Ruckus in the Chicken Tractor!

For the last few nights something has been scaring the chicks out of their wits, causing them to pile up in the corners and suffocate. There is nothing as hard on me (Matthew) as the death of our livestock, especially broilers, which we have a lot of experience with. Each time one of our creatures dies I feel deeply frustrated and angry at my inability to solve the problem, when several are lost in the same night, despite everything I do, its downright disheartening. For 3 days and nights I tried to figure out what was happening to the birds. Too cold? Skunks? Weasels? Coyotes? Two weeks ago April woke me early one morning to report a ruckus near the Eggmobile. When I staggered to the window and looked, bleary eyed, out into the field there was a coyote circling the hen's portable pen, testing the wire. We drove him off and haven't seen anything since, but the possibility that he was the cause of the broiler deaths was at the front of my mind. Still, every night before bed I made my rounds with the flashlight making sure everything was okay. By sunrise there would be dead chicks, no tracks or holes under the pen, no trail of feathers or any indicator of what had happened.
Then last night at about 1:00 Am, April heard a ruckus in the chicken tractor, (Thank God for her ears) and I went out with the flashlight. As I got closer to the pen I could hear a commotion from inside it and expecting a skunk, I slowly moved around to the wire covered side of the pen. Then I turned on the flashlight and there was a wild flapping of huge wings, and a giant eyed feathery form stared back at me from the from the middle of the in the pen. It was a great big owl! With a chick in each talon and one in its mouth, it was trying to climb up, through the loose wire that covered the top of the open end of the pen. I couldn't believe it! The owl had climbed into the top of the pen by forcing the two layers of covering wires apart, then killed the chicks at will, taking a few with it and leaving many more dead of fright, and, of course, leaving no sign of itself at the scene.
The owl dropped its ill gotten gains and squeezed out through the wire in a heartbeat, gliding off into the moonlit night, cool as a cucumber. I sorted out the chicks and calmed them down, then firmly affixed the covering mesh with fence staples, nails and wire, and added an extra layer, just in case.
I learn something new everyday (or night), sometimes the easy way and sometimes the hard way.
The hard way sucks, but at least with this new knowledge, I can prevent it from happening again.

Midsummer Time

After a solstice evening spent with the kids around the campfire we found the weeds creeping in yet again. So the second major weeding took place. This time it was spaced over a couple of days, sometimes we hoed the rows together, and sometimes solo. When we were working close together there was time for talking, weeding and discussing the events of the day, ocassionally stopping to sharpen the hoes at the end of the row and let the breeze blow across our bodies. When school is out the boys can help in this respect too. There is a great deal of satifaction in the tactile work of farming. There is always something to do, and often, as in weeding, there is a finished product at the end of your day's work that you can lean on your hoe and look at and know '"I did that today!". Fieldwork of all kinds can be a delight or a chore depending on your mindset, just like all work really.
After the weeds were knocked back, we set up the swimming pool and enjoyed a quick plunge into the 12c water, straight from the spring. Brisk and refreshing! Thank goodness for backyard inflate-o-pools.

Here is the difference two weeks makes on the growth of the garden. June 11th,



































June 25th,

Note the romaine lettuce, from transplant to table in two weeks.
Next to it (left) are 3 rows of radishes, then the swiss chard and finally mesclun lettuce mix.

There is now likely enough to warrant sending out our first deliveries of the year!

To Build a Chicken Tractor

Although they look pretty simple, on our farm at least, building a new chicken tractor is an involved process.

Here we begin in the woodlot, back in March, cutting and peeling while the sap is still in the ground.

R (our 9 year old son) can handle a machete pretty well. Here he fells a pole from the stand.




Timber!

















Then the peeling...

















After the poles are cut and peeled we stack them up off the ground in bundles, to wait until the ground drys up a bit.

When its finally dry, we use the tractor to skid up the bundles.


















Then the poles are put up in the rafters of the pole shed, which is itself made from poles. Here they are under cover and will continue to dry despite the weather. The lighter the better as the chicken tractor can be pretty unweildly if made from green wood.



















