BREEDING FOR PRODUCTION...EGGS AND OR MEAT.

[bnjrob]

Sorry, I didn't mean move their permanent home, I meant when you want to have them range/work in a specific area during the day. People talk/write about it all the time, taking a few hens and putting them in a 4x8 tractor fit on top of a raised bed for the day to work the soil as part of crop rotation. The point of the tractor would be to keep them on the bed they are supposed to be working, and not damaging other crops in the garden (from which they would usually be excluded during ranging). I was just wondering how one moved them from coop to garden tractor in the morning and back in the afternoon - catching and carrying each one sounds like a giant pain and stressful for the birds. Do people use a little red wagon?

gjensen, I realize you may not know if you don't do this, I was just hoping someone who did could explain - I have yet to see it addressed in a book or here, though perhaps I'm not using the right search terms?

Thanks for everyone's patience with my questions...

- Ant Farm

You would have to physically carry or try to herd them if you were not having them stay for several days in one place. Most of the time, even when they are on top of a raised bed, they are there for days at a time to make sure they completely get everything tilled up and they live in that one spot for a while. When we move multiple birds to different houses, we tend to do it at night since it's easier to pick them up off their roost than catch them while they are awake. I have a cage that goes on my utility cart, and we'll grab the birds off the roost, put them in the cage, and wheel them to wherever we are taking them. It's a pain in the butt, but sometimes we have to play chicken-basket-upset if we want particular birds in a particular house. Now if they were turkeys, you could just herd them. Turkeys herd much better than chickens and I can move them while they are awake, they simply walk with their house as it moves and when the bottom frame board bumps them, they know to keep on walking forward.

 

[Our Roost]

Have you ever thought of using the KISS method? It basically stands for Keep It Simple St---d. It generally helps me resolve most of my Obsessive chicken disorders. When I first started raising chickens we wanted egg birds so I bought 5 of each chosen breed to equal 25. The next year we decided on meat birds to accompany the egg layers, so I did some searching and a couple of years later acquired some good prospective meat birds. In the mean time, I discovered that all hens lay eggs! I didn't need egg layers anymore and only a good meat bird that laid eggs while waiting to be bred with roosters in the spring would suffice. Life had become simplar with just one breed that served both purposes.

But of course I have more chickens iam using to create the Super Breed! All I have to do is remember to keep it simple!

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

Have you ever thought of using the KISS method? It basically stands for Keep It Simple St---d. It generally helps me resolve most of my Obsessive chicken disorders. When I first started raising chickens we wanted egg birds so I bought 5 of each chosen breed to equal 25. The next year we decided on meat birds to accompany the egg layers, so I did some searching and a couple of years later acquired some good prospective meat birds. In the mean time, I discovered that all hens lay eggs! I didn't need egg layers anymore and only a good meat bird that laid eggs while waiting to be bred with roosters in the spring would suffice. Life had become simplar with just one breed that served both purposes.

But of course I have more chickens iam using to create the Super Breed! All I have to do is remember to keep it simple!

Yes, well, that's what everyone else has said, but thanks for the +1.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

Catching and moving chickens twice daily isn't fun for anyone. We did this for a bit with my CX pullets when I decided they needed to go on the Jenny Craig pasture for a bit and not hang out with the main flock during the day. Needless to say, the summer got hot and there was too much running involved for us and the chickens to keep it up.

Thanks for sharing this experience - this is the mental image I had of myself trying to do this. That's why this didn't make much sense to me...

If I were to utilize the chickens in the garden (versus their current job up at the barn turning compost for us) I would build the main coop near the garden and run "chicken tunnels" around the garden with doors that could be opened or closed to give them access to certain areas. Raised beds could easily be closed off for the chickens to work on with some fiberglass rods and a small section of fencing. You can do a google image search for "chicken tunnels in garden" to get an idea of how they're built. Although I will note that a lot of them seem to be built of either chicken wire or are fairly narrow. Something bigger and sturdier would stand up to time and predators better.

I actually have a good book on chickens and gardens, and this is a great idea. Unfortunately, for where I live, shade is paramount for the permanent coop placement, and there's almost none in the garden, so it'd be like raising chickens in a Sun Oven... (I wouldn't have them back there to work beds except between November and March, of course!)

