chicken feed

[Guest guest]

> How many chickens do you have and how many eggs do you get

> each day?

Belinda>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A year ago we had about 20 hens and 6 roosters. My sister's mini-doxie next door

had almost wiped us out by July 2008 before we figured out what was going on.

The hens were so stressed that we were getting NO eggs. I had one rooster left

and less than 10 hens (had 7 roosters before the dog - he's now kept on a line

in their yard). Then we caught two possums, one right after the other, in the

chicken pen in the middle of the night last winter explaining why we'd lost more

chickens. We bought some Rhode Island chicks from a friend (less than 40) and

they were a year old in June 2009. Last winter we started saving eggs from our

few remaining original Banty/German cross hens we've had since 1999. They were

crossing with the young RIR roosters and one Americauna rooster we raised. We

let the hens hatch the chicks, then I took them in the house and raised them in

big dog crates stacked on each other (chicken condo). I raised scores of them.

Yes, I used

commercial chick starter for this. Once they got feathered good and fairly good

sized, they went to a pen inside the chicken pen until they were big enough to

roam outside. Later in the spring I switched and started keeping chicks from the

young RIR hens who were breeding to the RIR roosters and the one Americauna. The

Banty hens were the ones hatching them as the RIR's were just wanting to lay.

Now we have somewhere around 30 roosters, more or less, and we are eating one a

week or two. Sometimes we do an extra one for our son's family. I am keeping the

original RIR roosters, the Americauna and three or four of the crossed young

boys from 2009 for future breeding. A few of these are even bigger than the

older RIR roosters already so the hybrid vigor must be kicking in. Some of the

eggs from the 2009 hens are bigger than the 2008 RIR's, too. At this time we are

getting anywhere from 6 to 12 eggs a day but we were getting a LOT of eggs up

until Dec. when

it went from unusually warm to unsually cold all of a sudden. A lot of the hens

are going through a moult now. The roosters we are eating won't be a year old

for several months still but they are big enough that they are filling up my

great big crock pot to the point that I'm having to cut off the legs as they

stick up too much for the lid. When we want one, I point out which rooster I

want. Then my husband goes to feed them - the whole flock follows him to the pen

like dogs. He simply steps on the foot of the rooster he wants while they are

all crowded up around him after the feed. In seconds, the rooster is a goner and

he hardly knows what happened. :-)

So we've gone from almost no chickens to over 50 right now and they all run

loose. By early summer we should have most of the extra roosters gone, hopefully

leaving us with about 30 hens and the breeding roosters. Most of our

Banty/German hens are getting up there in years so we know we won't have them

for a whole lot longer. It's not unusual for them to still be laying at 6 and 7

years old. I'll keep more chicks to raise this spring but not as many as last

year. We want more roosters to eat for next winter, Lord willing, like we're

doing with them this winter. One rooster is lasting us several days for

meat/protein. I had originally thought about killing them all in the fall and

canning them but that's a lot of work and use of energy - killing them as we

need them is working better for now.

I'm trying to breed the cross of Banty/unknown German chicken/RIR (and maybe a

few from the Americauna) for a larger chicken with the bigger eggs/bigger meat

carcass while retaining hardiness and mothering/hatching abilities of the

Banties. The Banty/German cross we've had came from a friend who has been

breeding them for years and she got them from a man who started them so they've

been tightly bred for a long time. The one rooster we have left from those

chickens is a throw back to the Silkies. We call him our Furry Chicken. :-) I

don't know if he's managing to get to any of the hens or not as he's smaller

than the others. I know we are getting a real variety of colors with all of this

- one young hen even looks like a Dominic with the black and white barring. And

one of the hens (we haven't figured out which one yet) is giving us a green egg,

proving that the Americauna rooster was getting in his licks somehow. LOL! That

gives us another gene pool to

work with.

Some things like

> year round greens are more possible in some parts of the

> country than

> others. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A small greenhouse can produce a lot of stuff for you *and* the chickens. :-) On

the Mother Earth News site, they have people right now telling how they are

growing things all winter even in New England, etc.

And size of flock makes a difference also.  I

> could keep 4 chickens

> happy out of kitchen waste even in Idaho in the winter..

> but not 20.  And

> raising meat birds.. well that is a whole different

> deal.  50 meat birds

> consume a powerful lot of food. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Then do it like both sides of our family do - raise the chicks out roaming loose

until a hard freeze, then kill them all and process and/or freeze. The only I

thing I don't do that our families do is pluck feathers - we just skin the

buggers and forget saving the skins. Too much trouble and work. JMHO. :-) I know

they have machines for plucking but we're finding it easier to kill one when we

need one and just skin it. We've even done this with ducks. My husband can catch

one and have it ready for me to put in the crockpot in just a few minutes. He

has a place out by the well where he has water, a pallet " table " , etc. for the

butchering.

Like I said, I *do* use the commercial chick starter - for now. Not planning on

doing that forever. Looking for other ways...We used to let the hens raise the

chicks and they did fine but in the last few years we've had one problem after

another - starting with the dog (my own Doxies don't bother the chickens) so I

hand raised them this time. I plan on letting the hens take over again in 2011

and see how it goes. We don't use chick starter at all when the hens are raising

them. They are finding food *out there* somewhere.

Even at that, even with the scores of chicks I raised, we still didn't go

through more than two or three 50# bags of chick feed. I kept lights on them all

of the time for warmth until they had feathers, then we turned off the lights

for the nights so they would sleep like they should. The dog crates worked

really well. I could clean them by shifting chicks to a small crate while I

cleaned the big one. I put a feed sack in the bottom of the crate and then I

could roll it up with the litter in it. That gets most of the litter - which is

full of chick feed so we take it all out to the chicken pen and throw the whole

thing in there. The big birds clean up a lot of the wasted feed. I used my small

woodstove shovel to get most of what was left in the crate, and then used the

Rainbow vacuum to get the rest so it was all clean. New feedsack went in, then

the chicks. On to the next crate in the stack. :-) I did need to do this about

once a week or else we started

getting a fine powdery film on everything in that room. We also had a small

window fan that was pulling the air to the outside right there by the crates -

another window fan in the other end of the room was pulling in fresh air. We

were doing this even if the chicks weren't there - helps keep the room cooler

without using the air conditioner. Also keeps the room from acting as a heat

sink if we shut it off and only use the air conditioner in the other main room

(which we usually do). An architect friend of our's pointed this out to us.

Attached garages do the same thing.

Back to raw dairy - souring/curdling raw milk is a wonderful feed for chickens.

Buttermilk, too. Soak their grain in it. :-) However, all of this will be moot

if the NAIS is not stopped....we will no longer be able to keep our chickens or

any other of the animals as we will NOT put a PIN on our real estate.

Anita in Arkansas (I started adding my state over ten years ago due to having

another Anita on one of the groups lists I was on - so people knew which Anita

they were addressing)