You filthy swine!

[mike_belben]

i didnt take a picture of mister duct tape but if you imagine a cardboard wing sticking straight out the side of a bumbling chick you wouldnt be too far off.  

so it took about 15 minutes of massaging vegetable oil all over the right side of this thing and keeping his greased up carcass from escape, to get the tape off without tearing feathers.  

the harder part was getting the oil off.  so i washed him in blue dawn and as the temps dropped really wanted him to dry out under the lamp, but..




the other birds decided against multiculturalism and pecked the foreigner a lot.  

so back to the wash room for 2 more rounds of scrubbing and blowdrying and then finally tooth brushing the dry yet clumpy bird proved to be the thing that got back as much of his fluff as possible so he could blend back in.  i created a big free food distraction to insert the little immigrant before the watchdogs noticed the invader.











this morning all looked well except the crops were all still full and the waterer, which was 1/3 full at 9pm last night, was bone dry.   theyre all shrieking their needs out.  im waiting on a new bucket of mash to get there, so i gave them a paintcap of crumbles to shut up and they mobbed it while i went for water, every bird, despite full crops.  they also had crumbles for dinner,

 when i put the water down every bird dove off the crumbles and did a 29 carcass pile up on the waterer, slugging down about a quart in minutes then went back to bed without eating anymore.  so lesson learned, these things dont like anyone who isnt just like them in every way, and are too stupid to stop eating when their crops are jammed with bone dry food and no water.  either A, never run out of water, or B, put the water in the food, or C, do both.

[Southside]

Yes, NEVER run out of water.

[mike_belben]

Interesting developments are that i have lost gimpy. Took two cardboard corral census tallies and still have 29 birds.  That means he is standing and walking normal enough that i can no longer identify him. Theres a few suspects but he has officially blended in. 


The flyboys have been getting their feathers trimmed one by one as they escape. 


Another interesting thing to look at is that some birdsnare natural diggers.. The flock is hammering a collection of free feed yet a handful of them just dont care, theyd rather sift and churn and dig to peck through composting bedding than eat from a pile of pure feed gift wrapped with a bow.  

 

[Paul_H]

They've been red pilled.

[beenthere]

More free feed for the chicks.. in this video about removing a bald face hornets nest.
MONSTER Hornets' Nest! | Vacuum Hornets | Wasp Nest Removals - YouTube

Skip to 12:00 for the feeding of the nest.

[Southside]

Have you ever seen what chickens will do to mice? Better than any cat those barnyard buzzards they are. That's some red neck entertainment right there!  :D

[mike_belben]

Sack of shelled corn was $5.25 the first time i bought in i dunno.. 2018.. 19?  

Its $9.50 +9.75% tax now.  


A sack of 7 grain chicken scratch is $13.50 +T.  


I almost buckled yesterday and bought one but said no.. Im gonna see this grass fed poultry thing through.  Ive got a crippled bird healed, no sick birds, and all are eating like savages still so why not. If i kill them all itll be a $56 dollar question worth answering.  

I have gotten my first live soldier fly eggs collected and turned to ferocious larva.  All my other larvae just appeared in the compost and i never saw the eggs.  This is the first time i put eggs on substrate.  They turned a dry corncob to a liquid puddle overnight, and they grew from about .020 to half inch long in the process.  Like a dry sponge of pure protein, fat, lipase and calcium, just add organic rubbish.  

[mike_belben]

ugh, im a dumb ash.  why did i go and say 'no sick birds'??  :-\   i go out there today and i got one who isnt not eating at all while the others are going kookoo for cocoa puffs.  i pick him up and can just tell right away from the posture and wings that its gimpy.  his legs are straight and he can stand and walk normal now, but he looks like crap.

this time i put some black marker on his beak so i can spot him, and gave him the water dropper treatment with electrolyted water mix which i then put down for all of them. put him in the crumbles bag until he had a few bites and will keep tabs.  

my fermented feed mash had a white skim of kahn yeast on top this morning. its harmless but it means that the temp is too high which i cant really help, and that i need to add some salt to the brine.  

theyre still eating and getting full crops but i have a suspicion backing off the crumbles (which is a grain mix) is gonna lead to slower growth since greens have half the energy of grains. but otoh, i trim off huge globs of white fat in a chicken and thats gonna be the fat you get from excess grain, right?  

i think next batch of birds will be split into a grain batch and a greens batch so there is a true comparison.  will help decide on the difference in slaughter time, weight, body condition, fat composition, muscle flavor, overall health etc etc.

[WDH]

Pulling for you, Gimpy.....

