good start AND it contained the premix already, which saved money.

One big problem I have with the checkerboard people and most others, is that they use bentonite clay or other things as a "cold binder" in their mix, so that they can extrude pellets. This can be up to 15% of the total mix! This means when you pay the premium for the checkerboard "crapolina" brand feed, you have to add an ADDITIONAL 15% to your cost, to equalize the nutritional benefit with a custom blend!

I called around here to see if I could find a caring independent and did! Independent feed mills either do not have the resources to "modernize" their equipment, or as in the case of the mill I found, care enough about the poultry & the farmer, to strive to provide the very best! These mills, the one I found as well, heat, NOT COOK, heat the grains so that the corn gluten becomes "gluey", then extrude it into pellets. Heating is of course, more expensive, so  the checkerboard people found a way, bentonite, to eliminate that cost, trim costs (bentonite is cheaper than corn) and still have a 50 pound bag of chicken feed MIX to sell without running into "truth" issues. By the way, they also crack out much of the corn germ for use elsewhere, lowering their cost more, keeping the "CRUDE protein" level the same (crude protein is the total amount of protein in the bag, whether it is digestible as the grains are, or indigestible, as feathers, hair, stalks and so on are), but the actual nutrition the birds has to utilize, is not..... yet they still charge several dollars MORE for the feed and present a "good" reputation to the public!

My local feed dealer is a "checkerboard contract store", which means they have a contract to sell and push checkerboard products about all else. This is reinforced by the many little free giveaways, trips, electronics and so on, as well as cash back for hitting set sales goals. This results in store owners whose eyes are more on a trip to Hawaii, or a condo in a resort area, rather than the health of the Nation's food supply. It does however, eliminate or marginalize the competition, which is why I personally have seen a many-fold increase in the number of feed stores "flying the checkerboard" in recent years....... and why finding a feed mill who creates a healthy poultry feed took me 400 miles from home!

ANYWAY........ my local guy was sold out of the feed mill mix yesterday. That happens! He was also sold out of milo as well. Seriously, that happens too and we have to be ready to adapt!

I had to step aside and recalculate my custom mix to what was available THAT DAY, rather than do what the checkerboard folks want and say, "just give me ten bags of crapolina". You need to do the same! NEVER, NEVER, reward bad behavior! Now my local guy did not run out on purpose, it just happened..... but to buy the crapolina instead, rewards the checkerboard people for removing the corn germ, adding bentonite and bribing store owners with "gifts" & contests that have zero benefit to our livestock! DON'T DO IT! Buy anything else! Voting with your dollars is the most effective way to win an "election"!

So and this is the whole point of this post,  I went back to my base mix: corn, ground soy, wheat, milo and millet. He had two bags of my mix, which I did buy, but save for our young chicks because the premix is already in it, I just have to add some ground soy and grit for "starter mix".

Millet was a bit lower priced than usual, so the mix became: 3 corn, 3 ground soy, 2 millet and 2 wheat, for 18.9% protein. My normal mix with the milo would have been 19.33%, so it was close enough. I could have added rolled oats and hit or exceeded 20%, but at $27 a bag, we only use that for the mealworms.

Poultry are very adaptable and the change in grains, taste, or texture does not bother them. In fact I think they see a different taste as "candy" and eat it more eagerly!

My feed store will have my feed mill feed in a week or so, so I bought just enough to hold us for two weeks. Living on the border like we do, rice was also an option to substitute, as was any type of dried beans. These need grinding for chicks though.

As a final challenge, the young guys who load the feed made an error in my order, despite my asking the to double check it (to save me the 140 mile round trip back). They grabbed WHOLE roasted soy instead of GROUND soy! Again, to adapt, I mixed it with the other grains for the adult birds who can grind it in their gizzards and will grind the beans myself if I need to make more starter for our chicks.

The key to raising any livestock is OUR ability to adapt. For millennia, Man has fed His herds according to what Nature provided. There was no "checkerboard store" 50 years ago, let alone 5000 years ago. Americans have been quite efficiently "trained" to buy prepared feed and when that feed is unavailable, we "crash" and don't know what to do. The feed store will always have a MORE EXPENSIVE alternative for sale, checkerboard makes sure of that! But by understanding your animals' needs and creating a custom mix, you both provide better nutrition to your livestock and get closer to them!

