Chickens

[Okie]

Anyone here raise chickens?
I do. I have Americauna, Buff Orphingtons, a couple of RIR, some banty Cochins, banty OEGB and a few mixed breeds. I have some Dark Cornish ordered along with Cornish Rocks for broilers. I plan to breed the Dark Cornish to the B Orphs to see what kind of broiler I can raise from them.
I am in the midst of building tractors so I can have pure breeds to sell hatching eggs.
I would love to hear from anyone else that is raising chickens. Maybe we can do some egg exchanging or at least some story swapping. 

[Soldier4Christ]

It has been many a year since I worked with chickens. My parents raised them in our backyard from the time I was born to about my 12th birthday. Can't do that now because of all the zoning laws. One of my first jobs was working in a hatchery at the age of 16. Everything was done manually there, no tractors. My parents had the Rhode Island Reds, Multi-colored and White Leghorns, and a couple of banty's. I was the only that could do anything with one of the banty's. I called him Charlie Wooster.    The other banty was so mean I couldn't even tame him. He made it to the stew pot fairly quickly. Charlie was an excellent guard chicken. He wouldn't let anyone in the coop that didn't belong there without tearing them up pretty badly. He would sit on my shoulder while I was feeding the other chickens waiting for his meal. I fed him separately because the Leghorns would fight with him over the food.

I rewired the electrical for my sister and her husband in their chicken coop in 1991 but that is the most that I did with their chickens except to eat a few.

[Okie]

My tractors are much smaller than the comercial type. Most I have built so far are 4'X8' that is big enough for a half dozen hens and a roo real easy. I have attached old lawn mower wheels to one end so I can move them to new grazing daily. I have been around chickens all my life. As a kid, my folks had a big truck patch, milk cows, chickens and rabbits. We sold milk and eggs, fryer rabbits and chickens and produce. By the time I was 8, I had an incubator. I kind of got away from chickens in my teen years. Daddy had sold the farm. Mom had a handful of bantys and a few guineas and I was working. Then I got back to raising chickens shortly after getting married in '79. In the 27 yrs that have passed since then, I have got into and out of having chickens several times. This is the first time I have ever messed with trying to keep breeds pure for selling hatchlings and hatching eggs and breeding big broilers. My daughter and two grandaughters are as excited about watching the babies hatch. My daughter and I have wittnessed it for years, but it is always so neat to see.
 I have had problems finding old mower wheels for the tractors and didn't want to put out the money for new ones. My daughter and the youngest granddaughter and I went to a junk store today. While talking to the man, he mentioned working on some mowers and junking others. I asked about the wheels and he said he would give me as many as I could haul off. He said he probably has 500 wheels that he would be tickled to death for me to take off his hands. I will be going back with the pick-up:)
I had been wondering where the wheels would come from and he had been wondering what he would do with them. We had both mentioned our problems to the Lord and he did the rest.

[Soldier4Christ]

We had both mentioned our problems to the Lord and he did the rest.

Amen! He knows our needs and always provides.

I came from a long line of farmers. My g-g-grandfather came from Ostergotland, Sweden in the early 1800's and bought farmland. My greatgrandfather and grandfather continued on the farm as they grew up. As I was growing up all my g-uncles, g-aunts, uncles and aunts all still had portions of the original farm and I would spend many a summer on the different farms. Hogs, cows, chickens, goats, sheep and horses. Besides the chickens all my parents had was a greenhouse and a very large vegetable garden. I left all that when I joined the Navy and really missed it all for 20 yrs.

The chicken tractors sound like some good old American ingenuity. My parents chickens were in a very over crowded small coop in our back yard. The chicken nursery I worked at was inside of a big building with different rooms for each level of the hatching and egg laying.

[Okie]

I had never heard of the tractors until a short time ago on a poultry forum. When we got the big rains last month, the one tractor I had built got to go to higher ground. The poor penned chickens were in skinky mud up to their knees. I decided then and there that tractors were the way to go. I am working on my third one now, only about 7 more and I should be pretty well stocked. Now my daughter is looking at the tractors thinking rabbits. LOL

[Soldier4Christ]

I didn't understand what you meant by chicken tractor. I was thinking of a tractor that was used to clean a hen house.  lol   I just did a search and found out how terribly wrong I was. WOW! I sure do wish someone had come up with that idea a long time ago. There were many a day that I had to use a shovel and a wheelbarrow to clean up the mess and move it to where we wanted it as fertilizer. There were many more days spent tearing down chicken coops and rebuilding them in different locations and in repairing the holes varmints would dig to get into the coop. And believe me we had plenty of varmints doing just that, rats, weasels, fox, coyote ...... It was a daily job with lots of losses of chickens.

Such a simple thing and yet it solves so many problems.

[nChrist]

We gave up on raising chickens.

I really think that we got some poor quality seed eggs.

Either that, or there were several other problems that we considered.

1 - We didn't know how deep to plant them.

2 - We didn't know how far apart the rows were supposed to be.

3 - We didn't know how much they were supposed to be watered.

(In Hiding    - Let me know if anyone laughs.)

[Soldier4Christ]

lol  ...  Maybe there was a problem with the fertilizer.

[Okie]

Yeah, you gotta watch the fertilizer. Too much and you might sprout a turkey. lol

[Shammu]

We gave up on raising chickens.

I really think that we got some poor quality seed eggs.

Either that, or there were several other problems that we considered.

1 - We didn't know how deep to plant them.

2 - We didn't know how far apart the rows were supposed to be.

3 - We didn't know how much they were supposed to be watered.

(In Hiding    - Let me know if anyone laughs.)

This is what that poor egg, will look like when it grows up..........

[nChrist]

 

Those dancing chickens sure are bony - they just never fatten up.

We tried to teach him how to sing, but he can't carry a tune in  bucket.

So, we have a dancing chicken that can't sing.   

[Soldier4Christ]

Looks like some wise chickens. All that exercise is probably so they can stay skinny and not end up in a pot.

 

[Shammu]

Looks like some wise chickens. All that exercise is probably so they can stay skinny and not end up in a pot.

 

[nChrist]

We had high hopes for that dancing chicken. Did I tell you that we named him ELVIS?



(Small Print: Hiding Again)   

[Soldier4Christ]

That figures because Elvis couldn't dance. He could sing but he couldn't dance.