Nevadans?

[aubreynoramarie]

RE YOU IMPLYING THAT ANYONE OTHER THAN MR PANTS MAY BE RUNNING THE SHOW AT ANY POINT?!? Oh he would LOATHE to hear such slander! Hahaha

 

[2seth2]

ARE YOU IMPLYING THAT ANYONE OTHER THAN MR PANTS MAY BE RUNNING THE SHOW AT ANY POINT?!? Oh he would LOATHE to hear such slander! Hahaha

 

[americanvalkyrie]

5 eggs today!!!! That's the most I've had in a day since Tuesday! Maybe by the time we can eat eggs again, there might be enough to actually eat. Maybe. Right now, Sahara's frying them all up so we can feed them back to the chickens.

 

[NevadaRon]

Picked up my meaties today from CAL Ranch. They're so adorable! You wouldn't know they were frankenchickens by looking at them.



I'm going to take a picture every week and also try and track the costs and I'll post the results here for everyone.

 

[gaited horse]

I have 8 3 year old hens and one rooster that has never crowd free. Not laying at all free to someone that wants them.
Or if someone can come grab them and bring them
To the swap. They should bra nice crockpot meal.

 

[2seth2]

Never crowed what breed?

can he still make babies?

 

[gaited horse]

Never crowed what breed?
can he still make babies?

He's a RIR. Idk if he can make babies.

 

[americanvalkyrie]

Picked up my meaties today from CAL Ranch. They're so adorable! You wouldn't know they were frankenchickens by looking at them.



I'm going to take a picture every week and also try and track the costs and I'll post the results here for everyone.

Frankenchickens. Lol, that's how I feel about meaties. But I still eat them. Because they're cheap.

I'd love to see the costs at the end. Before I combined orders to get this year's chicks, we considered padding an order with meaties, and butchering at 8 weeks. But there were too many laying varieties we wanted to try.

 

[chicharomirinda]

No. You were being resourceful! Yours is adorable. Elizabeth is just our resident building designer extraordinaire. When she retires we will all contract her out to build coops for us!

Ha Ha! I barely survived my coop build and i still have stuff left to do on it. All of your coops are great.


today I got the shade cloth over part of the run. I will probably pick up another roll to shade a bit more. Our large maple shades the other side of the run during the afternoon. I also started cutting wood to frame the walls for my kids' playhouse. I put the base on castors so we can move it around our patio whenever we want it, to put it in the shade, etc. I need to buy a few more 2x4s but I had quite a bit left from the coop build.

5 eggs today!!!! That's the most I've had in a day since Tuesday! Maybe by the time we can eat eggs again, there might be enough to actually eat. Maybe. Right now, Sahara's frying them all up so we can feed them back to the chickens.

How is everyone doing? Hopefully on the mend.

Picked up my meaties today from CAL Ranch. They're so adorable! You wouldn't know they were frankenchickens by looking at them.



I'm going to take a picture every week and also try and track the costs and I'll post the results here for everyone.

Yes, we'll need a thorough and full report on the meaties! I'm interested in trying that some time. good luck!

 

[americanvalkyrie]

How is everyone doing? Hopefully on the mend.

We have had no new symptoms for about a week. I think it's done it's tearing through the flock. That's the good news. The bad news is that my daughter might be out of the egg-sale business unless we completely cull and try again. We'll have to wait and see. A few days back, I only got 2 eggs, from 10 chickens. I haven't gotten that few since before I adopted the 6 from Elizabeth.

After the huge drop in egg production, I checked symptoms again. I especially researched what would cause such a dramatic drop. Infectious bronchitis was on that list, which was the first thing I suspected. The chicks that got culled ended up getting swollen faces and an odor, which is still confusing me, but all other symptoms match infectious bronchitis. All of the other chickens had no facial swelling and absolutely no odor besides regular chicken poop.

Infectious bronchitis the most contagious of all chicken diseases, and has been known to spread on the wind up to 1200 YARDS! It causes the symptoms I saw... coughing, wheezing, runny nose, bubbly eyes, sneezing. On one website, it has diagnoses photos, showing a baby chick with its beak in the air, gasping for breath. Which is exactly what I saw Dijon doing. It showed a chicken with runny eyes and nose, like Barbeque... only Barbeque was MUCH drippier.

Two things that disturbed me:
1) Some of the sources of information said that some birds may catch it, but you don't see any symptoms except if you stand really close, at night, when nobody is moving. Then you hear a bit of breathing trouble.
2) It can permanently affect egg production. Chickens can take 6 months to return to production after an outbreak, and even then, they may not produce quantity or quality they did before. This is especially true if they got sick at 2 weeks or younger, which is the age that my newest babies got sick.

So it's possible that every single one of my chickens has had it. Remember I heard wheezing/clicking from the little kids? They ended up having the fewest symptoms of all the groups. Of the babies, about 6 showed visible/audible symptoms. The minorca, turken, and RIR didn't show any symptoms at all. And out of my hens... only Barbeque has shown symptoms, and that one hen would not explain such a dramatic decline in eggs. Surely some others are dealing with it, as well, but showing no other signs.

So we'll wait and see. Right now, we can't sell or eat the eggs for at least another week. And I've informed Sahara's customers that she might be out of business for awhile. We still have to assess who's laying and who's not, and see if they even start up again. I have seen Barbeque on the nest quite a few times, but later in the day I'll check that nest and there will be nothing in there. I know Original and Tikka are laying, plus one of the australorps. And I think Shawarma the orp is laying. I haven't gotten a welsummer egg for days, and she was laying about 4 times a week before this. If they return to production in 6 months, then culling now won't do anything to improve productivity, since the new babies won't lay for about 6 months anyway. So we just have a bunch of pets, which are no longer miserable, but just not economical.