Have you ever considered taking in a farm boarder? I’m not 100% sure what they actually call this position, but it’s where someone who has no real farm experience but wants a change of pace from city life comes and lives with you, and works for room and board for a year (or however long). They don’t pay rent, but you don’t pay them wages.
I always thought that sounded like it might be a neat thing to do, from a city gal’s perspective. (I’m not asking to do this with you, just curious if you had ever considered it)
Chicken feetses make the very best chicken broth/stock. Or so I have been assured by many fine Mexican cooks, who make the stock for tortilla soup from feet, and then remove the feet and add in cooked chicken breast and other ingredients. A good tortilla soup can cure what ails ya.
OP, how much have the FDA/local/state regulators gotten in the way of you doing your job? How expensive was it for any certifications or licenses you have to sell/raise your chickens? Or is the climate near Austin simply conducive to what you’re doing?
Do you know anyone who sells raw milk? What sort of hoops and struggles do they encounter?
By “hybrid” did you mean a cross between a chicken and some other species of bird? Or a cross between two types/breeds of chickens? Either way, I’d love to know more about your particular birds. Has broodiness been completely bred out of them?
Also, your modified detergent bottles intrigue me… Did you come up with the idea and design yourselves? (I’m picturing you duping some unsuspecting second-graders into making them during arts’n’crafts time at school. “Guess what you just made, kids! KILL CONES! Bwa-hah-ha!”)
It’s been a long day on the farm. But then what job doesn’t require overtime on occasion?
Apologies but I will address your questions tomorrow after deliveries.
I’m pretty brain dead right now and all I want is a shower and some cheap red wine,
It’s great that y’all are interested in alternative farming and I really appreciate your patience.
Wanted to echo the thanks for the thread. it’s fascinating.
My Mexican grandmother made stock like this. She would save a chicken foot for herself and nibble on the chicken toes (and the rest of it too, really). My brother and I always thought that was gross. But she made all kinds of awesome soups.
Chicken feet is used to make a dish in Hong Kong/Cantonese “dim sum” or “yum cha” cuisine. It’s stewed. Chicken feet - Wikipedia I’ve eaten it but I don’t like it.
Your farm looks lovely and the chickens looks very healthy!
Good for you.
Can I ask about the processing?I can imagine eviscerating and plucking 120-odd chickens isn’t the most pleasant way to spend a day- how much of that is done by hand, and how much by machine?
What was the learning curve like wrt to slaughter, processing and husbandry?
Do you look back on things you did in the early days of the farm and :smack:?
How many tents do you have, and how many chickens in each one?
There’s not much money in gizzards and you have to clean them which is time consuming.
We could purchase a machine but it would take forever to make back our investment.
I do give gizzards away to customers that want them and are willing to clean them.
Aren’t you in Texas? Drive on down to Austin and I’ll give you bags of innards because you know, nothing says Happy Birthday or Merry Christmas like a bag of chicken parts.
As gardentraveler and Lynn Bodoni said, chicken feet make excellent stock. They’re supposedly high in collegan and I have arthiritic clients that swear by broth made from the feet. Also, people feed them to their dogs as part of a natural diet
The big CAFO’s don’t clean out the buildings for the duration of the grow-out which lasts 6-8 weeks.
This may be a little too direct but the birds literally live on their own shit and breathe their own shit and eat their own shit. That’s why they’re pumped chock full of antibiotics.
A quick lesson in chicken anatomy:
Chickens don’t have a separate orifice for urine and feces and eggs.
It all comes out of one place called the vent. That’s why chicken feces are so concentrated in ammonia.
Ammonia’s pretty nasty stuff by itself.
Allowed to build up, it scars the lungs and air sacs.
If it gets too bad, the birds go blind.
Think about it.
Baby chicks are very low to the ground.
Also, any creature’s poop contains lots of nasties.
You wouldn’t expect a newborn human to remain healthy if you threw them in a crib and never cleaned or changed her/him, would you?
Nothing voluntarily beds in shit and nothing can live long in shit unless you medicate it.
70% of all the antibiotics manufactured in this country are feed to our livestock.
