Note: the chickens have grown. They stay cute for about 2 days, then they start getting weird and manky looking as their feathers come in and often try to eat one another. Beautiful creatures, chickens. Whenever anyone tells me how much they love chickens I always think they probably have not yet met enough of them.
We move them about the pasture in giant chicken tractors. They are protected from predators, but get fresh grass and the pleasure of eating all the bugs they can catch. If they were free range, they would be free food for the foxes, cougars, coons and wandering farm dogs. They would also burn a lot of extra calories, making feed to meat conversion less efficient and less cost effective. Being on grass reduces their feed intake some and I think it makes for happier birds.
(I recently saw “vegetarian eggs” recently. Some food for thought for anyone thinking this more humane: if the chicken is not able to eat a bug, it is not outside. Also, chickens LIKE to eat bugs. If you think that’s gross, that’s really just too bad.)
The path of destruction in their wake is quickly replaced by beautiful lush green turf.
There are 50 chickens in each pen. They get moved out into the tractors around 3-4 weeks of age. I move a cooler of feed along with them, so I don’t have to worry about coons getting to the food. (They seem to be able to undo all securing mechanisms on garbage bins). I also bought an extra hose this year so I can bring the hose pretty close to them, instead of having to haul multiple jugs of water back and forth every time I do chores.
We raise “Special Dual Purpose” chickens from a local hatchery. They are a bit slower growing than say, a White Mountain. I have heard from people who raise those that you always know when they’re “ready” because their legs start to break and their hearts stop. Lovely. This is what happens when you mess so heavily with genetics. The birds we raise grow a bit faster than “Heritage” breeds. We have raised a few of those, and while they were very nice birds and actually acted like chickens and not chicken breasts, we wanted a little bit more bang for our buck.
BUCK-ACK!
Every time you post about the chickens, I think of the Arrested Development chicken dances:
http://www.break.com/usercontent/2009/6/arrested-development-chicken-dances-796328.html
Also, that first picture is really awesome. I love how many chicken facial expressions you caught there!
Vegetarian chickens? That’s one to tell my Dad about, we pen our veg patches and let a couple of chickens loose in ‘em for a morning to nom on the bugs every few days. Makes for happy if some what fat hens
What is the ‘dual purpose”? or better yet….what are their purposes? (I don’t know very much about chickens)
I really want chickens for the eggs. Are the dual purpose chickens good for a fair amount of eggs?
I have raised chickens on and off my whole life, and I adore the stupid things. My last batch loved nothing more than foraging for bugs in the grass, and we loved watching them. My honey wouldn’t let me eat them, so we gave them to a neighbor. I miss the little buggers. There is something so comforting about holding a chicken!
I loved the chickens we had too, layers, we had a trio of Araucana (Connie, Ethel and Princess) and a bunch of white hens. Yes, they are terrible creatures but I still like them. And I am comfortable eating them too.
I so wish we could have chickens, even one or two would be nice. but nooooooooooooooooo silly city ordiance.
I absolutely ADORE chickens. If there are a whole bunch of them – like any group of animals – including humans -they behave differently than as individuals. My Mom had a hen named “Umpy” that used to lay eggs at Mom’s feet.
I’ve been a vegetarian most of my life, but only recently have taken the leap into veganism.
LOVIN’ IT!!!
Ashley and Scott take incredibly good care of their animals.
I wish they everyone was as kind…
Dual Purpose: laying and eating. Our dual purpose layers gave us an egg a day each, can’t ask for better than that.
Don’t get me wrong, I like our laying hens. But 100 meat birds? When you have to dispatch a chicken who’s missing a leg because his brothers decided to gnaw it off… you don’t feel a lot of love.
Mob mentality among chickens ; sad but true.
Speaking of mobs…. it’s Pride Weekend here in Toronto…. even though I am far from Church St. I can still hear house beats….
I don’t comment very often but I’m an avid reader of your blog!