ATTENTION, FOR AREA RESIDENTS:

ORDER YOUR SPRING POULTRY THIS WEEK!

Again this year, we are ordering poultry from a hatchery: McMurray Hatchery (http://mcmurrayhatchery.com). If anyone in the area is interested in any breed of these poultry species: chickens, ducks, geese, or turkeys in any amount (1 to 500+) I would be happy to add your birds to our order.

By doing this, you can order 1, 2, or 3 of one breed, instead of the minimums of 10 or more. Shipping is a LOT less as well. It is a chance to get that unusual bird you want for a decent price.

Anyone who would like to order, please look at what McMurray has available for delivery during the week of March 28th. Your cost would be the actual cost of the birds, plus $.50 per bird for shipping and a flat $5.00 fee per order, no matter how many you order.

We need to order before this Friday afternoon. You can pay any time from now to March 1st.

Also, ducks, geese.... ALL waterfowl, cannot eat medicated chicken starter!!!The medication can kill them and the protein content is too low. I will have custom blended feeds available in bulk ( one pound to 100 pounds) available to purchase with NO medications. The price will be less than the area stores that carry feed.

For more information, please contact me privately, through here, Robert@eco-ranch.us  or 432-371-3200

Poultry Feed & Nutrition

The most important part of keeping poultry, is feeding them. Of course it can be argued that water, housing, medication, light and so on are equally important and they are! But feed is what makes or breaks a flock’s health and so that seems to be a place to start our poultry discussions.

When I began to work in the commercial egg business, we had just started our flock. Feed for us and for many, if not most flock owners, was something you bought at the feed store, trusting the owner and agribusiness to provide suitable nutrition. As I studied every aspect of chicken husbandry, I also learned that the company I worked for provided the barest minimum of nutrition to keep the birds laying until their first molt and some until their second molt. The birds were then removed and new “pullets” young females, were placed in the houses and the cycle began again. We had a contract with Campbell’s soup at one time, who took our spent hens and processed them into chicken soups.

The company lost that contract and I was told it was due to the fact that our hens had virtually no salvageable meat on them! The girls had put all their energy into eggs and when their “time was up”, they were past ready to die! With no buyer, the company killed and buried the hens, sometimes 20,000 at a time, in pits.

Antibiotics and steroids kept them laying one egg every 16 hours until Nature forced the molt on them, when they would stop laying…… for about 8 weeks…. Then start again laying fewer, but bigger eggs. The expense of feeding them for eight non-productive weeks, coupled with the reduced egg production when they started again, actually made it more expensive to keep them than to replace them, particularly after losing the income from the as spent hens.

I mention all this, because from my observation, nutrition may well be the key to reducing the outbreaks and the mortality from avian diseases, including HPAI. While it may be an impossible task to convince agribusinesses to change their feed practices due to a variety of factors, small to medium flock owners and owners of specialty, “niche” varieties of poultry can easily do this with little or no impact on their income!

I have received many contacts from Asia & Africa, as well as from backyard poultry owners here in North America. I always research the questions before responding and try to give the best answer for that particular circumstance. I do not have all the answers and the ones I have, may not be best suited to every flock, but using my knowledge, such as it is, along with the knowledge from the MANY other great flock owners out there, can guide you on the path to a healthy, profitable and satisfying flock experience. So please take whatever I present, ALONG WITH the information others (other than agribusiness) offer use it to manage your flocks!

So, I posted two videos about my “secret feed mix”, which is not a secret, but IS something that company with the “checkerboard” does not want you to know. Some 40,000 people have viewed it! While the kitten in a teacup, or elephant eating an ice cream cone may get millions of views, I still think the opportunity to inform 40,000 people is extraordinary!

The feed mixture I use was developed using the feed mix used by the egg producer I worked for, adding missing elements necessary for a long, healthy, productive poultry life. I am talking right now about a feed mix, not an overall diet, or even the best diet, just what I feel is a great feed mix. Another post will get into the overall diet, which is equally important.

The chicken house feed recipe was simple: ground soy & ground corn, blended to 18% protein, with a vitamin/mineral premix added. The hormones, antibiotics and steroids were added to the water. This mix is also a very good base mix for rearing hogs. Humans and animals with a little, key word LITTLE, bit of “fat” have always seemed healthier to me, probably due to the ready availability of the fat to be converted into nutrition when needed…… which is most of the time long before visible illness symptoms appear. To me, this is the most important part of my “secret” to keeping healthy poultry: A LITTLE FAT!

