(uplifting country music) - Hi, I'm Christina Hernandez. I'm the livestock specialist
here at Heifer Ranch. Thank you for joining
us for this video series of how we raise 20,000 birds on pasture. So we will show you how
we set up our brooder to receiving chicks to
our daily pastured chores and bring you to this end product of being finished with our
poultry for the season. So this is our brooder
that we use for our chicks. So you need a nice clean, warm space like a little chick nursery
for when your chicks first arrive at your farm. And so this is the
design that we settled on to have here at Heifer Ranch. It is 30 by 100. We have automatic water lines
and automatic feed lines as well as feeders and
waters that will set out when the chicks first get here. But probably the most important thing is going to be the heat. And we have six of these brooder hoods that we can control with a control panel. And so it's really important
that you keep your chicks to the proper temperature. So when your chicks first get here you want it to be between
90 and 95 degrees. They will be super cute and
full of soft yellow fur, pretty much. And so over time they'll lose that and they'll get in they're
colored or their adult feathers. And so with that, you will
control the temperature and start decreasing it over time so that when it's time for them
to go from the brooder out to pasture they're gonna
be used to that temperature that they'll be exposed to outside. So this is the record sheet that we use for all of our chicken batches. It starts here when they
first arrive at the ranch. And the important information
that we keep track of are the number of
mortalities that we have, the number of bags of shavings
that we put down on the floor so that we can use that to
know how much our batch costs at the end of the season
and then how much feed that we put out each day. And so we have a column
for each day of the week and then also for each chore time. So our morning chore time
and our evening chore time. And so this starts with
them when they get here in the brooder and then it
also goes out to pasture with them. And when they're out in pasture we just keep track of
the number of mortalities and how much feed we
put out each chore time. This is the water system that we set out for when the chicks first get here. So it's just a simple one gallon water that you can pick up from your
local co-op or feed store. We fill this with warm water
and then we also put a handful of sugar in that water so it dissolves. We want the chicks to
get here and to get water with some sugar in it so that
it helps boost their energy. So they're up drinking
water and eating food when they first arrive. We also have a water line in our brooder and these just nipple waters. So when the chicks get
curious, they'll come up and they'll Peck at this metal tip and a droplet of water will come out and we can raise and lower this to the height of the chicken. So as the chickens grow in the brooder we can just simply raise
it with this toggle. And then that helps keep the
floors clean in the brooder. We don't have any water
spillage or anything like that. So these are the shavings
that we use for our brooder. We get them from TLC, which
is in Centerville, Arkansas. We buy a truckload at a time
and we get full pallets. I believe there's 35 bags
of shavings per pallet. That way we have this space in our brooder where we can store two
pallets of shavings at a time so that the shavings are already in here and it's more efficient
for us just to grab a bag and put it down on the floor. We like these shavings, I
believe they are six cubic feet once you open them up. But they're shrink wrapped so they're nice and small and light. And we like the shavings that have the bigger chips in there. It takes less bags to cover the space. And then with these bigger ones the chicks are less likely
to try to consume them. So previously we used
shavings that were really fine and chicks try to eat
that instead of the grain. So these are the feeders that we put out before the chicks arrive,
they're called turbo feeders. They just come in two
pieces and they simply, one sits on top of the other. And then we fill it with some feed. And we use these feeders
until they are empty, which usually lasts them a couple of days. And then we move to our larger red feeders and then our feed line,
which you can see behind me. But the feed falls down here nicely. It's nice and low to the ground so the chicks can easily get to it and they're less likely
to get shavings in here with their feed the way
that this system is set up. We want the chicks when they first arrive it's really important
for them to get to food and water as soon as possible. So we like to put our feeders out and our waters out so that
no matter where the chicks go they're gonna turn around and
either run into feed or water. So these are the large
feeders that we use. We introduced them to the
chicks when they first get here and then they'll be using the same feeders throughout their seven weeks
that they're here at the ranch. They will hold 30 pounds of feed in there. And so what we like these
is that you adjust them to the height. So when the chicks first get here it's nice and low into the ground so they can just reach