After a few months of seasoning they are ready for use in construction projects. This year we need a few new chicken tractors built and hopefully we can improve on our previous designs.
In the past we had a huge (by chicken tactor standards) pen, about 16 x 18, with sheet metal in one corner to provide a windbreak. Although we used it for years, and improved the original design by adding wind braking fabric to the walls and reflective silvaculture tarps to the roof, the pen was too large for anybody but Papa to use, and could really have accomidated 200 chickens rather than the 50 we ever had in there at one time.
The next pen we built was ultra-light in comparison, with Typar fabric covering the outside walls to stop the wind and a hinged tin roof to gather eggs from the layers inside. About 10x10, this tractor was a much more mamageable size, and sort of set the pattern for our 3rd prototype.

Here the poles have been cut and laid out in the basic pattern, with angle bracing in every corner, solidly screwed to the frame.
Tools used:

Hammer
Chainsaw
Cordless drill
4 inch nails
2 1/2" decking screws
3 10' sheets of roofing tin
2 5 foot peices of roofing tin
50 foot roll of 3' chicken wire with 1 inch mesh
Staples
Staple hammer
Wire cutters



Now, this is not Joel Salatins model tractor. He uses nice light aluminum, instead of sheet metal, but for us that isn't an option. The Co-op has sheet metal, we use sheet metal. Yes it will be heavier, but its also solid, predator proof and stops the wind and rain. Joels moving method, using a dolly as a portable axle, should really help the mobility aspect though. And until I had read Pastured Poultry Profits I really didn't understand what he meant by 'using a dolly', now I have seen the light. More on that later....

Then we start building up...



















Add the walls, and screw them to the frame....





















Then the roof (unhinged, just solidly screwed down) goes on, add some wire to close in the front and shes ready for chickens.





















The chickens go from the now crowded brooder, out into the world for the first time. We carry 20 at a time in this tub until all 200 have been moved out into their new home. They are always rather stunned at seeing the sun and feeling the wind for the first time. For most meat birds, that would never happen, kept inside confinement facilitys from hatching to harvesting. Not these little dudes though, they are on their way to....





Chicken paradise!
After an hour of getting to know the place the chicks, now 1/2 pound, are scratching at the ground and pecking at the grass. Eating bugs and foraging in the sunlight.
In a few days we will build another portable pen for them and divide the birds between the two. There to stay for just 6 more weeks before they are full grown.

The green grass grew all around..

Just 12 days ago the cattle had been turned onto this paddock and grazed the grass down about 8 inches, leaving 10 inches of growth on the sward. They were only there for a day and then they moved and the grass was allowed to recover. In 11 days with good rain and warmth, the grass had grown 6 inches and was about to form seed heads when the cattle returned for another 24 hr 'salad bar'. So far MIG (management intensive grazing) has worked well, ensuring only some of the pasture is being grazed while the majority of it gets to rest. If we let the animals graze the whole thing at will, they will take only the soft succulent and tender new shoots, leaving most things to go to seed or get woody, which weakens the desirable plants and strengthens the weeds and brush. Although management intensive grazing, is well... management intensive (Daily moving fences, mowing under them), the time spent in the field helps keep us in touch with the animals and monitor the growth of the pasture.
Here is a view of the area the animals have been rotated through. This area has been divided into 4 different sections, with the most recently grazed closest to the camera and the cattle just moved onto the new grass at the back of the paddock, close to the corral. If you look closely in the foreground you can see the difference between the grazed and ungrazed land. This difference, although obvious to the eye when you are standing in the pasture, is almost impossible to capture on the camera for some reason.
The Dominant species in this area are bromegrass, timothy and clover. Usually this grass grows 3 feet high before I mow it down in July, but this year the animals have saved me the trouble. However much of the rest of the pasture will be ready for a early July "freshening" mowing, which knocks down the alders, bracken, weeds and forbs, allowing the grass to keep on trucking.

First Harvest!

Radishes are always the first things that fill out in the garden, today we picked a bunch. This year we tried 3 different variety's. The purple round ones are part of a mix called Easter egg. The red ones are known as 'Rudolf' and the long white ones were a completely new variety to us, Icicle. They are all delicious, mild flavored radishes, crunchy and juicy, straight from the garden.