Recently between 47 and 50% of the meat tested in the grocery store was found to contain drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a type of staph.
That’s not good.
And you eat it.
A considerable number of CAFO workers are allergic to antibiotics so if they develop a serious infection, they’re screwed.
More and more staph infections are antibiotic resistant.
That’s why they’re called super bugs.
I don’t mean to be rude or snide but have you actually ever seen a real chicken? They’re fairly fragile especially when they’re babies. A hammock or net would really stress the birds and that would kill a percentage of them right off the bat. Wings and legs would get broken.
It takes 15 minutes a day per brooder to scoop out soiled bedding and none of it get wasted.
It’s composted and used either in the garden or on the fields as fertilizer. Code_grey, I get the impression that you think automation is the answer to everything.
Some jobs are inherently labor intensive and that’s not a bad thing.
The Amish have the highest yield per acre of any American farmers and they’re not mechanized.
I failed to add a link to the last reply that show a correlation between CAFO chicken farmer’s and antiobiotic resistant infections.
There’s a program called WWOOF-Worldwide Work on an Organic Farm that we are a part of but regetfully many of the inquires I get sound very needy.
It’s hard to explain but there’s a number of people that want to play “'Little House on the Prairie” and I don’t have time to fulfill their fantasies.
I did get a hilarious email from a potential WWOOFER recently.
She had a long list of stipulations including the following:
3 hours of high speed internet access daily.
The farm had to be within walking or biking distance of a good sized city or give her the use of a car .
The farm had to provide a raw food diet of fruit and nuts (she specified types acceptable).
Beside food and lodging, she wanted a weekly stipend and outlined the total of hours she was willing to work.
The farm should be situated in close proximity to a beach or the mountains.
Best of all, she wanted no part of a farm that processed meat.
I had to wonder if she even read our listing.
Needless to say, I emailed back that we just wouldn’t be a good fit. :rolleyes:
Thanks **Lionne **.
It’s a very symbiotic relationship.
If people don’t support local farmers with their dollars we have no business.
Personally, I don’t eat meat unless I know exactly who raised it and how.
More later-I’m off to do the (funky) chicken thing.
I am particularly fond of hearts and they are getting difficult to find unless packaged with gizzards, and nobody in the house except the dog likes gizzards, and there are never more than 24% hearts to gizzards =(
I’m in Fort Worth, so I’d have to take a cooler or two and lots of ice. Our anniversary is tomorrow, so I really don’t think that there’s time for a drive there and back. Thanks for the offer, I’ll consider it in autumn or spring. Because I’m sure that the cats would enjoy anything that my husband wouldn’t eat.
ok, so this is a surprisingly labor intensive operation that, as far as you know, is not at present mechanized anywhere. Interesting, thanks.
If I were to continue the discussion of how to mechanize it ;), my next hypothetical might be reducing chickens’ chance of self-damage at the time of their being lifted up/down in their net or cage by, well, putting them to sleep so that they neither move nor are sufficiently conscious to be stressed out by wtf is going on. I guess that looks like the most obvious, head-on line of attack at this point, among several.
At least, this is an “industrial scale” variant. A labor intensive small farm variant may be closer to "manually move every chicken and her chicks from dirty trough A to clean trough B, and then clean out trough A. Presumably moving a chicken from trough to trough should be faster than 15 minutes.
But I should probably switch to asking questions about details of other operations
Actually, you’ve given me a marketing idea because we always have extra feet.
I’ll sell them as good luck charms!
Biosecurity is an issue because chick are highly susceptible to all sorts of pathogens and they have almost no immune system when they arrive.
In nature, a chick eats the hen’s droppings which helps stimulate its immune system.
Of course, in nature, most of the baby chicks die before reaching maturity.
A brooder is like a daycare center for newborns.
We strip each brooder and sanitize and let it rest for a full 15 days.
No one enters the brooder without dipping their boots in a pan of bleach water to avoid transferring disease from one bay to another.
We also add an organic supplement to their water for the first 3 days which acts to develop the chicks natural gastric ability to resist disease.
One of the biggest problems with chickens is e.coli infections.
The e. coli doesn’t necessarily kill the bird but it opens the door to a host of secondary diseases which will.