over and get their feed. But as the chicks are
growing in the brooder and out on pasture, we have it set up so that we can just move
this S-hook up the chain and that adjusts the height
so that it is at the proper feeding height for the
chicks throughout their life. So with these feeders the feed
space is a little bit bigger than with those turbo
feeders we already saw. And so the chicks are more
likely to get shavings in here and to actually climb up
in here and eat their feed. So with our chores, we
go around and make sure that we get out any
shavings that are in here. And then at the end of
each batch of chickens we also bring these up and we clean them and we sanitize them so
that they're ready to use for the next batch of chickens. So 1,600 chicks just arrived
here at Heifer ranch. You can see that they
arrive in these blue crates. They'll be roughly 100 chicks per crate. When they get here we
bring them all inside and shut the door so
we can keep it as warm as possible in here for them. And then our job is we
just take each chick and we dip it's beak in the sugar water we talked about earlier
and then we place it over by its food. So now it's had water with some sugar and now it can go ahead
and get right to eating and wandering around with
it's other chick friends. So we get our chicks from a
local hatchery here in Arkansas. So these were actually
hatched this morning and picked up by our
driver and delivered here to us just a few hours away. You can also receive chicks
through the postal service. There'll be delivered right
to your local post office. That will take a few days
for them to get to you. But what you're looking
for when your chicks arrive is exactly what these chicks are doing. They're drinking, they're
eating, they're being active. They're already scratching at the shavings and things like that. So those look like some
very good, healthy chicks. (uplifting country music) So we are back in our brooder
with our batch of 1,600 birds. They are roughly two
weeks of age right now. And we have just been
keeping a close eye on them, making sure that they are
comfortable in their environment and they have a clean feed and
plain water on a daily basis. They will be going out to pasture here in about about five days. So today I am just going
to walk you through our daily brooder chores. The first thing we do is
that we will come inside and we will walk amongst our flock. We were looking for anyone
that isn't thriving. So maybe isn't able to walk very well is a lot smaller than everyone else, if there's any mortalities. So we'll just do a quick overview of that every time we come in our brooder, then we will go ahead and make
sure that our water heights are at the proper height for the birds. As you can see here with our water line, you want the chick to just
have to raise her head a little bit to reach those
nipples and to peck at that. We need to make sure that the
water heights are suitable for everyone in our plot. Some birds are going to
be bigger than others so we need to make sure
that we adjust the heights for them as they're growing. Secondly, will be, thirdly,
will be our feeders. So our main red feeder
line, you can see the chicks have to sort of jump up to get in there. We do that so that when the
chicks are scratching around which you can see a lot of them doing now, that's their natural behavior, we want them to be able to exhibit that. They're scratching looking for bugs, looking for split feed,
anything like that. Is that when they scratch
around the feeders, we want them to be high enough
that they won't get shavings into their feed otherwise that
would just be another chore on us to clean the shavings
out of those feeders. All right so the height
that those are at right now are the perfect height for birds this age, which these birds are
around two weeks old. And then the second feeders would be these red hanging feeders. We incorporate these in
our brooder from day one because these are the red feeders that they'll use out on the schooner so we want them to already be accustomed to using them and to
be familiar with them. We adjust the height of
these with every chore time in the morning and in the afternoon. We want the pan of the feeder
to be at the chicken shoulders so you can see where their neck and their body meet together,
that's where we want this pan to be. We want the chick to just
have to reach over slightly to get feed. If it's too low, the
chicks will stand in it and kick shavings in there. We'll have to clean those out. Too high and the chicks, all the chicks won't be able to get to it or
they'll have to jump up here in order to get food. So we just adjust that
with a simple S-hooks and chains hanging from the rafters. We will fill these with our bucketed feed, varying every chore time
where our main feed line going down the middle of our brooder is actually fed through a hopper system connected to our grain bins
so that just automatically fills itself. And then, at the end of
chores we will also go through and we'll put down more shavings. We want our floor to be nicely covered so that we're covering
any large manure spots and that usually happens