Also, a couple of amino acids are missing in the soy/corn mix and while they are added to the pre-mix, I feel that getting them direct from foods is a better option. So I added several grains, which you can customize to your location and even add fish meal!

My mix, which you can download here: http://eco-ranch.us/POULTRYFEEDMIX.pdf is location specific. It adds sorghum or milo, wheat and millet to the corn/soy and increases the base protein level to 19-20%. IT also MUST have a vitamin/mineral pre-mix added, as well as calcium carbonate for layers and increased protein for babies, waterfowl and turkeys.

But some in Africa cannot get milo and also tell me that corn is expensive. On the other hand, millet is readily available and as a “miracle grain” is a better option that can be used to replace some ingredients. Wheat tends to slow digestion a bit. It should be omitted from the feed for chicks up to 6 weeks of age for this reason, we want good development and faster digestion! Some parts of Asia cannot get corn, substitute rice! Cannot find wheat? Substitute rolled oats! Want to substitute even though it is all available? Go ahead! Soy is expensive, but fish meal is not? Use fish meal!

The key to the feed mix is VARIETY and PROTIEN, not the exact recipe and NEVER, NEVER forget the premix if your birds are kept in coops or under 8 weeks of age!

I spoke at length with a Cambodian immigrant here, who made yearly visits back to Cambodia to help his home villagers to move out of poverty. He feels that poultry is a great way to do this. I agree! However, poultry has been in Cambodia for millennia, as it has in much of Asia, in the form of “Village Chicken”. These are more feral breeds of chicken that are tended by women when they are not gathering water, feeding children, washing clothes, or any of the myriad of things rural Asian women are tasked to do. Village chickens therefore, are a small source of income and eggs, but have great flavor when butchered.

My Cambodian friend was telling me of a disease that would wipe out flocks virtually overnight. It was close to but not Newcastle’s, not coccidia, not Marek’s. He could not name it, but the villagers fear it and won’t invest a lot in their chickens because of it. I studied about 20 publications and found it to be: HPAI, or “Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. This is not the dreaded “bird flu”, or H5N1, but just as devastating to flocks.

Oddly enough, as I did the research, hidden between the lines, was the cause of the nearly 100% mortality. It is something few think about in the West, but is the reason disease outbreaks in Africa are so deadly and the reason the America pioneers were equally devastated by 19^th century cholera outbreaks….. NO FAT, no stored nutrition reserves to utilized BEFORE the disease symptoms appear! It is the same for animals and for us here: CHICKENS!

I am not saying a fat guy would not die from cholera in 1840’s Kansas, or every chicken in Thailand or China would be spared HPAI or H5N1. I am saying stored nutritional reserves mitigate disease!

The same chickens my former employer could not give away to Campbell’s, produced eggs for me for years and were still laying when we culled our flock to move back to Texas (somehow, a few of his hens got to my farm). Some were 8 years old and still laying!

Feed is the single most important part of flock management, period.

I am also a big believer in:

·         pasturing poultry

·         meal worm farming

·         soldier fly farming

·         maggot traps

·         collecting produce from grocery stores or harvested fields

·         feeding “culled” fruits & vegetables

·         omnivorous diet

These will be the subject of a future post, or the next one. For now, think about feed and ADEQUATE feed. This begins the journey to a healthy, profitable, happy poultry farm!

Happy New Year everyone!!!

Hello!!! Welcome to our new blog!

This is a place to learn about keeping backyard poultry AND "Village Chickens". What is the difference? Backyard poultry is pretty much what we are now doing again in North America. That is, keeping a small flock of various poultry in our backyards, small acreages, or farms, for eggs, meat, profit, or all of them! In North America, we don't actually depend on the birds for our main food source, but do it as a "return to the basics" enterprise.

Village Chickens (and other poultry) is what many in the developing world depend on for their main protein sources. Usually the breeds kept are more feral and lay less eggs...... but it does not have to be that way!

Our YOUTUBE videos (http:// youtube.com/eco-ranchusa   show how to live sustainably, for those of us in the West and maintain a healthy, profitable, disease resistant flock for those in the developing world!

In this blog, we hope to provide readers with ideas, techniques and resources that will enable them to get what they want and need from their flocks, while enjoying having the birds share their lives! Please give us your feedback and do post comments, questions and advice!