Recent content by figsonwheels

Some time in January, we put some foam insulation in our chicken run because it was going to be below freezing for a week. It fell to where the chickens could get it. They pecked at it for several hours before we noticed it and took it out. That day and the next, our egg production doubled. A...

So sorry for not posting updates. Our life exploded with craziness. We kept feeding the two tractors separately, one with fermented and the other with dry crumbles. The tractors were moved every other day, so there was no build up of poop in either. We did notice that the fermented feed...

Our birds are 75 days old now and are still doing great. We are pretty sure the White Broilers are bug enough to butcher and the Red Rangers are close. It's hunting season, so the chickens will have to wait. They are all healthy and walking around (not just plopping down like our others did). We...

We are moving both tractors every few days. There is no noticeable difference in growth between the tractors, although the White Broilers are larger than the Red Rangers in both tractors. They are almost 7 weeks and none of them are even close to butchering weight, but we expected that. Both...

The chickens are 39 days old today. We had a cold snap last week and wanted to keep the birds together a little longer so they could take advantage of each others' heat. We've not had to use a heat lamp on them for almost a week, so they will be fine being separated. Today, we weighed them...

We moved the chicks outside this afternoon! They are 19 days old. We weighed the chickens as we moved them in to the tractor. All weights are in ounces. Total Weight Average Weight Weight Gain Smallest Bird Largest Bird White Broilers 104.3 8.02 87.3 6.2 9.2 Red Rangers 103.1...

This is the end of the second week we have had the chicks, although they are 16 days old. They have consumed a total of 51 cups of grains, measured dry (just about 15 pounds). Some of the chicks have a good amount of feathers on them. I think they feather better when they are not so warm...

The chicks are just over a week old (hatched 9/5/12) and we are THRILLED with the result of the fermented feed. We cleaned out the brooder today because the poop build-up and they had spilled some water. In the past, we had to clean it out because of the smell. There is really no noticeable...

We had one of the white broilers die. When I went out to feed them this morning, the chick that was only .8 ounces had died. I kind of expected that. The first day's food was almost all eaten. I gave them more food and then added another 4 cups of dry chick starter crumbles to the fermenting...

Twenty eight chicks arrived today - 14 Red Ranger Broilers and 14 Jumbo Cornish X Rock Females (White Broilers) from Murray McMurray Hatchery. They are all in one brooder drinking water and eating fermented grains from the 6 cups I started fermenting 5 days ago. After I filled their trough, I...

Once we had our plans drawn and most of the materials purchased, it only took a week to complete it including the painting and finishing touches ~ and we did not work on it all day, just in 3 to 4 hour slots. We are very happy with it and have not had a critter issue yet-it's been over 4 months.

DH and I are hardly ever on the same page until about half way brought the build. That's how we know we love each other~we keep sticking it out and work on new projects together!!

We built an inexpensive A-Frame chicken coop when we first got chickens 3 1/2 years ago. We kept adding more chickens and adding on to our run, and adding a new nesting area, adding tarps for shade, that our simple A-Frame coop and run looked like "Chicken Ghetto." This last April, we tore...

So, we don't have this coop any more. We kept adding birds, we increased the run size by 64 more square feet, but it was still not big enough. We then added another 200 square feet of run and it looked like chicken ghetto! We tore the whole thing down and built a new coop. This coop would have...

I just spent most of yesterday and this morning reading all 115 pages of this tread: https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/644300/fermenting-feed-for-meat-birds, plus many of the links. My eyes are buggie and I have four pages of notes. I started this thread to document our experiment and keep...