around the feeders where the chickens are hanging out a lot. And then along the water line as well, we'll cover up any split
water or anything like that with our shavings to make sure our floor stays nice and clean. And then as these
chickens are growing older they're losing their yellow
fluff that they showed up with. And they're actually
getting these white feathers that you can see on them. And so after their first
week in the brooder we're gonna start changing
the temperature inside. So we're gonna start gradually
decreasing the temperature so that the birds will get acclimated to the outdoor temperature
so they're ready to be exposed to that when
we put them out on pasture around two and a half
to three weeks of age. And one way we do that is
actually with our brooder ends. We have two garage doors on each end. And so we just simply took a hog panel the length of the garage door, we zip tied some chicken wire onto that. You can use screen or any other material you have laying around. We connected that to the hog panel so that we can open up those garage doors, let some air flow, let the
outside temperature come inside. And then the chicks can't
get out of the brooder and no predators can
come into the brooder. We do close those doors every
evening, just as a precaution so that things don't try to
get in here to our chickens. So if you're working on a smaller scale or smaller batches of
chickens and we are here and you don't have quite the
automatic system that we have you will still be changing
their water twice a day, making sure that they
have the fresh water, checking their feed probably
filling feeders more like this, making sure that there's no
shavings or manure in that feed so the chicks can get the
fresh feed as much as possible. And then you also have the option to not put down fresh shavings every day. Some people choose to do
like the deep bedded method where they just put a
few inches of shavings when their chicks first arrive
and they don't refresh those until the next batch is coming. Those are just different preferences and you do whatever works best for you and your farming method. So I just wanted to introduce
you to our Prairie Schooner. So this is the structure
that we have out on pasture that we raise our birds in
once they leave the brooder. So this is a 20 by 40 metal structure. You can buy the kits and
assemble them yourselves. So before you put your
chicks out to pasture you need to make sure that
you have a plan in place for where you're going to
be moving your structures. If you're using a structure this larger or anything smaller you
still need to make sure that the pasture you're
using has an nice terrain without any creeks or big
ditches going through it. You need to make sure
to place your structures far enough apart so that if
you have to turn them around and start coming back
in the other direction, the chickens aren't going over places that they've already traveled. So this is just one of our schooners that we're getting ready to put our batch of 1,600 birds out. You can see in there that we are using the same large red
feeders from our brooder. We use the same ones out on pasture so the chicks are already
accustomed to eating out of them. We have little giant red water bowls and the water system we've made ourselves which we can see more once
the chicks are in there. The schooner is covered
with a nice thick tarp. It's a billboard tarp and
the sides can be rolled down and rolled up so that you can
adjust them for the weather. So if it's raining, we'll
roll the sides down. If it's a nice sunny
day, we'll roll them up. The front and the back of our schooners is a piece of wood. And then the bottom of
it we have screwed on the vinyl bathroom baseboard material. And so that gives the front
and the back of our schooner the ability to go with the
terrain of our pasture nicely and then we can also put
other things in there so the chicks don't get
out of the schooner. So our schooners are covered
in PVC coated chicken wire, which is just a little bit more sturdier than your regular plain
metal chicken wire. And then on top of that we also have some metal mesh wiring just
as a stronger structure to keep predators, local
dogs or anything like that getting into our schooner and potentially getting our chickens. We chose this pasture here to
run this batch of chickens on. We've never ran chickens
on this pasture before but looking at soil
tests, this pasture needs some fertility so we will be running our 1,600 birds over this pasture without having to go over this
land again until next year. (uplifting country music) So this structure is 20 by 40. And so we will be able to
fit 500 to 550 birds in here at one time. When we put the chicks out here they'll be roughly two and half weeks old and a lot of that will
depend on the weather. If it's going to be some
pretty nasty weather we'll hold the chicks in the brooder for a little bit longer
so it's nicer outside when the chicks come out here. We will move this schooner forward one full space to fresh
grass every single day. We choose to do that in the morning. And the way we do that is
with a metal cable connected to either skid of the schooner. And we just connect this to a