This year we invested in an incubator, got some free fertile eggs from our local farm and now have our first 6 chickens and 4 turkeys. Hopefully our next hatch will have better resuts as we only hit a 50% hatch rate, here’s to the start of the new future!
Congratulations Vicky! Friends of ours are having a go at incubating. I’m hoping they are successful so we can stop relying on hatcheries.
Diane: oooonz oooonz ooooonz!
Our poultry run (and waddle) around crapping on everything, but I enjoy them immensely. Only one has a name: the lead goose, who has the title of Madame. She talks back and is somewhat personable. American Buff, if you’re interested. Of the chickens, the Fayoumis are my favorites, even though they’re not really worth eating.
We are thinking of getting a couple of chickens—-just merely for the eggs is what we are wanting and a new novelty in the backyard at the same time! We are not familiar with having chickens at all—–what do you suggest a person gets if this is what they are looking for?
My wife and I would love to have chickens some day, but unfortunately, I don’t think they would fit on our apartment balcony.
you totally nailed what I heard ALL DAY
Momx3: Friendly egg layer who you’ll love: Buff Orphington. Talk to Cheryl Murray at the Fettle, she’s got an incubator of those guys!
To be fair, when they are free-range, they don’t try to eat each other. That’s a crowd pressure thing.
Also, free-ranging them doesn’t make them prey, if you have a good farm dog around. When I was a girl on a Louisiana farm, our chickens roamed the yard and roosted in the trees or on fences at night. We had a few dogs on the place and never a problem with losing chickens. On the downside, my great-grandmother had to put a high fence around the vegetable garden.
Priscilla, how many chickens did you have free ranging at once? Were they layers or meat birds? If they were meat birds, what age did you raise them to and how much did you have to compensate for caloric burn?
Yes, eating each other can be crowd pressure, but any stress will set them off. Ours went barmy on each other this year when they were moved from the brooder to the pens. Also one year I mistakenly put in strawberries as scraps and anywhere there was pink or red on a white chicken, well they ate it…. bird included. That has nothing to do with crowd pressure and everything to do with a chickens natural lust for protein.
I’m in no way interested in keeping several dogs to keep all of the predators at bay, which are regularly spotted on our property. I think the height of concern for us would be the wandering dogs, (neighbours, not ours – have enough concern about dog fights as it is with our lap dogs).
We grow chickens in one burst over the summer, and there’s no way the investment in canine cost (guardian training, basic health care and feed for 12 months) would be justified by the 8-12 weeks of the year we have them.
And over my frankly dead and rotting corpse would I allow 100+ roosters to roam about the lawn!! We had one rooster last year we allowed to free range with our pleasant hens and he did nothing but attack our children, as they are prone to doing. My friends son could have lost his eyeball last year to one of their roosters, who was allowed to free range.
Not happening, though I am very glad to hear that worked for you. I am sure it works for some. Certainly something to be said for the raging popularity of electro poultry netting, we would consider that absolutely when the children are older, but for now we stick to the Salatin style tractors which offer the protection they need, while keeping them on fresh grass.
…And in addition to attacking the children, the rooster attacked our dog, badly. He was afraid to go outside, and would not go out the front door by fall. He would only go out the laundry room door on the side, scuttle around back and then rush back in.
This is the same dog who got attacked by a mouse last week, alas he is not hardy farm stock! Haha.
Puppers got p’owned by a mouse?
Would love to see a pictorial of that one!
Hey Ashley! Glad all is well on the farming front. Keep up the outstanding work!! Me and my brood will be in Southampton during the last week of July. Would you care to pop by our cottage for a visit? You could take in Lake Huron from a Southampton perspective…………
i just started raising chickens this year for eggs. we got three different kinds of chicks at one week of age. i’m excited watching them grow and taking care of them daily is quite relaxing. sometimes i just go out to watch them scratch in the dirt, dust bath themselves, or even handle them. i have three lady birds, which is the maximum allotment allowed in city limits. i couldn’t imagine having 100! but then again, i don’t have a farm (someday!). it’s amazing what they can do to a patch of grass, isn’t it? happy chickens!