- Jul 27, 2012
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Hi Y'all, this morning I got so excited at finding my first eggs- called friends, children & hubby and they all just laughed at the irony of it all - since for the last 3 years I have vowed NEVER to have another chicken except on my plate!
I didn't want my children raised in daycare centers, so when we moved to NC in 1990 in order for me to have a stay=at=home job, we built 3 commercial chicken houses. No, I had never raised chickens, but they were just chickens, right? How hard could it be to throw out some feed & fill water bottles?
Uhhh, well, DH had been around the poultry business all his life (his dad was a USDA Poultry Plant Vet) & was plant engineer for the local poultry plant He would know how to do everything,,,, Great. OK, lets build some houses. Had to learn fast, as the first flock came on Thanksgiving day, all 56,000 one day old chicks. Grew out those for 8 weeks, cleaned up and got another 56,000 2 weeks later. 280,000 chicks a year. For 20 years. 5,600,000 birds. But I didn't realize that I didn't know how to raise REAL chickens, only Genetic Baby chicks that are the size of adults at 7 weeks. (No we didn't feed hormones or antibiotics, they have been scientifically breeding for feed conversion and speed of growth for 50 years. In the 1940's it took 14 weeks to grow a 7# bird. Now we do it in 6 weeks. We grew birds that would be deboned, thus grew them out a little bigger for more yield to 7 or 8 weeks)
Guy called my DH one day and asked if we were thinking at all of selling the houses? Took us 48 hours to call him back with HELL YES! Sooooo,I vowed NEVER gonna have chickens again!
Happy dance! Sold the chicken houses, bought a pretty little 35 acre farm 16 miles north of the old farm & built fences to move the goats, horses, sheep, llamas & alpacas. No chickens.
So this spring I was at Tractor Supply and a friend who works there suckered me into getting some Ameracaunas and Buff Orpingtons.
NO place to put these chicks (since I'm never gonna have chickens again) so they went into large storage boxes in the spare bathroom for a few weeks.
At Easter the neighbor got her kids some chicks which they LOVED for all of 36 hours then they needed a new home (the chicks, not the kids - although by then I probably could have had the kids too). They kept getting bigger, too big for the bathroom so they moved to the wire cage the kids had used for all their "critter captures". The size and numbers (up to 28 chicks now) were growing expotentially so they then moved to the front of the stock trailer to the frustrated desires of the barn cats.
We were in the process of building a new milking/kidding barn for our oberhasli herd that had been put on the back burner waiting for more 'access to funds',
so the proposed area for the grain room got quickly converted to a temp. coop by putting up 2 of the dog run panels.
Birds looked happy, everything was going good until I could get the permanent coop up on the south side of the barn,, whoooh.
Then today I found EGGS!!! Ran up to the house and demanded of DH that I needed NEST BOXES NOW!!! He calmly looked at me and said I had put that plan on the calendar for middle of August...
YES! But I've got EGGS! TODAY! I NEED NEST BOXES!
Uh huh, he smiled, and went back to work.
Ok, Nest boxes. Got online & went to BYC.com to hunt up what had other people done..... and found the post about cat litter boxes..... YEA!!!! Got all the boxes from the barn that I had been using for mineral & salt storage & cut the lids at the bend & VOILA!!! Nest boxes!
I am SO happy to have found this list => looking forward to reading about how to raise REAL chickens!!!
For some reason I can't get the pictures to upload to this post, I'll try again on my next post to y'all. TTYL !
I didn't want my children raised in daycare centers, so when we moved to NC in 1990 in order for me to have a stay=at=home job, we built 3 commercial chicken houses. No, I had never raised chickens, but they were just chickens, right? How hard could it be to throw out some feed & fill water bottles?
Uhhh, well, DH had been around the poultry business all his life (his dad was a USDA Poultry Plant Vet) & was plant engineer for the local poultry plant He would know how to do everything,,,, Great. OK, lets build some houses. Had to learn fast, as the first flock came on Thanksgiving day, all 56,000 one day old chicks. Grew out those for 8 weeks, cleaned up and got another 56,000 2 weeks later. 280,000 chicks a year. For 20 years. 5,600,000 birds. But I didn't realize that I didn't know how to raise REAL chickens, only Genetic Baby chicks that are the size of adults at 7 weeks. (No we didn't feed hormones or antibiotics, they have been scientifically breeding for feed conversion and speed of growth for 50 years. In the 1940's it took 14 weeks to grow a 7# bird. Now we do it in 6 weeks. We grew birds that would be deboned, thus grew them out a little bigger for more yield to 7 or 8 weeks)
Guy called my DH one day and asked if we were thinking at all of selling the houses? Took us 48 hours to call him back with HELL YES! Sooooo,I vowed NEVER gonna have chickens again!
So this spring I was at Tractor Supply and a friend who works there suckered me into getting some Ameracaunas and Buff Orpingtons.
At Easter the neighbor got her kids some chicks which they LOVED for all of 36 hours then they needed a new home (the chicks, not the kids - although by then I probably could have had the kids too). They kept getting bigger, too big for the bathroom so they moved to the wire cage the kids had used for all their "critter captures". The size and numbers (up to 28 chicks now) were growing expotentially so they then moved to the front of the stock trailer to the frustrated desires of the barn cats.
We were in the process of building a new milking/kidding barn for our oberhasli herd that had been put on the back burner waiting for more 'access to funds',
so the proposed area for the grain room got quickly converted to a temp. coop by putting up 2 of the dog run panels.
Birds looked happy, everything was going good until I could get the permanent coop up on the south side of the barn,, whoooh.
Then today I found EGGS!!! Ran up to the house and demanded of DH that I needed NEST BOXES NOW!!! He calmly looked at me and said I had put that plan on the calendar for middle of August...
YES! But I've got EGGS! TODAY! I NEED NEST BOXES!
Uh huh, he smiled, and went back to work.
Ok, Nest boxes. Got online & went to BYC.com to hunt up what had other people done..... and found the post about cat litter boxes..... YEA!!!! Got all the boxes from the barn that I had been using for mineral & salt storage & cut the lids at the bend & VOILA!!! Nest boxes!
I am SO happy to have found this list => looking forward to reading about how to raise REAL chickens!!!
from Ohio. So glad to have you aboard.Great intro, thanks for sharing. Congrats on your first egg. 