tractor and move it forward. One person is in the back of the schooner helping the chicks move forward. And the chicks learn very quickly that when the tractor's
here and when we're here, then that means that they get fresh grass and they automatically come
to the front of the schooner and they try to be the
first ones to get the bugs. So this is the hose that we
connect to our main water line with just a quick release
and the water will go into our homemade water system. We like the hose intake to be
at the back of our schooner, so in the opposite
direction that we're moving, that way the hose stays out of the way and the potential for running any parts or pieces over is nonexistent. (uplifting country music) So today is graduation day for
our chickens in the brooder. They're three weeks old today. So we are going to crate them up and take them out to the schooner and there'll be on pasture
for the next few weeks until they're ready to go to processing. So we're gonna show you how
we do that with our chickens. The first is we will set
up a smaller alleyway within the brooder so that we can walk and herd the chickens
into the smaller section. And then we will load them
into crates from there. It's less stressful on the chickens if they're in a smaller place. It's quicker and more efficient for us instead of having to walk
around the rest of the brooder to get them and put them in crates. So we use our larger yellow crates to make the smaller alley. You can use anything
else that you have there on your farm to do that. But we don't put the smaller
chickens into those crates. We actually use these
smaller game bird crates. We purchased them from 3T products. I believe they're out of Minnesota. What we really like about
these is that the floor of the crate is solid and there's actually a little bit of texture on there that helps keep the chicks
from slipping around in there. It prevents them from getting their claws through the bigger holes that
are on the yellow crates. It's easier for one person
to carry this with 15 to 18 birds in it rather
than the awkwardness of the larger yellow crates. This crate also has two
different types of doors. The first door is a hinge
door, and that's how we put the chicks in and out. And I'll demonstrate
that here a little bit. The second door is a hinge door. We don't use that one as often but it's still there to use if you'd like. (uplifting country music) So we at our first
schooner full of chicks. There's a little over 500 chicks in here. So when we bring the crate
full of 15 chicks in here, we set that crate on the ground. You slightly tip it back so
you can flip that hinge door open and then you can just
gently tilt your crate forward so the chicks will kinda slide
and walk out of that crate. It's always important to
check inside your crate and make sure there wasn't
a chick hanging on in there. What we have right now
is this is our last batch of the year so it's a
little chilly out here. So we went ahead and put some hay around the edges of the
inside of the schooner so that they can get inside there and just help keep them a
little bit warmer tonight. The first thing we did when we brought this schooner out here is to make sure that there's no places for
the chicks to get out of. So we made sure all of our end boards were in place properly. That there weren't any holes
or ditches at the schooner or over top of. If that happens we can fill them with hay or we have some tarps or some
shavings bags that we use in the brooder just to
kind of fill those holes to keep the chicks inside and
not allow them to get outside. It's important when you bring
the red feeders down here that they're still at the proper height, right at their shoulder length. We have always noticed that the first day the chicks come out to
pasture their feed intake increases a lot and we wanna prevent them from scratching any of that out. All of our schooners are also equipped with four T posts that are hanging inside as well as a big tarp. And they serve a purpose if
there's a big storm coming in or high wind, the T posts
are already out here in the schooners. We can just grab a T post driver so we can stake down the schooners and then a tarp in case
you need to put that over either of the ends
if there's a lot of rain or wind coming through,
just as extra protection for the chicks. So as you can see, the chicks
have immediately started going to the grass,
scratching in it, eating it, looking for some bugs, that
is their natural behavior. And so we love to watch
them and to see them start doing that right away. So we have every schooner also equipped with just a simple water fix-it kit. There's everything in
there that you would need to either fix a leaking
water or a leaking hose or anything like that. We like every schooner
to have the water kit, the schooner or the T posts and the tarps So you're not running
around having to search for these things when you really need it. It's more efficient for it just to already be in each schooner. Every schooner also has a scrub brush. So we clean out the waters every day. And it's just a simple
scrub brush to make sure that we get any spilled feed or grime or anything like that out of the waters to make sure the chicks
have fresh water every day. Some of the things that we