You would have to physically carry or try to herd them if you were not having them stay for several days in one place. Most of the time, even when they are on top of a raised bed, they are there for days at a time to make sure they completely get everything tilled up and they live in that one spot for a while. When we move multiple birds to different houses, we tend to do it at night since it's easier to pick them up off their roost than catch them while they are awake. I have a cage that goes on my utility cart, and we'll grab the birds off the roost, put them in the cage, and wheel them to wherever we are taking them. It's a pain in the butt, but sometimes we have to play chicken-basket-upset if we want particular birds in a particular house. Now if they were turkeys, you could just herd them. Turkeys herd much better than chickens and I can move them while they are awake, they simply walk with their house as it moves and when the bottom frame board bumps them, they know to keep on walking forward.

Thank you so much - I guess I wasn't articulating clearly enough earlier, but this was exactly what I was trying to ask - how do you move chickens besides carrying each one individually. This helps - if I were to move them to the garden (at night, multiple days, tractor/shelter, noted), I would indeed use a little red wagon (with cage(s)).

- Ant Farm

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

We can't let them share wire between their pens, they will fight through the wire. Occasionally have to break up cock fights when a cock that is ranging decides to run up to a pen and fight with the cock inside the pen through the wire. And it can get bloody even with wire between them if I don't break it up fast enough.

All of our housing is mobile and ranges from the small a-frames that house single cocks, or a couple of hens if need be, up to large sheds on axles/tires that you can stick a twin bed in and a kid could live in it for a bedroom.

There's no set distance that we have as far as keeping them separated. The closest the pens may be to each other is 3 feet - the space around each pen is simply to allow us an easy time to service the pen with food/water etc., as well as to make it easy to hook up to the lawnmower or tractor and move each pen to fresh grass just by pulling straight ahead until the entire pen is on new ground. The smaller pens tend to be put closer together or closer to larger pens that may hold hens or the grow out pens, but that is because it is easier to maneuver the small pens compared to our big ones that we can walk inside of. The bigger pens are spread out more just for ease of poultry care and getting them fresh grass since they don't turn on a dime.

Our smallest a-frames are 4 ft x 8 ft and approx. 3 ft tall and they do a nice job of giving a full grown rooster of nearly 10 lbs, room to stretch and flap his wings, strut up and down and show off to the rooster next to him, and still have room to dig in the dirt. They are open air, with the back end being the coop portion which is covered with 1 inch foam board insulation and *plastic* corrugated roofing panels, with 1/4 inch hardware cloth over the insulation boards but underneath the roofing panels for predator protection. The *run* portions are hardware cloth layered with welded wire on our smaller pens. The large pens have chicken wire layered with welded wire but they are not suitable for putting small chicks/birds in like our small a-frames with the hardware cloth on them.

We also make some of the small ones that are 10 ft long that are able to house a couple of cocks comfortably, and we do have a couple of pairs of cocks that live together. Otherwise the slightly longer *small* pens can house more hens at one time or a cock and a few hens.

We do have males that live year round in different pens with females, otherwise we would need a lot more pens. But we keep way more birds, especially males, than most folks because we are not only dealing with rare birds that are difficult to find if we have any losses, but we also have multiple bloodlines and color varieties, so we have backup breeders for each of those.

When we have a cock that is going to breed with a specific set of females, then we just move roosters around to get the right male with the right females, a month or so before we get ready to collect eggs for incubation.

Here's what the *small* pens look like. They are fast to build, not very expensive, and very sturdy. You can see some of the other large chicken tractors in the pasture in the background. Our large a-frame chicken tractors are essentially like this, just much bigger with room for us to walk in and not have to bend over when we are underneath the ridge beam.

Super helpful - thanks so much for the detailed description/explanation!!! I would never have an operation with your scope and size, but your set up helps me understand what is involved when housing and managing roosters (few or many), and that knowledge would apply whether I had one breed or six (at which point I would probably need to be committed, of course)...

Thanks again!

OK, I will shut up now and stop monopolizing the thread with all my enthusiastic newbie-ness...

- Ant Farm

 

[dfr1973]

OK, I will shut up now and stop monopolizing the thread with all my enthusiastic newbie-ness...

