Florida Freedom Rangers

[UrbanBirds]

Hi all! This is my second time posting on BYC after lurking here for over a year (my first time was 2 seconds ago).

I wanted to share my experience with my flock and get some ideas from y'all on what to do next.

I have two separate flocks, my eggy girls and my Freedom rangers.

The egg group was my first venture into byc for many years and they are basically a "whitman's layer sampler" from one of the popular commercial hatcheries that I found advertised here. I could not be happier with the way these birds turned out. They are healthy and producing well.

The Freedom Rangers are doing well too. They are eating me out of house and home, of course, but they are thriving and growing into monsters right before my eyes. I started out with 38 (I know that's a weird number) and they have all survived except one that got injured during a careless chicken tractor relocation incident

When I let the FRs out in the am (they are only fed at night) they quickly run out and forage. This is great, this is why I got FRs instead of CXs. But I am in Florida, and at about 10:00 am, it is HOT

That's when ALL of the FRs either go back in the tractor or go find a shady hole or bury themselves in the smilax, lay down, and pant. The layers happily walk all around them, foraging all day, but the meaties want to do nothing but hide from the heat and occasionaly throw sand on their backs. They won't even drink in this state. I have actually brought water to them when they were doing this and they refused it, and even brought a few over to their nipple waterers (I'm a helicopter flockster, I guess).

I am beginning to think that the FR is not suited to hot weather. They are doing ok, but not as well as the layers. If I didn't have layers walking all around them, I guess I wouldn't have a complaint, but I did get these guys bc I wanted birds that forage all day.

So it comes down to the issue that I want to come up with my long term plan for future generations. I've decided that I want to start breeding my own chicks here, rather than just repopulating my egg and meat flocks from internet hatcheries. I want my small farm to be as sustainable and affordable as possible, and breeding myself seems to be the best way to do that.

I have read most of Harley Ussery's book and he is of course a huge proponent of breeding and raising your own chicks instead of relying on the hatcheries and incubators. He feels that this is the best way to come up with a dual purpose breed best suited to your own climate and conditions. Then you aren't raising a big group of meaties for the freezer, you sort of hatch, grow and cull as you go, keep some meat birds, keep some eggies, etc.

At first my plan was to breed a FR cock to some of my generic hatchery layers and see what I got for a DP offspring, but now that I see this heat tolerance issue, I'm not so sure.

I'd love to read anyone else's thoughts on all of this, as I'm sure many here have a lot more experience than I do.

 

[Hummingbird Hollow]

Having been very happy with the 35 Freedom Rangers I raised last summer, I understand your desire to see if you could breed them...or something similar to them yourself. I live in the mountains in Colorado, and while we did have a record hot summer last year, the humidity was very low (think Waldo Canyon forest fire and you have my location) and I didn't notice any particular issues with Freedom Rangers and heat.

If you were satisfied with simply purchacing chicks from the hatchery every year, you could probably just order them earlier in the year and avoid the issue of extreme summer heat.

I did decide to keep two of my FR hens and one FR rooster and put them in with my 7 mature layers and see what happened regarding chicks the followiong summer. I have 2 Easter Eggers, 2 Welsummers, 1 White Plymouth Rock and 2 Barred Plymouth Rock hens. I figure I would gather the EE and Welsummer eggs for the table (they are such a distinctive color that they are easy to spot) and then incubate some of the rest. Since WPRs and BPRs are considered dual purpose birds, I figured crossing them with the FR rooster would end up with someting worth raising for meat, plus some of those eggs would also be from the FR hens.

My plan didn't work out very well. The FR rooster, named Waldo, while at first scared to death of the mature hens grew into a monster bird. Not only was he easily twice the size of most of my dual purpose hens, he was a rapist and a bully. He chased my poor girls around the run for most of the day. There was no courtship or dance to entice them, simply brute force. Egg production dropped almost completely. One of the FR hens seemed to be his favorite, perhaps because the FRs were much larger and slower on their feet than the DP birds. I noticed that she was getting a bald spot on her back. I picked her up to examine her more closely and discovered that she had nasty, open wounds on her sides from this sharp claws. I suppose that if I was intent on breeding, I could have purchased one of those chicken sadles, but I was also worried about my smaller hens and the stress they were under. Waldo became a tasty Coc au vin dinner.

Now, I have read the threads of folks who raised some first generation Freedom Rangers, keeping and breeding some of their original order and were very pleased with the results. Based on my limited experience, I'd say you would need to keep them separate from your other hens due to the size difference. Be fore warned that the FRs are not particularly good layers, and they do continue to eat at a ridiculous rate even into their adulthood. I decided that, in spite of the fact that I love the idea of being more self sufficient and breeding my own, the cost of setting up a separate coop and run, the cost of purchasing an incubater, plus the cost of feeding a poorly producing flock through the winter in the hopes of hatching some babies in the spring really wasn't as cost effective as simply purchasing some new chicks when I needed them.

 

[Hummingbird Hollow]

I got the Meyers Hatchery catalog yesterday and was looking through it and contemplating the same issue as you've been thinking about: how to have a more sustainable flock of meat birds, rather than purchasing them from a hatchery every year.

What if you kept one or two of this seasons FR roosters and then purchased a bunch of Rhode Island Red pullet chicks. They are listed as excellent egg producers and both heat and cold tolerant. They are also considered a dual-purpose breed, with hens reaching about 6 lbs and roosters 7 - 7.5 lbs. You'd have the benefit of more eggs than a FR hen would produce and probably when you decided to imcubate some, you could eat all the roosters that hatched and maybe keep a few of the hens to see how they layed and eat the rest. You'd have at least two or three seasons of new chicks from the FR/RIR crosses before deciding whether the offspring were decent layers and decent meat birds too.

Just a thought. I might do something similar this year but a FR rooster and some Speckled sussex or BPR hens, since cold heartiness is more important to me than heat tollerance.

 

[UrbanBirds]

Thanks for your experiences and insights. The RIR idea sounds good.I'm currently on a BO kick. I have several individuals of both and both seem like great eggers and meaties.

I have the luxury of being able to hatch eggs all year because of my climate. So I may actually keep a few of both sexes and see if I can get a small crop a few times a year.

 

[Hummingbird Hollow]

The only reason I suggested the RIRs over something like a Buff Orphinton is that RIRs are listed as both cold and heat tollerant, and I know that BOs are very cold hearty, but the big, heavy bodies and small combs will make them less able to deal with the heat. Plus, their production is only listed as "good" while the RIR's is "excellent". I know I tend to be interested in the rarer heritage breeds, but I'm trying to take production more into account, because my goal is also to have plenty of eggs. Keep us all informed as your experiment progresses because that's how we all learn from each other

 

[juststruttin]

oops