include in our water fix-it kit is a box cutter. So if a hose needs a new
end, it has a puncture in it, we can simply cut it and replace it with a female or male hose end. We always have extra rubber washers. Some Teflon tape. A screwdriver that can go
from Phillips to Flathead and that helps fix the water
clamps, tighten those down. And then all the red
little giant water bowls we just buy extra bicycle valve cores. And then the little
tool to re-put those in. They just get old and have to
be replaced every so often. So this is Firewood and Ross,
our livestock guardian dogs. This is the structure that we
house them in at night time and it's just one of our
old chicken hoop houses. We upgraded to one of the
schooners you see behind there. So we let our dogs out during
the day to roam around, interact with the chickens
and things like that. Although they're still a little young so we locked them up at nighttime just until they get a
little bit more mature. But they have fed and
fresh water in there. This gets moved every day with chores to also give them fresh
grass and a fresh area. They have a nice little
tarp for weather protection. And then when it starts to
get a little chilly outside we'll go ahead and put some
hay in there for them as well. (uplifting country music) So today our chickens are four weeks old and I'm gonna take you out
to do our morning chores. So we will fill our buckets with grain to take to our chickens
and then we're gonna move our schooner and get them
settled in for the day before we do other projects. So these are 10 ton grain
bins and we have two of them them filled with our broiler ration. And so the way we get feed from our bins out to our chickens is that
we fill up five gallon buckets and haul them out there with
our UTV or on a trailer. And so we just simply put
our bucket on the hanger, lift up the door and fill our bucket. (grain rumbles) We fill the bucket up to a certain height and then that way we know
that it weighs 25 pounds. (uplifting country music) So we are getting ready to
start our morning chores and that involves
bringing our tractor down to our schooners, hooking each
schooner up to that tractor and moving them individually. So one person is driving the tractor and then there's one person
or two people in the schooner. And when they're in the schooner,
they'll either use a tarp or a feed bag or a shavings
bag just to have a little bit of noise and a motion in there and that helps keep the
chickens moving forward with the schooner as it's moving. And so those people
that are in the schooner their job is to keep those
chickens going forward to the fresh grass. It's always good to have some signals with your tractor driver. So if the tractor needs to
stop so that the chickens can catch up, they just put their hand up. Once we have reached all fresh grass and are off of yesterday's grass they just give that driver a thumbs up so the driver knows that they can stop and reverse and unhook the
schooner and move on to the next. So the way our water system works is that we have a quick release unit connecting our hose
that's out in the field to the hose that connects
to our water system within the schooner so that
when we're getting ready to move our schooner, we
can just simply quickly release the tube and then
that way you're not dragging your hose behind the schooner. That could cause significant damage and you'd go through a lot
more hoses than you should. When we have temperatures that
are gonna be below freezing or close to freezing, we
will go ahead and disconnect the waters during our evening chores that way none of our system becomes frozen throughout the night. So after we move the
schooner we will go back and we will bring our
hose back to schooner, re-hook that up so that we
can clean out those waters. We will get our buckets of chicken feed and make sure each feeder
within that schooner is filled to its capacity. And then we will walk around the schooner make sure that there's no big
holes or anything like that that the chickens can get out of. If there are, then we'll either fill those with a tarp or the feed bags or some hay so the chicken stay in the schooner. So with our water bowls in each schooner, after we moved them,
we take the water bowl and we'll swish it around
and dump that water out. And then we'll use our scrub brush and just simply scrub on the inside of it so that we can get all the grime and food that has washed
off the chicken's beaks out of there so they can
have access to fresh water. So we bring our records from the brooder and we bring it out to the pasture, so it's in each schooner. We are still keeping track
of how many mortalities that we had and then how much feed that we feed each schooner of chickens. And so we had zero mortalities today and we fed five buckets to our chickens. As you're moving throughout your pasture the terrain is more than
likely going to change. And so we always come inside
before we fill the feeders with grain to make sure that the feeders are at the appropriate height. We talked about it a
couple of times already that you want the rim of your feeder to be at the chicken shoulders. Or as you can see chickens walking around I can actually walk underneath the feeder because we have a little bit of a dip going through our schooner. So we just simply use
