Three Weeks Old

 

This is one of the 25 Freedom Rangers...just look at those feathers coming in. Those legs are HUGE...bigger than I would have expected actually.

This particular little one lets me hold him/her and is perfectly calm while I check them out. Kinda weird as this one is pretty spazzy and I'm pretty sure that this is the one spazzy chick from the brooder. Maybe they are trying to endear themself to me so they won't have to give up their life for the freezer and then eventually the dinner table.

It's too late little one, we have already decided on the ONE that we are keeping for the flock.

Cleo

This one has had a unique look since the very beginning and she continues to stay very different than all of the others. She seems to have a little more mottled coloring on her feathers and overall, she is generally pretty docile. She is developing well and seems very robust.

I guess if we keep her it would be like a token of the first batch of meat birds on our farm.

Here's to hoping that this she is really a she and that her stay with the current flock will be for a long time to come.

Farm Life is the Best Life!

Three Months!

The Magnificent Seven are 3 months old today!

That's it. There's is nothing else for today. The girls get little attention these days. They are fairly low maintenance and only act up when they are hungry. 

If we could make this their very own special day we would, but they don't understand - So, a photo will have to do.

Farm Life is the Best Life!

CAFO

When I decided that we should raise a few chickens so that we could have our own fresh eggs from chickens that get to roam free(ish) on pasture it never occured to me the kind of conditions that factory chickens are living in.

Over the weekend I was able to get a few Joel Salatin books to read via Kindle Unlimited. I read a few pages of one of the books called: Everything I Want To Do Is ILLEGAL ~ War stories from the local food front.

I didn't get terribly far into the book before CAFO popped up. I was curious so I looked it up. CAFO stands for:

"Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation"

It seems pretty straight forward enough right? Concentrated - like there is a lot of animals...maybe squished into smaller than needed spaces? 

Sure, but then I saw a photo (Yeah, I started out with eggs...hang with me...)

Photo credit: http://www.cafothebook.org/theissue_2.htm#up

Now these are meat chickens, that much I know...probably Cornish Cross. Another issue altogether, but for another time.

This is what our meat chicken operation looks like:

Our Freedom Rangers on grass

Okay, so the number is much, much smaller, but the method is so much better. They are free to feel the fresh air jump around, stretch their wings and all that. They aren't wading in their own poo (like before), but they were stinking up the garage pretty good and there are only 25 of them:

Last time in the brooder

The brooder isn't overly large, but it's also not small. We couldn't keep up with their poo and they were only in the brooder a couple of weeks! 

I cannot even imagine what it would smell like in what is called a factory farm. 

BLECH!

Oh, so when I went to the CAFO website, I got sidetracked with the meat bird operation. Here is a pic of confined egg layers:

http://www.cafothebook.org/theissue_6.htm#up

Our layers:

This shows both the waterfowl and chicken enclosure.

Our girls are out on grass and have all sorts of room to forage what little green grass is available and eat bugs, scratch away at the piles of cut grass and even take a dust bath. 

Also, the girls have a nice spot where they can lay their eggs:

Not a bad set up

Oh, hello there...

Evidently, a few of the chickens decided that jumping into a box - in the heat of the day - is not on their agenda. Silly girls.

For all of our married life together we have been blissfully unaware of the issues surrounding food production. Would we have changed our ways if we had known better? We weren't choosing organic foods due to cost, but at the same time we had grown our own veggies off and on over the past 27+ years. However not enough to put into the freezer or even supply veggies for every meal. Enough to feel like we were doing something good for ourselves. 

I believe that every little bit helps when making decisions on what we choose to put into our bodies. Also, it's never to late to make a change. We make do with what is available and it has worked out fine. However, now that I am reading Joel Salatin and watching people like Justin Rhodes and other YouTubers I'm realizing that only I can make a change for the better. Starting with our own eggs is the perfect place to start! 

Check out the CAFO ~ The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories HERE. I'm not trying to be provocative here, just coming to terms with what is happening with how our food is being produced for consumers like you and me.  I will always be a meatatarian - which includes eggs. I go into this knowing that not all of the meat/eggs that we will ever eat will be ethically raised or respected as part of God's creation. I can only do my part to make our critters happy and give them a good life.

While I continue to learn about how food is being produced, I will keep growing food for ourselves and share whatever surplus we don't put up or freeze.

Farm Life is the Best Life!

Graduated

Even though the Freedom Rangers are not yet three weeks old, we moved them out of the brooder box that they have been housed in since we brought them home on the 5th.

Having them in the Brooder hasn't been bad, but they are eating machines and they are really good at converting food into poo...and quick! This brooder is fine for 6-10 chicks or ducks, but 25 meat chicken babies...NOPE.

It was so bad that the garage stunk really bad too! 

I didn't like the idea of them living in their own waste - which is hard to keep up with btw - so it was time to get them out. Up until Saturday they were extremely active - sparring with one another jumping on the waterer and just being crazy. I keep thinking that maybe we could make a brooder area out of the small room at the end of the parking shed. We'll see, it's just an idea right now. There are too many other things to tackle and the box is fine.

Anyway, in order to make the chicken tractor available the ducks needed to be moved first. The easy part was just letting the Magpie girls out of their enclosure and letting them do what they do. Which really was just foraging and exploring the back yard. 

The electric netting was gathered up and carted over to the new area and then it was time to start moving the tractor to the yard. Which was a chore in itself. I am able to pull it - but it is a slow process. The route we were taking to get the tractor back into the yard was the same route we took to get it out of the yard...so down the driveway through the yard in front of the garden and through the field to the side yard past the garden boxes and then finally under the cherry tree. 

The good thing is that we won't really have to cart it anywhere else after this batch of chicks are done. We are only planning on one batch of meat birds this year. So, wherever the tractor ends up when it's time to harvest is probably where it will stay until next spring.

So, once the tractor was in place we got the baby meat chickies out of their stinky brooder and out on grass!

This was Sunday morning - all is well with the littlest creatures on the farm

We ended up having to get them a new feeder as they were too big to huddle around the little yellow feeder anymore. Now they can all eat at the same time. Also, they got into this whole being on grass thing down pretty quickly and were scratching and tackling a mole hill in no time flat! Since they are still just under three weeks old we have a heat lamp on in the corner for them and we are using the brooder box as a wind break so they will be somewhat protected at night. 

When I woke up on Sunday I was concerned about them, so I went out to look at them early in the morning and they were doing pretty well. Happy Happy! So, I don't need to worry about them too much. 

The Twenty-Five will fill this tractor out in now time!

What we have observed so far. Freedom Rangers are extremely active! They have been jumping the two feet to the top part of the frame - crazy - and have been able to maintain some sort of balance for about two seconds...if that long. They have been stretching their wings...A LOT! "Flying" from mid-tractor to the door. Their aim is okay, but the landing is pretty rough. They like to jump on top of the bin that we put in with them as a little shelter and then taking kamikaze dives off of it to the ground. Since they enjoy jumping so much I decided that they could have the perch that Tom made for the Javas. The FRs figured that thing out in like a minute. It took the Javas a day or two. The other thing that has been constant is the sparring between what I'm guessing are males. Not sure how many there might be, but a good rule of thumb for straight run chicks is ten percent...maybe a few more. I guess we'll see in a few weeks.

Seriously, these littles have been a lot of fun to watch and I am looking forward to seeing how they progress over the next few weeks. Trying to take photos and post them on Instagram so I will have a good record of their growth and progress during the time that they are with us. 

Farm Life is the Best Life!