Do the chickens ever get restless?
How do the chickens behave around you?
Have you ever thought of raising any other type of meat-bird?
Pullet, thank you for the clarification on the bedding replacement issue.
An additional question, why exactly are the chickens supposed to peck at the bedding which, as has been claimed upthread, might contain some feces? Why don’t they only peck at the feed plates? (which presumably are free of the feces). Is there some profound reason why we don’t mind that they do that, or is it a matter of us being unable to prevent them from pecking where they feel like pecking?
ETA: would a hypothetical “pecking control solution” be useful and marketable?
They are chickens. It is in their nature to be inquisitive. Lacking fingers, they peck at things to investigate them. Sometimes they eat the thing they peck, sometimes they don’t. Sometime this is bad for them, sometimes it isn’t.
If you would like to teach them the germ theory, be my guest.
There are serious efforts to limit pecking when this behavior becomes detrimental. It is less of an issue in the meat chicken industry. There are already several dozen methods employed and various on-going studies to find new ones. In short, we got our best gals on it. I wish you luck, but I don’t think you’re going to have the blockbuster, outside-the-box solution to this problem.
what is special about meat chicken industry in this regard? So is pecking of feces a bigger issue for egg chickens?
Are these dozens of existing methods complex enough to be used only in factory farms? Or does jlzania not use them because they would conflict with the philosophy underlying her farming methods?
Do you have to limit how much you permit Cornish X chickens to eat?
How detrimental the pecking is depends on what is being pecked. For ease of discussion, let’s divide them into categories:
- pecking of contaminated feces
- pecking of other chickens
To address #1: Eating feces isn’t actually an inherently evil thing. As jlzania pointed out, eating of normal feces can help populate the lower intestines with beneficial bacteria. Eating feces that is contaminated with intestinal parasites is bad, though. Large meat bird farms often choose to limit this bad effect through use of either antibiotics or medical dewormers as they are the most effective. There are a few herbal remedies, but their effectiveness is still debatable. All farms, large and small, also limit intestinal parasites through careful management of the ground the birds are kept on. That is the main technique jlzania relies on and it works great for her because she has a comparatively large space for the number of birds she is raising.
In the world of egg-laying chickens, the most effective way to prevent transmission of fecal parasites is to keep the birds in cages. Egg laying birds are much lighter than meat birds, so being in cages isn’t as hard on their feet. Another advantage of keeping the birds in cages is it makes it easy to quickly separate the eggs from the feces, reducing salmonella exposure for people.
To address #2: Like I said before, chickens use pecking to investigate their world. Anything new or different gets a few pecks to see what it is. If you are the weird bird in the flock, either due to injury or genetics, you get a few pecks too. For example, if a bird breaks a growing feather and is bleeding slightly, the red color will be interesting to the other birds, who will peck at the bloody feather. When you’ve got a house of 20 thousand birds, all picking at one injured bird, the injured one is quickly pecked to death.
They also use pecking to establish dominance hierarchies amongst themselves. Again, not a big problem in small flocks, but more of a problem in large ones.
Birds picking at each other is less of a problem when they are little, partly because they are too weak to do much damage to one another, and partly due to a lack of hormonal stimulation to really compete with one another. It’s the same reasons you don’t expect toddlers beat each other bloody in fistfights but see teenagers do it all the time.
Because meat birds go to market at only 6 weeks old, long before puberty hits, aggressive pecking is less of a concern. Both large and small meat bird producers have less of a problem with picking for this simple reason. For facilities that keep adult birds, though, it is a big issue.
Large adult bird farms limit birds picking at each other several different ways: carefully managing the number of birds in a house, keeping the lighting low so the birds are less stimulated, removing injured birds frequently, insuring there isn’t competition for food and water, and providing toys. In egg-laying facilities, having the birds in cages limits the damage to the victim bird since she only has a few other birds who can pick on her.
So, the OP uses some methods large farms use and some they don’t. Because she doesn’t want to use medications, she relies more on ground management and bird density. All of this works fine for her because of her particular niche market.
ok, (correct me if I am wrong), I think that post 66 by Pullet says, with respect to the meat chickens, that pecking of fellow chickens is a non-issue because they are too young to do damage whereas pecking of feces (if they happen to be infected with parasites) is indeed an issue. The pecking prevention methods mentioned in this post seem focused entirely on preventing attacks on other chickens, except possibly for the keeping lights down that may also be relevant to discourage exploration/pecking of feces.
Ok, so suppose we will somehow completely eliminate the pecking consumption of any material that is not in the feed plates (hence including the feces). Could we then deal with the task of replenishing of intestinal bacteria by using relevant additives to the feed? E.g. could such additives be made by collecting feces and subjecting them to a treatment that kills the parasites while leaving bacteria intact? Or else just by culturing these bacteria on broth and then making chicken drink it?
Just a quick question for everyone other than the OP.
