"culls?" What to do with them?

[TimG]

Quote:
I think there are some people who (quite reasonably) care what kind of conditions their chickens will be living in after they are sold (or given away). I wouldn't sell a hen to go live in a coop where the current hens are already stressed from overcrowding, for instance. No, when I sell a hen I do not insist on a coop inspection first, but if I somehow knew that the conditions were poor, I would not make the sale.

I have not been following carefully the complaints of the opening poster, so I do not mean this to support one side or the other. I mean only to address the comments quoted above.

 

[thecochincoop]

Quote:
ok you lost me there. I guess your talking about I should take them to swaps and stuff. I don't want to be taking them places and exposing to illness. I'm not going to be keeping them that long either. I'm talking about getting rid of birds that are 4 weeks old or younger. I don't do a lot of advertising either

Sorry that I lost you there. I'm honestly not criticizing, I'm just trying to understand your logic. You have stated that you don't have the space to raise the number of birds that you are hatching, thus, creating an excess of culls.

You have also stated that you (1.) choose not to sell at swaps, (2.) can't or won't raise young ones until their old enough to bring good prices, (3.) put little effort into advertising, yet you complain about the people who are putting in the effort to get maximum value for the same birds that you are selling cheap.

It seems that the only way that you will be able to find peace with the disposal of your culls will be to either expand your facility to allow for grow out of the better culls, or to send every non-mottled chick to the compost heap asap after it hatches.

At least that's the message that I'm getting, and I apologize for not understanding if you are indeed trying to get a different point across. I'm just one of those guys who is only concerned with what birds are in my pens, and not what everybody else is doing. Once a chicken leaves my property, it's no longer mine to decide it's fate going forward.

My main problem is that I have a quarter acre of land. not a lot to work with there. I am only going to keep roughly 40 mottleds to finish out and then pick from those in the fall. My flock size goal is roughly 20 with some newer birds replacing lesser quality older birds. I am sure there are going to some solids in there that I dont' need and the extra males I will probably just cull. I'm going to estimate going on percentages that I may have about 20 birds to sell young, not a whole lot, but in my small scale operation more than I have room for. There are inevitably going to be solids and splashes crop up when trying to breed for the blue mottleds. I don't really want to cull them all, but most of the breeders that I have talked to don't sell chicks since they don't know what they are going to turn out like so I'm assuming there is a reason why they do it and a theory behind it. Not quite sure I understand the reasoning exactly behind it though unless we're talking about the ones of the color that they are working on. Basically I want to research the options and have everything planned out before I make any rash decisions next year. I was having trouble with incubation this year and once I got it worked out my hatches were mainly late in the year and the young birds weren't selling very good close to fall, I'm just trying to avoid that problem next year. I got a lot of nice birds, but mostly males and sold almost only females. At the very least I think that a majority of males will need to be culled to avoid this in the future. Females weren't too hard to sell by themselves so maybe just culling males and selling females will be the way to go next year.

edited:
Still figuring here. I guess I finished out about 10 males that I would up giving away. That is my only real regret of anything that I did this year, so it seems to me that in order to be more economical and efficient that I need to cull some of the males and just post the solid females for sale as soon as I can tell what they are.

 

[Funky Feathers]

Ohhh, I so need some nice quality Splash (cochin bantams). Anyone?

 

[thecochincoop]

sorry none here untill next year

 

[hunter1hall]

My cull roos go to a zoo. They are food for the reptiles. Its definitely a win win for me. I can hatch all I want and have an avenue to relieve the overpopulation of roos.