[Old Greenhorn]

Hey Mike, maybe you should start a 'Go Fund Me' page for the little guy. That's what everybody else seems to do when faced with difficulty (aka 'life').  :D :D :D

[HemlockKing]

Hey Mike, maybe you should start a 'Go Fund Me' page for the little guy. That's what everybody else seems to do when faced with difficulty (aka 'life').  :D :D

Just put that gimpy is your emotional support animal and that'll get them to open their wallets!! Save gimpy!

[mike_belben]

Well weve got some stuff going on behind the curtain that would definitely cause most people to grovel and beg.  Its just not our style.  The Lord will provide.  


The gimpster is eating pretty good and standing up correctly again so i guess that electrolyte is good stuff. I got him to take a few sips of yogurt whey as jim suggested.  The rest of these pigs are ferocious eaters. if i walk in at mid day now to make sure no one has overheated they fly out of the brooder at me unless i feed them.  

Today is 14 days and im thinking the need to go outside soon to avoid overheating in the shed but arent feathered out yet for the night time lows.. other than on their wings.   What would you do?

[Southside]

Don't put them out without being fully feathered. They will die. Find a way to vent the shed better.

[thecfarm]

Grain is pricey. A 50# bag of good grain will kill a $20 bill. It's almost $19 at the store I work at.
If they take longer to reach the weight from eating your food, so what? It's cheaper!!!

[Southside]

From a taste and eating experience slower growing is actually preferred by the customers you would be targeting with your birds.  Same thing with beef, it has a different mouth feel, texture, taste, etc.  

Speaking of taste you want the fat on those birds.  Fat is where the taste is actually stored, not in the lean meat.  Soy and corn fed beef or chicken has a very limited mineral profile in the fat so the taste is basically non existent, and it's consistent that way - which is exactly what the commodity world wants.  Chef Ralph at Ponderosa wants his steak to taste a specific way, so he seasons it with the recipe he has developed, and uses it time and time again, so the steak you get today from him will taste the same as the one next month - all because of what he added to a blank tasting piece of meat.  If his steak from one farm tasted different than the one from a farm 50 miles away he could not produce a consistent finished product that is the same in any restaurant they own in the country.  That is where 100% grassfed comes in and shines.  When an animal eatts a salad bar of forage it picks up a wide variety of minerals and stores them in the fat.  Fescue will provide different minerals than clover, which are different than Johnson Grass, and the time of year and local soil fertility will impact things as well.  Green, living, forage will provide the best mineral and CLA profile, it's all in the chlorophyll baby!!   Don't get me wrong, if we go to Golden Corral I return to the steak guy multiple times, but I also know it's all in what they added and we haven't been there for well over a year.  Now our own beef - the only thing I add is a touch of salt and pepper to it - it has it's own flavor that actually tastes like real beef.  I can not finish a beef in the 18-20 months that a feed lot does, simply can't happen on grass.  Takes me 26-30 months most of the time to be sure I have a marbled ribeye, finished beef when it gets harvested.   

I will try to get a few pictures later this week as we have birds to process and right now it only happens on rainy days given the field work I need to finish.  My birds have a 4-6 oz of bright yellow fat that wraps around the gizzard and works it's way down to the vent where it's really built up.  Basically they have a big butt.  This is a very good thing.  I carefully remove that fat, wash it, and package it in 1 lb bags that I wholesale for $3.50 / lb and direct sell for $4.50 / lb.  So that brings me and additional $0.88 - $1.69 / bird.  On the high end it more than covers the initial cost of the chick.  Sort of like running a sawmill only opposite.  The lumber pays the bills and the shavings are profit.  Here the fat is paying for the input stock costs, and out of all the organs and other "chicken" parts we sell the fat is the single largest component per bird on a weight basis.  What I am trying to get at is it has value, significant value.  You may trim it off of a commodity bird because it's nasty and slimy, but in a grass fed product it is consumed for the taste. When it comes to chicken fat in the grass fed world, the market wants it to render and turn into "Schmaltz", and yes they are happy to pay for it, so I produce it.  The more clover I can get into my birds the brighter yellow the fat and skin are - makes for happy customers.  

