Ask the Pastured Poultry Farmer

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
101

Because there is one hell of a fucking difference between chatting on a forum and getting dirty down on the farm. No matter how much you read or chat about stitching up a wounded sheep, it is NOTHING like practice on a store bought dead chicken … though I also practiced suturing on a slab of pork belly that still had the skin on as well. Handling a parakeet is nothing like handling guinea fowl or chicken chicks. No matter how many tricks to get a horse under control we chat about, it is nothing like having a 1+ ton animal up close and personal and trying to body slam you into the side of a stall.

Most farm inventions derive from workarounds by the people at the pointy end of the pitchfork to get their jobs done, not geeks sitting in a think tank somewhere.

102

There is a way to process the urea and other nitrogen heavy compounds in bird waste into basically just nitrogen to use as a supplement in animal feed. I don’t think it is done commonly, but it is possible. Using the composted litter to grow plants to feed the animals or processing the waste for electricity is more common.

That one is pretty good, although it looks like they have the conveyor belt turned up a bit high. insert dopler effect chicken noise

Yes. It breaks down like this: animals (and people) have native bacteria in the lower parts of the large intestine that they use to greater or lesser extents to help produce nutrients. But, how does the bacteria get there? When all of us are born, we come from a sterile environment. Research found that the bacterial populations turn up a few days/weeks into life and the populations are damn similar to those found inside the parent animals. Hence, the theory that baby animals get their necessary gut bacteria by eating the feces of their parents. Even chickens, who don’t spend any time with their parents, get their bacteria from the fecal microbes left over in even the cleanest chicken house from the previous flock.

No one on this forum has any problem with you asking questions and learning. I’m happy to give you more info on the current methods used and the various reasons why one producer might chose one technique over another, equally valid technique. For example, there isn’t disagreement over feces and potential parasites. There are just different ways of handling the problems that can come up from feces and parasites. If there is something about that particular topic that still confuses you, please say so explicitly.

As for more efficient ways of learning, why not start with the basics?
Then, you can explore small scale farming. If you are ready to get your hands dirty, you can either offer yourself as a temporary worker-in-return-for-lunch to the folks shopping at your local feed store (I promise you are within a 30 minute drive of a feed store no mater where you live in the US), or you can see if you have any skills that might be worth money to a poultry producer.

The reason you are getting some hostility is that, on your second post, you narrowed in like laser on some problem you decided needed fixing. A problem in a rather specific agricultural industry when you apparently have limited understanding on raising animals in general. It’s like you listened to a symphony once and decided you had an awesome new violin bowing technique.

People, smart people, have spent many years studying how to raise chickens for profit. You abruptly deciding you know better when you don’t know the situation at all is pretty insulting.

103

if egg chickens can be raised in cages due to their low weight and if they are in fact raised in cages and not in other environments where feces would have been controlled by different means, does that not mean that meat chickens would also have been raised in cages or similar self-cleaning environments if only we could figure out how to do that? I.e. does not this thread so far indicate that the cage is the optimal method of dealing with feces/parasites issue for all those chickens that we manage to stick into the cage? (ignoring philosophical beliefs of people who don’t like cages per se)

104

Yes meat chickens can be raised in cages. The point of pastured poultry is that it’s kinder to the animals, and a low stress more natural environment generally = a healthier bird, certainly a happier one. And yes, to many people the comfort of the animals we use for food IS important.

I take that back, not just important, paramount.

Factory farming works in that you can crank out meat and eggs at an amazing rate for relatively little money or effort. Just because it CAN be done doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Labor intensive is ok by many people if the result is healthy meat and eggs coming from birds who lived as good a life as possible, and died a swift death with as little fear and pain as possible.

105

also, jlzania said upthread that in factory farming of meat chickens they are given antibiotics for reasons somehow connected to eating feces in an environment where feces removal is not as frequent as how she does it. Does that mean that if meat chickens were raised without access to unprocessed feces (like a cage with some processed, parasites-killed feces added to feed) there would be no need for antibiotics?

On the other hand, would anybody even care one way or the other about these antibiotics? Do the factory farms have any reason to seek to stop using antibiotics other than beliefs of a minority of consumers who probably don’t like factory farmed meat regardless of antibiotics issue?

