Flighty Red Broilers

This batch of Red Broiler meat chickens that I am raising is flighty as hell. Ordinarily when you touch a meat bird it squawks a bit and a tremor shoots through its body, and that’s about it. When you touch a good percentage of this batch of Red Broilers, they go off screeching and flapping like they were shot out of a cannon.

None of the batches of meat chickens that I have raised have had a terribly good homing instinct, so they get close to the shelter at night, but not all of them get in it. This means that it is always necessary to round up a few of them and get them into the shelter. When I get out there well into dusk but before dark the round up is pretty easy. I just herd them with my feet. However, after dark, a chicken is pretty blind, so they don’t like to move. After dark, I need to pick the birds up and walk them to the shelter. As I mentioned above, this is usually pretty simple, just reach down and pick the bird up. With this group, however, you have to snatch them with two hands around both wings and hope you get a good grip before the cannon fires.

Last night my neighbor came over to buy some pork and another neighbor came to pick up a few pigs I piggy sat for him for a week, so we didn’t have dinner until about 8:30, which meant that I didn’t get out to the coop until well after dark.  One bird had squirmed its way in between two of the hay bales that I placed up against the shelter for added warmth because the nights have been so cool. Its head was “inside” but its butt was sticking out into the paddock, so I wanted to pick it up and bring it around to the front of the shelter and place it inside. Because there were still other birds to round up, I hadn’t closed the front of the shelter yet. When I touched that bird to try to grab it, it exploded forward, screeching and squawking, and slammed right into the back of the shelter. There was a huge boom inside the shelter as all seventy-five or so birds that had been inside frantically flapped their wings and came rocketing out, dashing in all directions once they cleared the door, screaming their heads off.

“Son of a bitch!” I thought to myself and shook my head as the commotion died down.  I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them peeping to each other and from the sound of it they were all over the place. I could hear that at least a few of them had gone through the fence. What should have been a simple little job had become a real chore.

I started at the fence line first. I swept my flashlight a couple feet inside the fence and a couple feet outside. Even with a flashlight a two pound red broiler hunkered down in the grass is hard to see. I was worried about stepping on them, so I had to walk very slowly and carefully. There were only two or three outside the fenceline and about five or six just inside it. I quickly snatched them up one by one and placed them inside the shelter.

After that I did a sweep of the whole paddock. While I had been walking the fenceline, about half of the chicks had peeped each other into a couple of big groups, while about half were spread out and too far from the peeping to move towards it. The latter half just lay low in the grass. I went around picking up the stragglers. A couple of them were flighty explosive types and one of them made such a commotion that one of the big groups nearly exploded apart when the flighty bird started flapping its wings (I missed them and only grabbed around its body) and screeching, but other than a big collective squawk and shudder, the group held together.

Once I had the stragglers in the shelter, I moved onto the big groups. Rather than reach down and pick them up one by one, I ushered them along with my foot. When I held the flashlight light out in front of them, they kind of moved into it, so I just kept the light out in front and pushed them along with the inside of my boot. As they moved away from my boot, the group got pretty spread out, but they stayed more or less together and moved along. Once at the shelter, only a few walked inside it, most just lay down in front of it, which was fine with me for the time being. I went back for the second big group, and about ten minutes later, the two groups were all in front of the shelter door. Then I reached down and pushed them one by one into the shelter. At that point they were pretty well desensitized to being handled, so there was no cannon fire.

A detailed ten minute sweep of the paddock uncovered five more birds laying low in the grass. After getting them in the shelter, I did one more quick sweep then closed the shelter door and called it a night. The paddock is up by the road and not too far from the house, so I think that any birds that might have still been out that I didn’t see probably made it through the night because the predator pressure is pretty low, although it did rain.

The flightiness should really be bred out of this strain of red broilers. Ranginess is a desirable trait in a pastured meat bird, but not flightiness, and you can have ranginess without flightiness.

