Fermenting Feed for Meat Birds

[Beekissed]

Coldest here too that I can remember since I was a little girl...many, many moons ago. I think this is the new normal...unpredictable weather patterns and more severe swings of highs and lows. Just think if we had to do this with no electricity to keep things thawed out....

That may be coming before long too. Our power grid isn't the greatest.

 

[armorfirelady]

-3 here with a roaring blizzard. It's been 20 years since we had one. Girls were toasty warm including their feet. That extra plastic & hay is def keeping them warm. I still had window open 6 inches lol. I closed it for the night tho since screen covered in snow. Few places still letting snow in so tomorrow I will put some burlap up in those spots. Blizzard warning is till Wednesday. Thank goodness I am off today although I am sure fire company will keep me busy

 

[BCMaraniac]

Not snowing now, but -4 degrees here is TN.....brrrrrrr!

 

[Triple Willow]

It's 2' here with -8' wind chill. The snow pretty much missed us, thank goodness. People were actually complaining about the weather reporters because it was forcast and didn't happen. Some people always have to complain about something! They ought to be thankful and hush! I heard several around here have had their water pipes freeze up. It hasn't been this cold here in a long, long time. I hope this doesn't become a regular thing. If it does become regular I have some changes to make in heating, animal housing, etc. Plenty of room for improvement.

 

[armorfirelady]

-8 here windchill -30......:and we must of got all the snow you guys didn't

 

[BCMaraniac]

-8 here as well, wind chill -17 here in TN, but only a couple of inches of snow from yesterday. A lone rooster has been greeting the morning for about an hour.

 

[armorfirelady]

-8 here as well, wind chill -17 here in TN, but only a couple of inches of snow from yesterday.  A lone rooster has been greeting the morning for about an hour.

He is probably complaining about the cold

I checked the temp in the coop & it's actually 7 degrees warmer in there

 

[Triple Willow]

Thread about keeping chickens in REALLY cold temps...
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/...-temps-your-chickens-have-experienced-happily

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Alright ladies and gents! I JUST processed one of the CX's and threw the carcass in for soup. I would like to show off some quick before and after pics. One of these pictures was taken in a bit more daylight than we have right now and so the colors are a smidge truer than the one under yellow man-made lights but, well, it's a cell phone camera. So what do you want?

When I got these sad, sad CXs I processed one on day one. I was horrified by how bad it smelled and how AWFUL the organs looked. This was the photo of the liver I took that day. I threw it in the trash along with the feathers because it looked SO gross. As I pulled it out it started to rip apart in my hands.



I tried to adjust the colors redder to come closer to the ones of the other picture since this was shot in daylight. I shouldn't have. It makes the gross discoloring look MORE appealing than it did when I butchered it. Those light splotchy bits were BRIGHT yellow. This liver was also HUGE, nearly twice the size of a small liver from one of the CX's I raised out early in the year. Bleeeeeh! The tippity tips of this liver were greyish but pretty much liver colored... The rest was just yellow.

Picture two is below. This is the bird I had on a restricted diet of FF for two-three weeks. I just butchered her today. Again I tried to adjust the colors to be bluer to match the other one... It just didn't work well. I shouldn't have. The colors don't do this liver justice anymore, but the difference is still violently clear.



This liver is 2/3rds the size, a solid color, beautiful RED color like a really healthy liver. There was some coloration on it that was not completely uniform unlike the livers from the CX's I produce but all around it was one color. There was no sign of yellow anywhere on the liver. It was firm and came out as one piece with rough handling.

I think that's about it. 'Nuff said. I know which bird I would rather eat!

 

[Angelicisi]

We are right there with you! And have many people buying breeders now from us because they want to try too. It is hard work but we don't consider it work. We all have a job to do and do it, period and we work dang hard doing it especially while still learning the ropes of it. A lot of us don't have guidence or advice, grandparents have passed or we were too young when parents went...um modern? Thank goodness so many here are willing to help and share their 1st hand knowledge of what needs to be taught and continued to be taught by people doing it. So much nonsense information that some people continue to collect and put in books or in articles and they've never even eaten a backyard egg or had to clean poop off anything :/ lol Keep the info flowing! You all have helped Me tremendously!

Hey, to be fair to us youngun's, some of us are TRYING to make a come back. Honestly, it is my dream to be a subsistence farmer... Unfortunately, it's my beau's dream to own a retail gaming store and those two things don't really line up. My mom lived on a farm for about her first ten years but then she was thoroughly a modern person by the time I came along. While she still hung laundry to dry and washed dished by hand and cooked from scratch, that was about it. Not really the type of lifestyle you folks talk about.

Now that I have been at this for a year I really am starting to appreciate how much work goes into my food. I have been trying to eat less meat because I am trying to provide my own meat and that's really hard work and sometimes the animals don't even produce. It's been five months since I processed a rabbit! I haven't bought eggs in eight months, and even though I only have one hen laying I still don't buy em. I go without eggs instead. I'm looking at adding a miniature sheep and a mini goat to my property in the next year and I know it's going to be a ton of work. I spent a day butchering a tiny suckling pig this year... And I can't even imagine how tough it is to butcher a full sized pig! I've also gotten more people involved in their food. I have taught a dozen people how to skin rabbits this year, and I had a class of 8 come in from another city from a college to watch me butcher some as part of their agriculture class. I'm meeting some more people interested in learning later today. And yesterday I finished tanning my own rabbit hides! I am thinking of making a throw out of them by stitching a bunch of them together. I gave one of them to my sister that helped me butcher the pig. And later in the season I will be making my second ever batch of canned chicken broth out of the frozen carcasses from the chickens I butchered over the last year! I will be doubling the size of last year's garden this year and I will be trying to store more of my vegetables and working out the problems. By the end of next year I want to be confident in growing my entire supply of carrots for the following year.

So some of us are still trying! Personally I want to learn all this to be entirely self-sufficient. I don't want to be reliant on our current system. I wanna walk into my back yard whenever I need something and pull it out of wherever it is, still alive and growing and say "I made this, I know exactly what went into it, I can make more, and now I get to eat this" rather that a grocery store and grab something that was pulled a month ago and say "I know nothing about this and put no effort into it. Time to buy it, pay a hundred taxes on it, take it home, store it for a while, then eat it." And someday I will get there! And along the way I will drag as many people along the same path as I can. So people do try still! And that is about all we can do in a modern world.