[mike_belben]

well that just expanded my brain into a new realm.  man..  lots to think about.  


i have mountains of bread coming in, like brand name sandwich bread. its not even bad yet, we just cant eat all of it and i dont have a dime to be buying pigs.. lot of medical stuff going on i dont wanna discuss publically thats keeping decisions on everything up in the air.  anyway i just gave away two trash bags of bread because the freezer is full.  should i be drying it and grinding it for a component of bird feed?


there is no question my birds are consuming a very very high portion of greens.  i worry that it may be too much.  dont forget that these are blended and fermented by salt, vinegar and cultures so its pre-digested. i cant find any instance of anyone else doing this and there is a constant nagging in the back of my head that im gonna kill them, so that is in question. what is not at all in question, is that judging by their behavior, crumbles are their favorite.  the violence degree by which they go after a handful of crumbles is borderline dangerous.  they like greens and will eat all day.  but they love grains.  i dont know if they should.

im pretty confident this batch of birds is just for education and not resale, maybe gifting but not marketing. which frees me up from any customer expectations of purity in one direction or the other and allows me to play the dissection and experimental BBQ comparison game.  i should build a second A frame so i can segregate batches and try different feed strategies, but thats probably not until next year.  my primary strategy is to do it in a way that doesnt cost money.  with money printing, input costs never stop rising.  there will be a lot of producers who fold if they dont learn to cut out costs.  the price of birds will keep rising so if i can feed on homegrown inputs margins will continually grow.  well.. in purchasing power it wont but you know what i mean. 

[mike_belben]

what is the live weight on that beef at finish, and does tenderness ever suffer? 30 months is the USDA cutoff right?    


on the wholesale parts selling... who would one look for as a wholesale buyer?  i assume chicken plants are selling their own and not buying it.. would it be canned food factories or meat packers?  its fine if you dont wanna discuss, i understand. 

[doc henderson]

It was interesting working in the NICU.  We would have a preemie that would start looing yellow and get a work up for jaundice.  on several the workup was negative including the bilirubin number.  come to find out the moms were vegan and breast milk was orange, (from eating lots of yams ect.) and the babies turned orange.  Maybe these can eventually be marketed as chicken nuggets that have a helping of veggies included.     if they eventually free range, they will pick out what they want.  some that I knew that raised chick to chickens for friars, did it in 16 weeks but they fed lots of grain.  fat occurs in mammals when the calorie intake exceeded there daily needs, and is stored. in starvation mode, we breakdown muscle to use as cellular energy. 

[mike_belben]

if i dont confine these in a moveable coop theyll be killed either by my dogs, or the wild dogs, or the neighbors dogs or the buzzards or the coyotes or the snakes or the...   


seriously its for their own good!  

at present i dont have the grass straightaways needed to comply with the salatin model of daily full length moves onto fresh new grass, so ive been preparing them to live on a deep litter system.  i layer grass then sawdust then grass then sawdust and just keep going up.  the snail trail they leave behind in the slow moving pen will be one of high organic matter and fertility that will be gardened in the future.  i dunno how well itll work but thats what im gonna do. 

the argument of they need fresh grass to eat kinda goes out the window since im feeding a puree of better greens than they are capable of chewing up.  so what they really need is -in my mind anyways- a clean spot to live on and not be eating their own rump sauce.  if i keep adding unpooped layers thats gotta be a little better than them living in the same nasty barn or dirt patch. the cooler, slower microbes will be working on the subsurface plops. 

[doc henderson]

I agree, and I think your moving coop will achieve the same.  did not mean to say they need to run free all day.  we got away with that, but live on the edge of town, and cooped ours up at night when most predators (wild) would do their harm.  we lost a dozen young turkey chicks all at ones,  in a pen with no cover.  they were gone or had their heads pulled off.  I assume for the next days meal.  That was 25 years ago and we lived in the country then.  carry on.

[mike_belben]

Very interesting thing happened today.  

I rounded up about 40 soldier fly larvae and tossed them in this afternoon at 3pm.  Took a while but the big eaters all ate as many as they wanted.  By 9pm, those birds had sprouted tailfeathers and the start of full body feathers plus had much thicker wings.  

I looked into it.. Feathers are mostly made of the protein keratin.  Which is what scales are too.  Soldier fly larvae are covered in scales.  The other half of the flock is still just fuzz. So i guess i can call that a keratin deficiency compared to the rest.  Tomorrow If i segregate and feed them a diced up bunch of larvae and they fluff up same day ill know for sure. 

[doc henderson]

nice thought, but doubt it could produce that fast.  maybe your big eaters are just ahead of the crowd.  fun to think about.

[mike_belben]

Its hard to say.  Ill be keeping a close watch for it.  Another piece is that a few feathered birds pushed out some seriously solid turds -literally struggled- that are absolutely not the result of eating green mash or crumbles.  Larvae were the only abnormal feed so far so i know its the cause of the turd and i watched 3 feathered fat birds drop nuggets. Fuzzy birds still squirting green sauce.

I cant for sure say larvae did the feathers but i aim to test it tomorrow

[mike_belben]

My brother has been raising CX meat birds about a decade in a mudlot on feed and tonight he told me his birds dont fully feather until nearly slaughter. 

Im at day 15 now for reference. 