 

More Critters, Please; and Diversification vs. Return to Labor

More Critters, Please

One of the ways that I know I want to be a commercial farmer is that I am not satisfied with kitchen garden or homestead quantities. I don’t want to grow fifty heads of garlic. I want to grow ten thousand. A twenty foot row of dry beans doesn’t cut it. Neither does ten or twenty pigs. Nor twenty-five ewes. I don’t know at exactly what numbers of each of anything I would be satisfied, but I do know that when I hang out with the flock of sixteen commercial ewes, one ram, and seventeen lambs — thirty four sheep — it looks and feels to me like a tiny little flock. I also know that I am sad that there are only three more ewes left in that flock to lamb. Not only can I easily imagine a flock of 1oo ewes, I long for it. This contrasts very sharply with Jen’s feeling that there are a lot of sheep out there and it has been a busy lambing season. She is more than satisfied. My appetite has been barely whetted.

The desire to raise a lot of animals does not a farmer make, however. Without the attendant desires to do the work necessary and manage the marketing and financial aspects, you can’t have a commercial-scale farm, or, alternatively, you won’t have a successful  and/or satisfying commercial-scale farm. Commercial farming is not for people who enjoy leisure. Commercial farming is for people who enjoy work.

I was talking with my friend down at the vegetable farm the other day about work. Their farm stand is open seven days a week from 9am to 6pm, ten months out of the year, and she and her husband are there working on the farm every single day — she manages the farm stand and greenhouses. I can count on one hand, maybe one and a half hands, the number of days they take off over the course of their 300+ consecutive days of work. She figures she works eighty hours per week. Granted, they get a nice chunk of time off between Christmas when they close and March 1 when they open back up, something that a livestock farmer does not get. Regardless, the point is they work their asses off, and if you, like I, want there to be more of them, you’d better also want to work your ass off, seven days a week, and 365 days a year if you are a livestock farmer. A “day off” for a livestock farmer is when she does nothing but feed and water the animals — two, three, maybe four hours of work, depending on the number of species (generally speaking, each species needs separate attention) and number of animals (the number of animals of each species can increase quite a bit without substantially increasing the time needed to feed and water them) on the farm and the time of year (winter feeding and watering takes two to three times longer than it does in other seasons).

Diversification versus Return to Labor

This parenthetical about the fact that each species needs separate attention deserves a bit of its own attention. There is a value in diversification, there is no doubt about that. Diversification is good for the farm ecosystem because each species makes different and distinct contributions to and demands on it, and in a way that can balance the ecosystem interactions of the other species. Diversification is also good for marketing, especially direct marketing. People have grown accustomed over the past two generations to “one-stop shopping.” They want to be able to have satisfied all of their meat needs, for example, on one farm. If you raise only pigs and sheep, potential customers might very well drive right past you to the farm one town over where they raise pigs, sheep, and meat chickens, or, even better from the customers’ perspectives, pigs, sheep, meat chickens, and beef cows.

However, before diving head long into really deep diversification, like I initially did, I would advise that you weigh carefully the increase in labor against the increase in net income, either through customer attraction, customer retention, or more straightforwardly, additional sales. Remember that even if you add only fifty chickens, your labor requirement will go up by a whole species worth of feeding, watering, fence and shelter moving, equipment maintenance, and daily watching and looking. Not to mention those chickens will need to be slaughtered and marketed.

Think about this following example very carefully.

If you add 1,000 meat chickens to the farm, say in four batches of 250 birds, this will add a substantial amount of labor — one study of pastured poultry operations showed an average of 24 hours per week, times 28 weeks in the four batch season = 672 hours over your existing labor demands (Note that this includes slaughtering the birds, so if you have them slaughtered, your labor demands will be lower, but your costs will be a bit higher, about $1.00 per bird). If your net income per bird is $3.00, then the total increase in net income from adding the 1,000 chickens will be $3,000, or about $4.50 per hour.