This morning saw us get into the garden for a thorough weeding before the next rain fell. With both of us working we cleaned up the whole 1/4 acre in about 2 and a half hours. Next the cattle need to be moved again, they have consumed the grass in the paddock they are in now and are ready to move to the next place. Because of our recent moisture, and frequent rotation this 'next place' will actually be back on the first paddock they were moved onto 2 weeks ago.

More planting

The daily tasks of weeding, feeding, watering, checking, fixing and moving our animals or plants is starting to accumulate. Right now it takes about 3 hours a day to simply run the systems we have going if everything goes right. The garden is still being planted, even if its getting late for some things, we'll plant it anyway and see what happens.
Finally got some turnips into the ground, about 75 feet of them.
The next planting of lettuce went in, Sangria red leaf and mesclun.
Beets and early maturing carrots also went in, with a scattering of radishes to mark the rows.
All told the 1/4 acre is almost full. So is the Red Pine garden.

Currently we have in the ground:
Spinach
Baby leaf Mesclun
Chard
3 types of Radishes
4 types of Peas
Romaine
Broccoli
Bunching Onions
3 types of tomatoes, red alert cherry, caspian pink
Corn, arrowhead se
3 types of winter squash
3 types of summer squash
3 types of beans, green, yellow, Jacobs cattle (cooking)
2 types of cucumbers
Storage onions
2 types of carrots, purple haze, napoli
beets, chiogga
turnips
2 types of cabbage,green and red
potatoes, Yukon gold
zucchini
Sangria lettuce


23 different vegetables
36 different variety's

Chicks 2, Revenge of the Barred Rocks

The feed store called, their flight had arrived.

At 9:00 Am this morning 50 freshly hatched chicks came into our care. These little dudes will one day be Barred Rock laying hens, but for now they are just Barred Rock fluffs. For the time being they are quite happy in a large box, and in a few days when the Cornish cross birds move out of the brooder they can move in. But once they outgrow the brooder they will need their own chicken tractor for summer accommodations.
Even as chicks they exhibit hunting and scavenging ability's completely absent in the meat birds.
Its neat to see how much genetics actually predisposes animals to different behaviors. The Cornish birds are bred to eat, sleep and get bigger, a set of tasks that they do very well. Even as 8 week olds the Cornish birds never show much interest in foraging or exploring, they only want to know where the feed, water and shade is. In contrast the Barred Rocks are excellent foragers, showing a desire to explore their surroundings, leaping and scratching, even when they still have their egg teeth. As full grown birds, the Barred Rocks could probably get by without grain in the summer (at least that was how people kept them in the old days) as long as they were completely free range. Unfortunately free range birds have a habit of pooping everyplace and getting eaten by passing creatures, so we try to keep them safe in their movable pen. Still they get almost a half of their total food needs from the pasture they are put on, while the Cornish Giants get only about 20 percent of theirs from the same source. When moved to a fresh piece of land in the morning the Barred hens go right to work and strip off the moss and thatch on the ground to get at the earth worms. Then they graze off the tops of the clover and grass, picking off bugs as they come across them. By evening when their grain ration arrives, they have completely aerated the soil, scratching in a light dressing of high nitrogen manure at the same time. The next morning they move onto another piece of land and do it all again.
Within a few days the 'chicken tilled' ground is sprouting dense green foliage, a sure sign of the highly soluble nitrogen in their manure, and in a month the growth is several feet high.
The animals are happy, the soil is enriched, the farm slowly gains.

Meadow Mowing

Every year we have lived here we have found the scythe a useful tool in making and keeping open land. In the first two years it was the only "mowing machine" we had apart from the lawn mower. Even after the tractor came with its sickle bar mower, the scythe was still needed to get into those hard to reach places and cut down the weeds before they go to seed. The scythe started our "managed mowing" program. With it, we could mow the grass and also knock down the large woody forbs like goldenrod and bracken and later ,as the land clearing progressed, the young alder sprigs as they came up from the stumps.
Although largely replaced by the 'string mower' or "weed wacker' in modern times, the scythe is still a useful tool and has many things to recommend it.