106

I’m guessing that feeding antibiotics as a matter of course is cheaper than the labor to clean the pens regularly and dispose of the waste more frequently, plus the time taken to regularly examine all the birds and remove sick ones promptly. Hard to do when you’ve got several thousand birds at a time.

So no, factory farms probably are not looking to remove antibiotics - they result in better growth at minimal cost. And to hell with the environment.

107

given that saje’s responses are not directly relevant to the questions I asked in posts 103 and 105 (they are simply a restatement of the status quo situation and anti-factory farming beliefs) I hope for more relevant explanations from other people.

108

Well I guess I have no idea what your point is or real questions are then. I’ll let smarter than I answer henceforth. So sorry to waste your time. :rolleyes:

109

But your questions are not relevant to the subject of the thread. If you want to ask these questions, please go do so in GQ. Or GD. I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to get at here.

Thanks,

twickster, MPSIMS moderator

110

Well, a lot of the issue is that you really don’t want the chickens eating poop. At least not in significant quantities. One theory is that tiny, tiny amounts in the very early days are useful in establishing the gut flora, but beyond that you can overload their systems and make them sick. The best way to keep them from eating poop is to keep the brooder/coop clean and that’s a chore with the little beggars letting fly everywhere, including the food and water dishes. If, however, you’re not going to keep them clean, medicated feed can keep bacterial overload and coccidiosis in check for the short term…and meat chickens only live in the short term.

And of course people should care about farms using antibiotics–medicated feed contributes to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and that’s something that affects everyone.

111

Forgot to say earlier: Thanks, jlzania for letting me take over this corner of your thread. Didn’t think it would turn into such a thing.

For clarity, I’m rearranging your posts slightly, code_grey. Hopefully, they are relevant enough for you.

Aha! Finally we get the baseline issue that got you on this. Ok, lemme 'esplain:

Antibiotics are one way of managing a common intestinal parasite called coccidia which can cause morbidity and morality in small chicks (the older chickens can generally handle the bug themselves). Another way of managing coccidia is by having fewer birds on a given stretch of ground. A third way is to have just as many birds and accept the losses you suffer without using antibiotics. A poultry producer chooses which way they want to go: Fewer birds but don’t use antibiotics, more birds and use antibiotics, or more birds without antibiotics but more of them die/get sick. Obviously, no one wants to watch birds die from a preventable disease, so most people either choose to use antibiotics or to have fewer birds.

Note I said “managing” problems, not “eliminating” problems.

Ok, yeah. The best method so far to lessen transmission of fecal parasites in the world of large scale poultry rearing is to keep the birds in cages. However, this can only be done if:

  1. the birds are not very heavy (egg laying birds weigh about 2 pounds when full grown, and they still have problems with their feet from standing on the wire)
  2. the birds are finished growing (or else you’d have to swap them out between different kinds of cages with different mesh size)

Given how short a time meat birds are alive, how rapidly they grow, and their large finished weight, keeping them in cages is completely unfeasible. Furthermore, changing any of those three features would make raising meat birds massively less cost effective. Keeping meat chickens in cages just ain’t gonna fly.

You just aren’t going to get an environment that is so clean as to be parasite free in any sort of food production setting. There is no way to get the equipment/cages needed to house 10thousand birds sterile every 6 weeks. Also, you have to take insects into account. Good farms will have minimal flies and beetles, but you’ll still have some. These can act as carriers and reservoirs of parasites for the birds. So, some of the parasites will survive to re-infect the next flock.

There are ways to raise birds in nearly sterile environments but they are amazingly expensive and labor intensive. They are only used in research situations where people are developing poultry vaccines and whatnot and need to be absolutely certain that there aren’t other organisms to interfere with the study. In these cases, you generally have 4-8 birds living in a small room with with a dedicated person to tend to them.

Like CrazyCatLady said, there is one legitimate reason to reduce antibiotic use: The more it is in the environment, the more bacteria develop the genes to get around the antibiotic. Bacteria can share genes with each other, so we run the risk of those resistance genes ending up in nasty bacteria.