- Ant Farm

Most of us have done this, as well ... and I got all the same advice about only one breed and keeping things simple to start. So, me being me, I choose a breed with NINE accepted color varieties ... Wyandottes.

 

[bnjrob]

I actually have a good book on chickens and gardens, and this is a great idea. Unfortunately, for where I live, shade is paramount for the permanent coop placement, and there's almost none in the garden, so it'd be like raising chickens in a Sun Oven... (I wouldn't have them back there to work beds except between November and March, of course!)

Thank you so much - I guess I wasn't articulating clearly enough earlier, but this was exactly what I was trying to ask - how do you move chickens besides carrying each one individually. This helps - if I were to move them to the garden (at night, multiple days, tractor/shelter, noted), I would indeed use a little red wagon (with cage(s)).

- Ant Farm

Shade is a HUGE problem for us, living in the middle of pasture. So we make our own. Every chicken tractor has a double layer of shade cloth on it. The shade cloth we were able to get a few years ago was much thicker and only needed one layer, but the stuff that Lowes/Home Depot carry now, needs two layers to provide the deep shade needed for a Texas summer. It does great and when we are inside the pens during the heat of the day, there is a significant difference in temperature where the chickens are at, compared to the full sun outside of the chicken pens. The shade cloth goes down to within 18-24 inches of the ground. If you take it all the way to the ground it cuts off air flow and gets too hot.

Yep - you really do use a little red wagon. I have a cage that I got at Tractor Supply, meant for rabbits, but it works for chicken transporting too. It is also my broody breaker cage. It's too short for a rooster to stay in for any length of time, but it's tall enough for a hen and when you move the wire floor so it sits up inside the outer cage and not directly on the ground, it does great to get the broody up off the ground and get her broodiness broken.

 

[JRNash]

I've got my own ideas about how I want to do the things with my roosters, or at least I thought I did.lol The endless information and other people's ideas and questions keeps me steadily modifying how to go about things. BYC has got to be the most informative helpful website there is. I will literally wake up in the middle of the night with some oddball question,do a BYC search and Bingo!!someone has asked and answered what I'm looking for. Simply Amazing.

 

[eyralis]

Hi! We have a flock of five bantam faverolles (2 salmon, one black, one blue, one splash). We love, love, love their friendly disposition.

We're hoping to achieve these three goals:
More eggs
Bigger eggs (for bantams)
Still as sweet, docile, quiet and friendly.

Should we start crossing within different faverolles strains?

Or is there another breed that is as docile and people-loving as the faverolles, but lays even better?

 

[gjensen]

Hi! We have a flock of five bantam faverolles (2 salmon, one black, one blue, one splash). We love, love, love their friendly disposition.

We're hoping to achieve these three goals:
More eggs
Bigger eggs (for bantams)
Still as sweet, docile, quiet and friendly.

Should we start crossing within different faverolles strains?

Or is there another breed that is as docile and people-loving as the faverolles, but lays even better?

Bantam Faverolles have enough size to lay a medium sized bantam egg.

They would not have ever truly selected as layers. They could still be commendable.

I would decide on a color, and go with a single color. I would say go with the Salmon color. A beautiful and unique color. There are plenty of mediocre to poor blue birds. But that is up to you, and not me.
If you have birds that are any good, there would be a market for them, and could offset cost. This can equalize any disadvantage they have to more productive birds.

Egg size is very simple to select for. Simply set a minimum size for setting. Raise the bar as you make progress. Learning to select for good type and capacity will help in this regard, and is fundamental to breeding good birds. Type gives them potential, but you have to be sure they realize that potential. Learn to breed good Faverolles.

Select according to their POL (an appropriate POL), consider their winter habits, when they molt (early, late, how long?). When do they fully come back into lay during the spring etc. A good layer is the sum of her parts, and a compilation of characteristics.

Crossing strains is an option, and always is. It is usually more advisable to breed them as you are until you at least know what you need. Then any sourced birds can be selected according to need.

There is a saying to Start where you are with what you have, and I think it applies here. You might need more than a pair to start (hard to say), but you could possibly enjoy learning to breed good Faverolles. Good examples are nice birds. Poor examples are just birds.