• It uses no fossil fuel
• Has no moving parts to break
• Is easily sharpened (with a file or stone)
• It is quiet and meditative work
  

Alone, the scythe can mow small acreages quite well and has the added benefit of leaving the mown grass in windrows, ready for bailing or laying up loose. We kept 2 1/2 acres open with it. With just 20 minutes a night after work, the job took about a week in the cool evening air. It is necessary however to keep the blade very sharp in order for the scythe to work properly. Usually I give it a once over with the file every 50 swings. If you hit the ground, a log or a rock, stop right away and apply a new edge. As long as the blade is sharp the work is easy, as it gets dull it takes more force to cut the whole swath. The increased effort needed quickly wears one out. But razor sharp, the work involved is akin to using a mop or broom,the effort is easy to maintain.
This year the scythe has found a new 'out of the way' place to mow. Under the electric fence! It takes about 30 minutes to completely mow the perimeter of the fence, which also gives us time to check for broken insulators or fallen branches on the line. Today while mowing I observed the cattle eating a plant we have always called 'fluff beans', but we have never known its actual name. Considering the animals are eating them I think its time we found out!

The Baler Project

A few days ago when the rain was allowing us to look for different work to do, the boys and I started in on the the old square baler we had bought the summer before. It is probably amongst the first Ford balers ever made and it's tiny in comparison to most other square balers out there. One of the biggest issues with the machine was whether or not we could get the knotters working, as the baler had sat out in the elements for at least 10 -15 years. However after a day of patiently removing the old crustified grease and cleaning the moving parts with solvent, we could actually get the mechanism to move . With a little gentle working of the parts against each other and lots of WD-40, the last of the old solidified grease was worked out of the fittings. Then new grease was pumped in and voila! The mechanism worked. Next was getting the intake roller to shift, which was a similar process to the knotters and after getting it to let go of the rust it too worked. The kids had a lot of fun hitting all the grease points with the grease gun and turning the flywheel to run the mechanism through it's paces. It really helps to have an extra pair of hands around when you are working
around the farm. Hopefully they will look back on that rainy day in the machine shed when they are older and remember helping papa fix that old baler.

Sprouts Ahoy!

Things have been springing up in the gardens the past few days, everything is up and growing. Pictured here are the hothouse tomatoes we are trying this year. Started from seed in the end of April and then potted out direct into the greenhouse after the temperature was right, they have quadrupled in size in the last week.
Varietys we are trying this year are, Red Alert, Caspian Pink, Yellow cherry and one other who's name eludes me for the moment. As you can see the greenhouse is a blend of 2x2 sticks attached to rough poplar skids and joined with brittle plastic angle bracing. It's 160 square feet is home to 35 tomato plants which fills it out pretty well. IN addition to the tomatoes we also started broccoli inside at the same time. Pictured is one of the Broccolis that was planted in our bedroom garden in January, when we most acutely need to see green, living things. All the others are still young growing sprouts, but these three elder broccolis are already in flower mode, which 6 weeks ahead of time is pretty neat.
The advanced broccolis put me in mind of the things that Alvero was doing at Plan B farm in S. Ontario.
His large ' sprouting chamber' and multiple large greenhouses gave him a real jump on the season, and the market. His greenhouses were simple affairs really, but were still surprisingly expensive ($7000 for the 50x100 foot model). In comparison our little greenhouse was a gift from a friend 4 years ago and the only cost associated with it was buying a roll of plastic. It might not be fancy, but for now it fills the bill.

Rainy Days

The year long drought we have lived through has at last been brought to a close. After about 2 weeks of intermittent rains, last nights steady downpour finally soaked its way into the aquifer. This morning a cloudburst dropped over an inch in 15 minutes! The spring is flowing full bore, the creeks are swollen torrents and the river is a chocolate milk brown from all the runoff. The ground is so saturated that we actually have standing puddles here and there.

Pictured are the cattle(taken yesterday), knee high in the bromegrass that grows along the side of the driveway. The land is hummocky and undulating along that stretch, unmowable by machine. usually it needs a scything about midsummer to knock down the goldenrod that comes up in it. But now that the cattle have been trained to the wire, we can fence it in and let them do the mowing, of the grass at least, which is more than half the battle really and they are growing healthy grass fed beef at the same time.