[Southside]

what is the live weight on that beef at finish, and does tenderness ever suffer? 30 months is the USDA cutoff right?    


on the wholesale parts selling... who would one look for as a wholesale buyer?  i assume chicken plants are selling their own and not buying it.. would it be canned food factories or meat packers?  its fine if you dont wanna discuss, i understand.

I target a 1,000 lb finished beef, might go 1,100 lbs but for 100% grassfed you really don't want to be bigger than that.  There is no economic advantage.  Tenderness is a product of the cooking as much as the finish of the beef itself.  You can't cook grassfed beef too slowly, but for sure you can cook it too fast and make it tough.  A big key to tender grassfed beef is that the animal gains weight each and every single day of it's life, if you can keep that gain over 2 lbs / day all the better.  Do not let them drop weight.  It's all about forage management and planning 60+ days ahead.  
You can ship a 20 year old cow and get it USDA inspected.  The age cutoff - I think it's 24 months, but don't recall - is for being able to leave spinal bone in the cut.  Think T bone.  If it's past the age cutoff then the it's deboned and you get filet instead.  BSE / Mad Cow Disease brought this on.
We sell all of our beef cuts bone out, then other than the spine bones we sell all the bones too.  As far a buyers go - no as a little guy you can't and don't want to deal with packers, canneries, etc.  We wholesale to privately owned grocery stores and small boutique shops that both use and retail our products, that's the best advertising right there.  You want to deal with the place that you can speak with the owner, or a manager who has purchasing authority.  I have zero interest in dealing with Whole Foods and 15 layers of Accounts Payable folks.  
Now onto your bread question.  Caution - soap box ahead.  My answer, no don't do it, and don't feed it to pigs either.  Now let me qualify that, if you told me that you and the kids had no food and the chickens were your winter food source and they will die without the bread - then feed it to them.  But you are trying to develop a system that works to grow a product you can sell, so you need to be able to duplicate the results, and don't want to rely on outside inputs that might not be there down the road.  In addition that bread really isn't very nutritious.  The germ is gone from the grain, if it's white bread then it's been bleached, the grain has been heated to a temperature that the nutrient profile has changed, and it's full of other products that won't do your stock any good.  
Here in the US we treat our agriculture systems as garbage disposals.  It's mind boggling.  Bio-solids are land applied - IE - sewage, and crops are grown in it.  Pigs are fed slop, cows are fed dried distillers grains, and for the love of Pete I still remember the USDA guidelines for feeding broiler litter to dairy cattle in the '80s and '90s  Do you know what is in broiler litter?  Chicken crap, sawdust, and dead chickens.  The Dang USDA had daily recommendations for how much of that to include in your TMR (Total Mixed Ration) that you fed lactating cows each and every day.  Again, BSE / Mad Cow, and  honestly the European and Japanese import ban on our beef was the only thing that put a stop to that.  
When you buy store brand "Ground Beef" on sale at Food Lion, or any other major chain, chances are it is ground up Holstein.  Likely about 6 years old, fed corn and soy her whole life, and when she would not settle, had a mastitis issue, foot warts, or production dropped, she was shipped and ground into that sale package.  It's tasteless, a bit off color, and cheap.  That is the result of feeding garbage to livestock, you get a poor product in the end.  As a kid one of my jobs was on a farm that raised hogs in pens,using bakery waste for feed.  Truck loads would come in, we would put them into dump trucks that had a boiler feeding them heat, and slop would come out.  I would ride in the bucket of a loader dumping 55 gallon barrels of slop to those hogs, and the pork tasted like "garbage pig" as I came to know it years later.  
With your greens system you are diving into something that I have no experience in so I am following with an opportunistic eye - "Steal shamelessly" - do you know who said that?  As far as birds go, they have a gizzard so they can digest whole seed grain.  They require nutrients that they are able to extract from seed in that gizzard.  One thing I would look around and see if I could find is bulk grain.  Millet, Milo (to a lesser extend because of the increased tannin in it these days from selective breeding), sorghum, wheat, barley, safflower, corn (but if whole kernel you will need to crack it until they are larger) and sunflower are all whole seeds that broilers readily eat (we feed them) and you can get in bulk at a far discounted rate than commercial feed in a fancy bag. The Safflower and Sunflower will also help with fat and protein needs.  Anything they don't eat can be sprouted and will turn into a green that they will then eat, so you get two chances to use your investment wisely.  
I agree you have some faster developing birds.  At harvest we will see some that dress over 6 lbs and others at 4 lbs and change - all in the same batch.  
Keep up the good work!

Your brothers birds are due to the conditions they are in, we see full feathers at 2.5 - 3 weeks every time.