Am I the only one that keeps seeing the title as “Ask the Pasteurized Poultry Farmer?”
No, I also talked about methods to limit transmission of intestinal parasites. These include keeping the birds in cages (not feasible for meat birds), managing the ground, and use of medications. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear enough, but it’s there in the first paragraph of #1.
Why? Why go to all this trouble? The methods I just re-outlined above help just fine with the detrimental effects of eating feces. Is there something about eating feces that unduly squicks you out?
I really operate under the radar of the FDA. I had to have my processing building inspected and submit a plan for how I intended to kill the chickens. The inspection was free. I also have to deal with the Travis County health department because I sell in Austin at the market and renew my permit with them every year.
That costs $90.00.
The problem is that the health department doesn’t understand our operation because we’re not a mobile food unit.
It’s just weird.
The raw milk dairy farmers have it much harder. The FDA is really gunning for them. I do know of a small store in Round Rock that sells raw milk and they have to jump through hoops.
Thanks for the kind words about our farm.
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Processing isn’t for everyone. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle or if I could handle it. I learned to do it at another farm and they warned me that a volunteer had passed out on the gutting line the week before. I’ve never been especially squeamish and blood doesn’t bother me which is a plus. It’s certainly slimy and you do get rather messy but I wear a long rubber apron and boots.
We have an automatic plucker but everything else is done by hand. I cut off the heads and feet and remove the guts.
I’ve gotten much faster at it with time and it’s now one of those mindless tasks where you can crank up the music and just sort of drift and let your mind wander.
Oddly enough, I’d rather spend the day on the gutting table then deal with office politics or traffic but then I never was one for chatting around the water coolerl
The learning curve was huge because we went from running 600 chickens a year to 1,460 a month.
Ironically, our success was our biggest problem. Suddenly our orders escalated enormously and we lacked the infrastructure to support the increase in numbers. For awhile, it was a mad scramble to build tents and brooders.
Didn’t help that for the first two years, our area of Texas was in an extreme drought/heat situation or that the winter of ’09 was the coldest in a decade. When I look back, we did so many stupid things that it’s amazing we’re still in business.
We currently have 15 tents. Each tent starts out with 120 birds and we begin pulling Cornish games hens at about 4 ½ weeks to reduce the crowding.
Thanks so much for stepping in with such a detailed description of the confinement house practices, pullet.
(very appropriate user name in this instance).
Admittedly, I have a very strong bias against CAFO’s and the only stories I hear from the AG inspectors are the horror stories. Overflowing manure traps and the like.
One of the big problems right now is the rising cost of feed and energy.
In order to cut costs, some CAFO operators are reducing the amount of time they run the vent fans in the buildings which is creating major problems.
Pecking can be a sign of protein deficiency in adult birds as well.
Personally I like the thought of putting 365 chicks to sleep while I clean the house but I haven’t decided whether it would be more effective to read them bad poetry or sing them lullaby’s.
I don’t understand your reference to tents. Are they the chicken coops?
Jlzania, you mentioned above that you don’t like or trust Whole Foods…what are your reasons behind that?
could meat chickens be kept in elevated cages (like egg chickens) if we were to increase the effective surface area of their feet, such as with “shoes” or “horseshoes” or other such semi-permanently attached contraptions? I.e. this “shoe” would be at any given time supported by several of the cage’s bars, and from the chicken’s standpoint it would be no different from standing on a small island of a “floor”.
if egg chickens are kept in cages and so there are no feces around to peck, do they get feces or another bacteria additive placed into their feed? Or how do they handle the gut bacteria issue that the meat chickens handle by eating feces?
See here.
Jlzania, thanks for your answers- it’s great that the demand is out there for ethical meat.
code_grey the whole idea of pastured or free range chicken, which many of us like, is that it allows natural behaviours in a natural environment with fresh air and exercise for the birds and a good quality of life.
Putting shoes on chickens in order to cage them is the opposite of what farmers like jlzania are about.
Maybe you coud start your own thread “Help evaluate my intensive farming ideas and inventions”.’
OK, I see a photo of chickens under a tent, but no explanation as to why.
I’ve heard that brown eggs and white eggs are basically the same thing except for the color. Is that true?
Here’s a weirder question. I’m Asian so I shop in a lot of Asian supermarkets. I know that in general, American markets don’t sell the more delicious parts of a chicken (heads, organs, feet, etc.) When you sell your chicken to whoever, do they just want the typical breast, thigh, legs, wing? What do you do, if anything, with the leftover parts of a chicken? Do you just toss a bag of heads in the garbage? Do you grind it up into some chicken paste and refeed it to the other animals? What happens to the delicious chicken heads and organs?
Just finished reading the topic and realized some of my questions were answered in regards to the innards. But I still want to know abuot the heads. I love gnawing on the chicken heads. Unfortunately I live too far away to drive to your farm and pick some up. But if someone requests it, like an Asian supermarket, would you sell it to them?