Picking up chicks

200 Cornish Cross chicks arrived today at the local feed store we buy them from. It's hard to believe these little dudes will go from 1 ounce fluffs to 5 pound broilers in just 8 weeks. We have only done batches of 50 at a time in the past so this is a four fold leap in scale. In preparation for their arrival, a 4 x 8 brooder was built in the chicken coop. The brooder is 3 feet off the floor, mounted to the walls with a hinged front door to make cleaning easier. Two heat lights are keeping our little charges toasty in the picture (right).
When they first arrive we dip their beaks in water to help them understand how to drink and where the water is as they are often dehydrated from the journey. After 199 chicks were 'dunked' and running about in the brooder, we discovered one little buddy that had expired in the case. Bummer. That is a first for us, but we did all we could to get them home and into the brooder as quickly as possible, so at least we know we tried our best.
The animals have become very interested in the gardens since we started planting them, we have had to run off a pair of geese who have been eating the alfalfa sprouts several times now. And this morning a heard of 8 deer were heading towards the plowed ground when the dog alerted us to them. Ah defending the food against the forces of nature, creatures are hungry too, but they need to find someplace else to snack.
The steers have been turned onto their 3rd paddock to graze. This one is a small 50 x 50 square, adjacent to the western gate of the corral, and filled with a lush growth of bromegrass. Yesterday they ate and ate until it looked like they might burst. Then they lay in the shade and chewed their cud for an hour or two, then right back to the gorging on thick, lush pasture.
The MIG grazing techniques are intensive, but a lot of fun and we are really learning what the carrying capacity is for our grassland. Time to move them again!

June Bug

After a couple of days with family and friends, it's time to get back at it.

June will be the first 'chicken' month and there is a lot to do to get the larger system up and running.

We will need a much larger brooder to accommodate the 200 broiler chicks.

Likely we will need to build a 'brooder tractor' to give the little guys a place to finish fledging when they out grow the brooder.

Several more 'chicken tractors' will need to be constructed and fitted out with water, shade, feeders and other sundry items.

50 layers will arrive about a week after the broilers, and they will need accommodations too.

Weeding will become a priority in the garden and toward the end of the month we will get ready for the delivery of our produce to our waiting customers.

With more and more systems coming online, there is less time for building and a lot more time spent running the farm. The frequent rains of the last 2 weeks have helped germination along nicely, and almost everything is up and growing. The rainy days have also allowed for some visiting with knowledgeable neighbors and tidying up the books, even playing with children! Today we are building the brooder (chicks come tomorrow) and planning the month out to get done all the things we want accomplished before July.

Month in Review

This May has been the most productive (from the farm's perspective) we have ever had. To re-cap the madness...

The Pasture was fenced in, the corral was built, gates were hung, piped water from the house to the water trough, and the electric fence charger system was installed.

Then cattle were purchased, loaded, transported and unloaded, and the cattle learning curve began.

The chickens went from the stationary hen house to their, eggmobile on the pasture.

2 new acres were ploughed, disced, cultipacked ( see above pictures of cultipacker, and the effect it has had on germination) and seeded with Clover, Alfalfa and Oats, as a green manure crop for next years production.

The Red Pine garden was planted in mesclun, spinach, radishes, chard, peas, romaine and broccoli.
The front garden was expanded to a 1/4 acre, and had been planted in squash, corn, beans, cabbage and cucumbers.

1/2 mile of potatoes was planted with our neighbor and his team of horses

We had fires raging around us, smoke filled the sky and we finally got a couple good rains.

We lost a close friend and long time supporter when Al died.

3 graduated from university with her Bachelor of Science in Earth Science degree.

We put up a new greenhouse and transplated out our tomato starts.

And we made many new contacts and friendships with people we never would have known without being on this quest.

Total hours worked: the log book shows 336

Total expenditures : treasury exhausted

Total knowledge acquired: priceless

Looking forward to June but it's time for a day off.