Feathered Fertilizer Spreaders

On October 15th of last year we showed you in this blog post: replacement hens, how we received baby chicks in the mail that day and put them in the brooder in the garage.  The babies were ordered to take the place of aged hens that just naturally die over the course of time.  Consequently, each passing year we add new birds to the flock to take the place of those whose egg-laying days have past.  Those hens that have assumed room temperature are buried in the garden and now produce vegetables for us - dead or alive, a laying hen's work is never done!

The new chicks, which included mostly Barred Rock hens, also included a few Barred Rock cockerels, a few Aracaunas, and four guinea fowl, grew quickly and they were moved to the chicken tractor in the pasture.  Today they are 117 days old, give or take a few days, and that puts them right at 17 weeks old.  Barred Rocks will begin to lay between 20-24 weeks old, so we are still about a month and a half away from seeing the first pullet eggs.

The photo below shows the birds in the tractor eating the chick grower crumbles that I've dropped them. The brownish-grey birds are Aracaunas, most of the black and white speckled ones are barred rock pullets, with a barred rock cockerel just to the right of center.  He's a bit bigger than the others. The all white and all grey birds are guineas of the White African, Pearl Grey, and Lavender varieties.

Birds are 'a growin'!

Each day I feed and water them and push the tractor forward.  The birds are better than a lawn mower.  In just a day, they clip the grass down.  They really enjoy eating grass.  If you butcher one, their crop will be full of tender grass.  There's another thing they do, though.  They poop.  They poop a lot.  Like a fertilizer spreader, they distribute chicken manure all across the pasture as I push the tractor to a new spot each day.

When the pullets begin to lay their first eggs, I'll clip their wings and release them to roam free on the 3 acre pasture.  Free at last!  The older birds you see below behind the tractor that I've just pushed are opportunistic.  When I push the tractor, like scavengers, they look for any tidbits that they can find to eat.  I see them eating the small feathers that the pullets have shed.  Feathers have protein, so that's what they are after, but I can't imagine feathers being very appetizing. 

The clean-up crew

I wanted to show you another photograph.  At first glance you will see a pasture that is mostly brown due to the frost, with a tinge of green grass stubbornly trying to hang on until spring.  You'll also probably notice my shadow as the morning sun casts shadows westward.  If you look in the very center of the photo, you will see a brown line.  That is the trail that is left behind as I push the chicken tractor.  It is marked by grass clipped down and rich chicken manure.  It looks like a dead landscape, but once a rain hits it, the nitrogen-laden chicken poop will cause the grass to grow very green in that trail.  It changes from a brown trail, to a dark green one.  The cows appreciate their feathered fertilizer spreaders!

The Trail

But in about a month and a half, the trail you see above will end as they will all be released to free range.  Have no fear, though.  We just placed our 2016 Meat Bird order.  At the end of this month we'll be receiving sixty (60) one day old meat birds in the mail.  We do this annually to raise our own chickens to eat over the year. They'll spend about 3 weeks in the brooder in the garage and then... Then they will occupy the same chicken tractor that the replacement hens will be evicted from and they will pick up the fertilizer spreader duties from the pullets.  And the cycle continues...