our S-hook that's on here and we lower it to where it will be at the chicken shoulders to like
eat at the proper height. What this dip is going
through our schooner, there's a little bit of mud
and a little bit of water sitting on the ground. And so we are gonna go ahead
and just grab a few handfuls of hay and cover this area so the chickens don't get all muddy. So you can stay warm since the temperature today isn't going to be very high. In each schooner, we have a 30 foot piece of just plastic drainage tile. And we have on one side of each schooner and we just simply attach
it with a few bungee cords. And the reason why we have this in here is so that when we get
to the end of our pasture and we need to turn around,
we can simply just start turning our schooner at an angle and this prevents the
chickens from getting close to that bar and potentially
getting some other of their toes or their feet caught underneath there. When it goes against
some of the woody plants it's actually kind of nice
'cause it makes a noise that prevents the chicken
and it keeps the chickens away from that side that's turning. During our chores we also
really wanna pay attention to the chicken's behavior,
how they're acting and how they look. If you take a look at these chickens you can see that their feathers
are a little ruffled up. It's cold here today. And so, but it's a beautiful
sunny day, no wind. And so we raised our
flap on the south side so that the chickens can
have access to the sunshine. And you can see majority of
them have started to come over here into the sun
so that they can get warm and lay down. When it is also cold like this we go ahead and put some hay on the ground so they can get in there and get warm with that. If it was gonna be windy or raining or anything like that, then
we would leave the sides down and still put hay out to them. So as you can see behind me,
we have two of our schooners running side by side, but you can notice that there's a large space in between them and we do that on purpose. If you remember, our
schooners are 20 by 40. And so we want this space
in between our schooners to be at least 20 feet so that when we get to the end of our pasture and
we need to turn back around that there's enough free fresh
grass in between schooners for one of them to come along there and then the other schooner
will just go off to the side. So we just placed this hay
bell here a few days ago and we placed it just in
front of the schooners and in between two of them
so that when we do have to put out hay, we're
close to two schooners at the same time and it
just makes putting out hay more efficient and then
we have to walk less. (uplifting country music) So we were at one of the last
steps of our chicken batch. I'm going to walk you
through how we prepare to get our chickens ready for processing, how we load them and then
what we do afterwards. So we load up our birds into crates and take them to the
processor the day before their scheduled date for processing 'cause they will start very
early in the morning with that. So at least 12 to 18
hours before the chickens are scheduled to be processed, we will take away their feeders so that we want their intestinal system to be clean of food
that will help decrease the number that will be
condemned due to contamination. And then, so we want them
to keep fresh water around but no access to feed. And so we'll take all the feeders away give the feed to the other chickens of other batches and wash those feeders so that they are cleaned
for the next batch. We will, to get ready for processing we'll have all of our yellow crates here on the farm for the number
of birds that we'll need. We do seven to eight birds per crate depending on how big they are. And then at nighttime,
so after the sun has set, the chickens will be going to sleep. They'll be nice and calm. It will be a less stressful
environment for them. We will put all of the crates
out around the schooner. And so I'll walk you through
how we load our birds and then maybe another scenario depending on what will work best for you. So with our schooners,
the wood base at each end we can remove those. And so what we have been doing
is taking our yellow crates putting them around the
edge of the schooner. We will take off those wood ends and we can pull our schooner
over top of our chickens so that the chickens are just
free where the schooner was but they are still contained
in the yellow crate wall. And then we have open
space to catch the birds. We can walk in there
without having to worry about the waters or the metal
poles inside the schooners. And so we will take the yellow crates and you wanna take your
crate to your chickens rather than bringing your
chickens to the crates. It will be way more efficient,
less walking on your part. You'll be able to just stand in one spot and pivot back and forth
with chickens in your hand, putting them in the crates. So that's how we do it. Another way that you could
do it would be that you take your crates inside
whatever chicken schooner or tractor that you're
using and you can use those crates to make smaller sections so that the birds have less room to walk away from you, to move. That'll make it more efficient for you just to take the birds and