Large farms would be more than happy to rear their birds without antibiotics, but they would have to reduce how many birds they have on a given stretch of ground. That means they would have fewer birds to sell, so they would have to raise the sale price to stay in business. This is the exact strategy jlzania uses and it works because she has a customer base who is willing to pay more.

So, most people logically conclude, why don’t we all just pay more for our chicken meat and eggs so that the chickens can have more room to run around? What these people forget though, is that an industry-wide rise in the cost of eggs and meat would also increase the cost of every single product that uses chicken and eggs. Every pastry, every can of soup, every tv dinner, every bag of pasta. All of it would be more expensive. For middle-class folks, no biggie. For folks surviving on the edge of the poverty cliff, no good.

112

Pullet, I would like to concentrate here on teasing out the differences between existing cage system for egg chickens and existing non cage system (which seems to be used, with quantitative but not qualitative variations, in both factory farms and in small farms like jlzania’s, for meat chickens).

In your post 111 you are saying that even with cage system the situation is not fully “sterile”. Well, so do they give antibiotics to caged egg chickens because of this lack of sterility? Or is it the case that it is “clean enough” to avoid antibiotics?

Also, so again, if egg chickens are grown in cages “because we can”, does this mean that there are major economic reasons for this, which are not yet fully explored in this thread so far? What are the driving factors here, is it the cost of bedding/feces cleanup that is much less or absent for cages? or deaths from chicken-on-chicken violence? Or some other factors that have not yet been covered?

Looking at it from another angle, if fairy godmother wanted to grow meat chickens for cheaper by keeping them in a “cage” with a solid floor (hence no need to worry about mesh size for growing chickens) what would she need to do? Would it be just a matter of magically removing the feces since they can no longer just fall through the mesh? (note also that such hypothetical fairy godmother cages could potentially be stacked one on top of the other to save horizontal space)

ETA: when you say that we cannot make chicken raising environment sterile enough to get rid of parasites, the question is, where do the parasites even come from to infect the chickens in the first place? If we only feed chickens stuff where all parasites are killed, how will they get infected?

113

No thank you, Pullet. Of course, with that user name I would expect no less. :wink:
And you’re much exhibiting much more patience than I’m capable of right now.
I don’t generally suffer fools gladly and the fact that I’m dealing with the third worst drought in Texas’ history doesn’t maker me especially tolerant.
I find it’s hard to be nice when the thermometer is cresting a 100 degrees in frickin’ June.
My reluctance to start an “Ask the ..” was twofold.
I knew there would be periods when I didn’t have time to sit at a computer and I think it’s bad form to begin a thread and then disappear. I really appreciate you and other informed posters stepping up to the keyboard.

I am in absolute agreement and this is a quandry that I’ve haven’t been able to resolve to my satisfaction.
On one hand, I can’t charge any less for my birds.
Michael Pollen says rich farmers grow crap food for poor people and poor farmers grow good food for rich people. I’m trying to find the balance.
I know some of my farmers market clients are just barely middle class.
They choose to give up other things in order to eat well.
They don’t dine out much, they don’t buy sodas or processed foods, they eat what’s seasonal.
That still doesn’t help the single mother struggling to put food on the table.
My market accepts WIC but not for meat products.

I firmly believe that there is a hidden cost buried in cheap food however.
The FDA just banned a chicken feed additive containing arsenic that’s been linked to cancer.
Who thought that was a good idea?
We are developing super bugs because of the prevalence of antibiotics in our meat.
E. coli outbreaks are becoming more common.
America has the cheapest food in the world and the highest priced healthcare.
I believe there’s a correlation between the two.

Small amounts of manure spread over the fields fertilize the earth.
Concentrated amounts kill it.
The evaporation from the manure lagoons at the pig CAFO’s in North and South Carolina are contributing to acid rain in the region which in turn is creating algae blooms that destroy local lakes and streams.
In Delware, there is arsenic contamination in the ground water from the chicken farms.
The list goes on.

There’s also the people cost.
Undocumented workers make up much of the labor pool for both the confinement houses and the processing plants.
Many of them are women.
Remember the recent egg recall?
The same farms had numerous labor law violations.
Women complained of being abused and even raped by their supervisors.

