The perennial farming problem: How to actually make money from it.
Diversification, of course, is the old way of doing it.
This mono~culture is modern & has not been good for the farming industry long term.
The DD/DH one's....I always read as damn...it's a habit I just can not break.
Darling daughter/darling husband.
Well, today is the big day... 30 *hopefully* mostly boys are off to freezer camp. I have a Van full of chickens on the ferry, with a 10 am expected arrival at the processing plant. I kept the featherless wonder in my hold backs, and several suspected males... but we could only send in 30, so I concentrated on size and health. There’s at least two females going in, “broken toes” with three twisted toes, and the one who spent a week not able to walk. Hopefully I called the genders well and that is it for females.
I figured, although I’m not planning on keeping her for breeding, that it would be easier to keep the female featherless wonder than yet another cockerel. So of my 10 remaining Meatbirds I have three female CX, one clearly female Ranger, one crowing boy, and four *hopefully* just masculine looking gals (with my cockerel luck?) Sorting yesterday was fun... two hours of attempting to separate and herd chickens into the appropriate pens.
Down to the last 3 chickens to pull out, and I almost caught one boy in the tractor, but he flew out. 20 minutes trying to catch him, I finally lifted the tractor hoping he would go back in, and another boy joined him. Ten more minutes or so trying to herd them both to a corner for wrangling and eventually I decide to make a little corral with two crates and my water jerry. I get them both into the corner and the original escapee flies back into the tractor. So that’s my Crower in with the girls.
Did I mention it was warm and sunny when I started this escapade, so I was in jeans and a tank top? Of course five minutes in a light drizzle starts, no biggie, but by halfway through, it was a full on summer downpour of heavy, but warm rain. My theory is, if/when the remaining boys become too difficult to keep (they are crowing and getting frisky with the girls already at 11 weeks!) I can always do them myself for our personal use. I highly doubt they will be well enough behaved to wait for our next batch of cockerels to be hopefully ready in 14-16 more weeks.
So, one of my raccoons is getting fairly bold with me, I got within ten feet of it last night, then again this morning. Luckily it it far more interested in the leftover chicken feed than in my chickens. I still plan on circling the wagons (or chicken tractors, to be more precise) a little closer to my trailer for a while. While on Saltspring (the island the slaughterhouse is on) we will be picking up an Ewe and her lamb, Andrew’s cousin’s pet, for return to the farm, as her tenant “doesn’t like the sheep noises and such (poop)” in the yard.
I’m thinking about how best to modify my layer tractor design to accommodate the meat birds for longer term housing, I’m thinking they probably aren’t too big on high roosts considering their size, lack of agility, and limited flight capabilities. As I was herding them yesterday there was a fair amount of running and wing flapping going on... and I just kept getting the idea that they thought they were “flying” to safetyit was like a cartoon.
If I wasn't over caffeinated I wouldn't function @ all!