put them into the crates, your crates will be nice and close. But if you have another
way that works best for you you just wanna make sure
that it's efficient, it's less stressful for your chickens and that it's just a safe
environment for everybody. So these are the yellow
chicken crates we use for the adult birds going to processing. We will put a seven to eight birds in here depending on how big they are. And just for demonstration purposes, I will show you with these few chickens that we've saved over from our last batch. We want our new livestock guardian dogs to still interact and be around
poultry for the winter time. So we just saved these
birds behind so that the dogs will have some
poultry to be around. And so we do this at
night time, like I said after the sun has set, depending
on what the moon is like it's gonna be pretty dark out there. And so when you use headlamps, you wanna make sure that
the color of your light is either red or green. We don't want the white
light to be on the chickens. And so when you're taking your chickens to processing just as a
precaution on your part you wanna make sure that
you mark your crates 'cause you're probably not gonna be the only one processing that day. So we just use a simple flagging tape. We use the same color each time so the processor knows
that the pink tape belongs to Heifer Ranch. We just mark each crate on the end so that when they're unloading they see which crates belong to us. And so these crates have
a nice hinge door on top. So we have that open. And then, like I said
earlier you wanna make sure that your crate is by your chickens. You don't want to go pick up a chicken and walk them back to your crate. You want to take your
crate to your chickens. And so the way that we catch birds you want this to be as
less stressful as possible. So make sure you have gloves on. And you're gonna take your hands. and you're going to put them
over top of the chickens wings so that they don't start flapping. If they do start flapping
then that could cause some bruising and then that
would affect your end product. So we'll put our hands over
top of the chicken wings and then I catch their
legs or their drumsticks in between my pinky
finger and my ring finger just to help contain them
and to have them move the least as possible. And so with your chickens,
since you're putting in multiple chickens in the
crate, you wanna make sure that you put your chickens
inside of the crate so that when you get to your
number six or seven or eight that you're not just piling your chickens on top of each other. So that there's room
for everybody in there and they're not scratching
each other's backs. So once your crate is full
with the number of birds you wanna put in there, you
take your crate to the trailer. And we always make sure
that there's two people carrying a crate because
they get very heavy with seven or eight birds in there. So each person will be on the end; you'll go and you put it on your crate. And then these crates are really cool that they actually lock into
place on top of each other. So you just wanna make sure that you hear that clicking noise. And then as you're putting
full crates of birds on top of each other, always listen and pay attention to the
noises of the chickens. 'Cause there's some big slats on the floor of these crates that every once in a while a chicken may have their
toe curled under there. And as soon as they start squawking or making a lot of noise, just
simply lift those crates up so they can get their toes out of there. So we have officially
entered our winter mode. We have sent off our last
batch of poultry for the year. And so we have our schooners behind us that are ready for winter. We took the white tarps off the top so that we could put them in storage so that they're out of
the sun, out of the wind and that just helps keep them able to be used for longer;
we'll get a couple of years out of them. We'll take the watering system
out, put that in storage. We'll clean all of the feeders and waters put those up out of the way. We'll pick up all of our
water hoses out of the pasture just so everything stays
nice out of the weather just to get as much life out of it as we possibly can. We parked all of our schooners out of the way in the edge of the pasture so we can still graze other
livestock through here and that they're not
in the way of anything. Some other winter projects we'll be doing, we'll be taking soil samples from pastures that poultry have been
on and potential pastures that we need to put poultry on, just so that we know where
our soil activity is at. We'll also be reviewing
our chicken records that we kept throughout the year so we know how much input we put in them and how much profit we'll
be making off of them. Throughout the year our
schooners go through a lot of wear and tear so
one of our winter projects will actually be going
through the schooners, making sure all the wires connected, fixing anything that's broken. For example here, this end
bar got bent getting pulled through some tall grass so that'll be one of the very first repairs we make before the start of the next season. (uplifting country music)