If you can get a chick to 21 days, you’re out of the woods.
The pens are fairly secure and usually nothing gets in them but we set the traps if there’s evidence of a hit.
We also create a platform bed in our truck with plywood and an air mattress and sleep with the flocks if we began experiencing real problems.
It’s actually pretty nice most of the year.
The stars are magnificent, it’s usually around 78 degrees in the summer which is what we run the house air conditioner on anyway and you can hear the owls and the coyotes and the wind in the trees.
It’s a nice place to fall asleep.
It’s a cross between two different breeds of chickens and I’m a bit embarassed but right now I can’t remember which ones. I believe the males are white leghorns.
The broodiness has been bred out of them but more to the point, they never live long enough to lay eggs.
It takes a pullet 6 months to start reproducing and ours are processed when they get to 5-9 weeks of age. You really don’t want to keep them around much longer than that because they will literally eat themselves into a heart attack.
We came up with the detergent bottle kill cones ourselves but I *love *the idea of drafting second-graders.
One of the big problems facing rural America is the lack of young farmers.
I’m 56 which is the average age of a chicken farmer.
It’s hard for younger folks to come up with the capitol (or is it capital? I can never remember that either).
Land’s expensive as are tractors and bailers etc.
You end up owing everything to the bank and one bad year can break you.
We are huge on reusing and recycling and improvising.
Our tractor is an ancient little Kubota which we purchased 10 years ago for
$5,000. It can handle most of our needs and our neighbors graciously allow us to use their big ol’ honking John Deere when we need it.
We in turn give them free fertilizer for their pastures and free chickens.
Anytime Lynn. Just let me know and I’ll gift wrap 'em.
Tried to edit to include this in my last reply but I missed the damn window.
Often we are contacted by other families who want to add to their income and we’re happy to help by teaching them our methods.
Our business has grown to a point where we can’t produce the volume that the restaurants need so we’re mentoring a young couple that live about 20 minutes away that want to do this for a living.
We’ve formed the A.K.C. C. (Ass Kickin’ Chicken Cooperative) to meet the demand and we help each other with the deliveries and major building projects at hand.
As the bumpersticker on my truck reads “No Farms, No Food.”
I’m going to be an ass and butt in because I have some expertise in the area of large-scale poultry farming.
In large scale meat poultry production houses, generally the chicks are brooded in one part of the building and then gradually given access to more parts as they get bigger and are able to regulate their body temperatures. So, not all of the litter in the building is being used for the entire 6 week growout period.
To describe it more clearly:
A large building with a dirt floor covered with shavings or some other sort of organic-material litter.
Heat lamps suspended from the ceiling, set low to the ground, run down the middle of the building.
Little chicken food and water dishes are set near the heat lamps
About 100 chicks are kept in an approx 10 foot ring around the lamps by use of a ring of cardboard or something similar.
As the chicks get bigger, adjacent cardboard rings are merged, making larger rings around the heat lamps.
The chicks get bigger still and the cardboard rings and lamps are removed all together. The birds now have full run of the house. At this point, the little food and water dishes are generally replaced with the adult size versions (these kind are usually automated, they come in several styles).
After the growout period, the dirty litter is either removed and composted or composted in the building, depending on which works better for the situation. This part is generally done by one or two guys using heavy equipment.
A properly managed house with proper housing density and ventilation has minimal ammonia build up, even at the level of the chicks on the ground, for the entire 6 weeks. Farms that have an ammonia problem are not doing their job correctly.
There really isn’t a need to completely swap out the litter while the birds are still in the house. Trying to shuttle them from one part of the building to the other would be a whole lot of stress for no purpose. Doing something to make them all sleepy for this activity, an activity that does not need to happen, is extra pointless. Never mind that any sort of medication you want to use to make them sleepy has its own biological risks and could either damage the birds or cause food safety concerns.
There are no adult birds in the house. All the chicks are the same age. Mom hen is back at the egg farm making more baby meat birds.
There have been attempts in the past to raise meat birds in cages to help reduce the transmission of intestinal parasites, but the birds are too muscly and heavy to do well standing on wire 24/7 for 6 weeks.
