Winter Update: New GVF Babies Arrive

 Things are pretty slow right now at the farm. We have our vegetable seeds ordered and are waiting their arrival. Some of the guys have been working on our sawmill but quickly came to realize that frozen logs do not cut well! We are also about to start tapping trees for this years maple syrup run. We are praying that it is a great year for sap so that we have enough syrup to sell in our farm stand all season.

 Most of the excitement right now is coming from our order of 100 Rhode Island Red chicks! We are trying to keep ahead of the demand for our pastured eggs come this summer. Right now we are just barely keeping up! We ordered them to arrive at the start of February so that they would be laying in June.

They are so cute and fun to watch at this age! They are living in a large box in the house for now but will be headed to a coop once a few more of their feathers come in. Then once the snow is gone and the grass is in we will move them to the chicken tractor.  The kids are loving having them inside the house!

 We will most likely add another 50 chicks in the summer so we will end up with a grand total of 200. We hope to be able to offer our eggs at a local natural food store! Stay tuned!

Processing Our Pastured Broilers

We wanted to share some photo's of processing day! We processed our first batch of broiler chickens on August 11th 2012 and it was such a great experience that we are already planning for next year. We will be posting a sign up sheet for anyone who is interested in purchasing whole broiler chickens starting next summer. Here are some photo's from our day...

Here our broiler chickens have reached the 8 week mark! They are looking really plump and healthy.  We are excited and hesitant at the same time...

None of us have ever raised an animal from baby to table. It is bound to be a day of learning and excitement.

We ended up with an okay day for the job, a little gray sky and drizzle for the morning and then warming up later on. We started out with 50 chicks and lost 2 during the 8 weeks of growth. We added 4 roosters that came with the laying hens for a total of 52 chickens to process that day.
Here is the chicken tractor with the roof pulled off and what's left of the broilers. We are about 3/4 of the way through in this photo.

Our three pretty Rhode Island Red boys awaiting their fate. The other rooster "George" (not pictured) was from the Kelley's house.

Our set up was pretty simple, the broilers went from the killing cones, to hot water, to defeatherer  to cold water tank, to the processing table. It was all hands on deck at the tables! 

An upclose shot of our borrowed plucking machine. This one worked great! So fast and clean!!

From the plucker the heads and feet are removed and then the broilers go straight to a cold water tank to cool them down. 

Another job after coming out of the plucker is to remove any feathers that did not come out. See those long tail feathers to the right. Those are the easy ones, it's the tiny little stray pin feathers that we needed the needle nose pliers for! I have excluded any photos of the evisceration process but there are tons on youtube if you really need to know :-)

And finally to the table! This was our first one and it tasted great! 

Thanks so much to everyone who helped that day!!! We could not have had such a great experience with the whole process without all of our helpers! A special thanks to our friend Dick who taught us all he knows!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

A Chicken Tractor for Pastured Egg Layers

Our next construction project after the duck house was a movable chicken coop (also known as a chicken tractor) for our Rhode Island Red pullets (young hens). We decided on a light weight A-frame style with some metal roofing to keep out the rain and provide protection from the sun. 

Here's Patrick our "construction manager" adding chicken wire to the ends. This end will hold the egg boxes later in the year but for now it will just be chicken wire.

We also added two clear plastic panels to each side to allow light into the roosting area.

From this view you can see the end with the door and the roosting area inside. The roosts were just 1" poles we cut from the woods and crisscrossed inside the tractor. Just inside the door we allowed for enough room to hang their feed and water. We also used electric wire netting since it is easy to move! 

This is moving day! The kids are excited to let the pullets into their new home.

Here are the girls (and a few boys!) enjoying the fresh grass in their new home! It took them a few days to find the roosts but they easily adapted to the new area. Eggs coming soon...

Just a few bits of info if anyone is interested...
 We could not find any info on chicken tractor designs for pastured egg layers online when we started this project. Hope this may be helpful to someone else.

This coop was built for 50 hens but could hold up to 70-75. 

It is 16' long and 12' wide.

The total cost of materials was around $1000.

The electric netting was purchased at Premier we have184 feet in two sections.

We use a hanging metal feeder that we bought at Tractor Supply.

We use this style dispenser for water that we also bought online.

We have found that the tractor needs to be moved twice a week, once within the fencing and another when we move the entire fencing system. We will update this with the egg boxes when we get them on.


UPDATE: Check out this post to see how we added the egg boxes on to the back.

UPDATE 2013: This year we needed to add 100 new laying hens to our flock to keep up with the demand for our pastured eggs. We are trying out a new tractor/coop in order to house them all. We were also wanting more space for egg boxes since we have had some issues with broken eggs and eggs being eaten by the hens. Below is a link to the post with a few photo's of our new set up. We also added double the amount of electric netting as we had last year. The new  house is quite hard to move right now since we have not added the wheels. We are moving it by slowly dragging it along with the farm tractor. We would love to elevate the whole thing on some kind of steel frame with wheels and then be able to hook on to the frame when moving.
Post 1 with construction photo's inside and out.
Post 2 with photo's in the field.