One of our prior employees, Mike, worked at the Sanderson Farms processing plant in Byran Texas.
He was paid $11.35 per hour to hang chickens upside down on a moving line.
And that’s a union wage before union dues were deducted.
Mike was expected to hang 1800 birds per hour to meet his quota.
That’s 30 chickens per minute, folks.
He couldn’t afford the shitty, high priced health insurance offered.
Every fingernail on his hands was black with a fungus caused by handling the chickens.
And he had it easy.
The workers that actually used knives to part out the chickens lobbed off fingers on a fairly frequent basis.
Someone has to pickup the tab for fishing said parts out of the gut buckets and sewing them back on and I bet you dollars for doughnuts it’s us, the taxpayers.

That still doesn’t answer the question of how to make high quality food more accessible does it?

Well, you can probably make a good guess as to how I feel on the issue, saje. :stuck_out_tongue:
(And I won’t bore you with a diatribe on what a dangerous slope we teeter on when we justify cruelty by saying “It’s just a…”)
I don’t expect people to buy my birds for moral reasons.
I want them to buy them because these are the very best tasting birds you can find.

114

Depends on the farm. With adequate nutrition, sunlight exposure, room to move, etc. you shouldn’t have illness and need antibiotics. If you don’t provide those things, then you’re probably going to need antibiotics at some point. Farms that fall into the second camp tend to use them as a matter of course rather than waiting till there are signs of illness.

The major economic reason is that if chickens are caged, you can cram a lot more of them into a given space than you could if they were free range. Recommended space for building a coop and run are roughly 4 sf/bird indoors and 10 outdoors to prevent feces buildup and behavioral problems like excessive pecking or feather-pulling. The closer quarters are, the harder it is to keep things sanitary and the more likely you are to have issues like interbird violence and egg-eating.

You mean like a coop? She would need to either make the chickens stop shitting all the time, or else change the bedding on a regular basis. How regular depends on how many chickens you have in how much space, and how deep the bedding is.

115

does everybody else here agree with CrazyCatLady that horizontal space is so expensive nowadays that cages lead to major savings just by virtue of economizing space per bird? Or is the cost really in smaller spending on feces removal? Or maybe real cost savings with the cage system are somewhere else?

116

anyway, so let’s go on with the data gathering session. When chickens live in cages, how does their defecation work? How many times a day do they do it? How long does each session last? Are their feces basically liquid or is that different for different ages of the chicken?

Can you predict the time of defecation of a particular chicken based on the time of feeding (if it’s not continuous) or on based on some other aspects of the setup of their environment?

Do they also urinate, as a separate activity? If so, do we care about that in terms of the cleaning work? How often do they do it?

117

Why are you gathering data? And JLZ answered most of that upthread - chickens have one external exit hole in their bodies, for egg laying and excretion. Their urine and feces are eliminated mixed, as a pasty goo that sticks to everything and stinks to high heaven.

And since birds are by nature not meal-driven but generally graze or pick all day long, they also eliminate all day long.

I don’t know about cage farms, but I would hope that for the health and mental well being of the bird that they have feed in front of them all day long - their systems are set up that way and it’s healthier for them.

(Sorry JLZ, I can’t help myself. Tell me to shut my yap if I’m way off base :slight_smile: )

118

is the purpose of “bedding” in non-cage housing purely to neutralize the feces? Is there anything analogous to bedding in cages, where there are no feces?

119

Jeez. You call it “Data gathering” and you don’t even know the utter basics of bird’s elimination?

If you’re seriously interested in the subject, READ A BOOK. Or search on line, there are dozens of websites that go through the basics for people starting out raising a few chickens for their own consumption, just waiting for you to read them.

Expecting someone to take their time to type out answer to your questions day after day when the information already exists in abundance if you’d take a minute to google, that’s … something. Self-centered, maybe. Almost abusive of other people’s time.

Why not give Pullet and the others a break for a day while you check out the existing resources?

120

I agree. I suggested earlier that (assuming he’s genuinely interested in the subject) code_grey spend some time on a poultry farm. He rejected that as “inefficient,” although I think firsthand experience is invaluable. But his endless questioning is only efficient because of the willingness of others to answer his interminable questions.