Instead, let’s look at what happens if we forgo the diversification and add more pigs to the numbers already on the farm. Recall that the assumption is that this is a commercial farm, so let’s say you are already raising 100 pigs, and that you are having them slaughtered in five batches of twenty over the course of the year. On average, between non-commodity wholesale and direct marketing, your net income per pig is $75, or a 30% profit margin. To achieve an increase of $3,000 in net income, it will be necessary, at $75 net per pig, to add forty pigs over the course of the season, or just eight pigs per batch. I can say without qualification or reservation that your labor increase for those eight pigs per batch will be so marginal as to be irrelevant. On average, you will not clock a single hour more per batch to add those pigs. On a return to labor basis, that $3,000 is free money, it costs you nothing. In addition, the addition of those eight pigs per batch will lead to a marginal decrease in the cost to raise each pig because fixed costs will be divided over more pigs. You will therefore also see a marginal increase in your profit margin.

However, before making the decision to net an additional $3,000 for no more work, keep in mind that this is a hypothetical. There are at least two real world considerations that cannot be penciled out, even in hypothetical, so easily. Will you be able to market those additional eight pigs per batch, and at a price that does not lower your current net per pig (or, if it does lower your average, can you market even more pigs  to make up the difference [assuming you have the cash flow to do it, you can add quite a few more pigs without increasing labor requirements by scaling up the equipment])? Will a lack of diversity of product offerings cause you to not attract or retain customers? If adding meat chickens increases your overall sales by 30% because the chickens draw more customers that also buy pork and lamb, then the hours spent raising the chickens will have been well-spent. Similarly, if not adding chickens causes your sales to drop by 30% because you lose customers to the new farmer three stalls down at the farmers market who has pigs, beef, lamb, and chicken, then, again, those hours will have been well spent.

Personally, I am very much inclined to forgo raising chickens because I don’t really like raising them, but I just haven’t had a strong enough gut instinct either way how giving up chickens might affect my overall sales. Until I have that strong gut feeling, I will continue raising them, I think.

 

Questions about raising broilers

Anne recently left the following comment asking a few questions about broilers that I have decided to answer in a blog post rather than as a comment or privately via email: “I am getting ready to try raising our own meat chickens next year. Could you post a picture of your shelters – it would be helpful when we go to build our own. How many chickens can you raise at a time in 1 shelter? What’s the optimal wt/age of your red roasters and how much grain per pound does it take to get them there? Now that you’re experienced, would you ever consider going back to the “monster cross” or are the reds doing well for you?”

I am sorry, but I do not have any pictures of my shelters. However, they are similar to the one pictured here on Robert Plamondon’s site: http://www.plamondon.com/hoop-coop.html. I open the shelter in the morning and close it at night so that the chicks are protected from predators. I use electrified poultry netting to contain the chicks and to keep predators out. One section works, but needs to be moved often. If you buy a second section, you increase the area that you can enclose four times (one section = 40×40 = 1600 sq ft.; two sections = 80×80 = 6400 sq ft.), so the second section is well worth it.

I keep fifty chicks in one 8×10 shelter. I don’t think I’d want to keep more than seventy-five in there. The last week or two the birds are pretty big and things get pretty crowded, and unless you have additional shades set up in the paddock, the chicks spend a good bit of time in the shelter on hot sunny days. The shelter needs to be moved frequently because the ground beneath it gets covered with manure pretty quickly.

People seem to like a three to four pound chicken. Because of scheduling problems, I needed to keep my red broilers until they were twelve weeks old. About eighty percent of them dressed out to four and a half to over six pounds, which is much too big. Ten weeks would probably have been perfect. A few would have come in under three pounds, but I have had a few people interested in birds that size as well. You are shooting for a bird with a live weight of between four and a quarter and five pounds. The red broilers are less feed efficient than the Cornish Cross. My feed conversion is between 3.5 to 4 pounds per dressed pound. Cornish Cross come in closer to three pounds (about 2.4 pounds in confinement).

I will never raise another Cornish Cross. You can read why in this post: Nuclear Farming. I also plan to move away from the red broilers to a heritage, dual purpose breed like Delaware or Barred Rock, both because breed conservation is important to me and because I need a non-production breed source of laying hen. In production breed layers, the males are discarded, often being dumped in piles to suffocate and/or starve to death.

Good luck with raising the chickens next year.