Chicken Processing and Meat Bird Breeds

One of the best presents we've ever received is a Whiz-Bang Plucker built by my DH's wonderful mechanical engineer father. It has been fantastic! He made a few improvements to the design and fixed complaints that were discussed in the plans turning out a trouble free home built plucker! You can see it in the foreground of the picture below.

It's been interesting processing (in my mind it's butchering but processing is a more PC term I suppose) this year. We hadn't done much in the meat bird realm since moving here due to the difficulty of brooding off-grid.
Now, with a propane heat lamp, we have the usual brooding issues.

So our goal now is to start hatching our own meat birds. The Rainbows from S&H Poultry supposedly breed true.. we'll see, but whatever the case we've been pretty pleased with the birds we get from them. We started buying our meatbird chicks from them and continue to do so along with a couple other places.

My favorite meat breeds, in order:
Rainbows
Red Rangers
Freedom Rangers

Though I have a dislike for Freedom Rangers as they are the most apt to cannibalism if they get a little bit of stress. The Ranger roosters can be pretty mean. And thus far the Rainbows have had more breast blisters but in all breeds the blisters tend to only be on the roosters. Carcass wise, the Rangers seem to be a good all around bird and the Rainbows favor a higher weight for a better carcass. They all get to the size of small turkeys when full grown. Carcass weight being 8-10# for the roosters and 7-8# for the hens. When full size they have gorgeous fat deposits and a lot of it! I am most fond of the Rainbows because they are just plain pretty. They have no standardization of feather color. I sell feathers in a small amount and the variety of colors is rather helpful for diversity.

We're looking at trying S&G's Heritage White's this fall for a final batch for the year. They have a shorter grow time, which isn't normally ideal for us but they should be done before our winter really hits in January and February.

So why slow growers?  Because they have better flavor and health! I don't have the issues I would otherwise raising Cornish X. Nor are they as dirty. I've talked with many producers who dislike how lazy and dirty Cornish X are so I'm not making crazy claims! If you disagree please comment! Help me find some redeeming qualities in the Cornish X!

This and That...

To start off, the solar panel has brought a nice change when it comes to the power situation. We have more continuous power and continuous refrigeration. I didn't realize how much I missed continuous refrigeration ... but we still have work to do on the system. We built our generator as well. Pretty basic especially after blowing through three in the last four months. It's been super annoying. I haven't been able to use my washing machine the last couple months so laundry is way waaay behind! That's only one of the problems. But the power shed is coming together and it's pretty awesome.

Canning has been pretty non-existant this year. The garden is a veritable failure due to a number of factors. Even now, after having the baby, I can't seem to get out there to do any work. Now with ragweed in full tilt my allergies keep me out.

Always lots of things going on and never enough time to do them...

Solar...

It is dry. Not as dry as last summer but dry all the same.

I had my baby girl the end of June so now I'm in the healing stages. Though I'm pretty healed up already, I always push myself a little too hard.

Now onto solar... we bit the bullet and bought a 1 kW solar panel. We had to buy a solar charge controller as well. No home panel manufacturing this time, no time available for it. I've too many other building projects pending. But we spent a day hacking it together so it could be used while getting it's permanent location ready. So for the first time in nearly 4 years I have continuous power and refrigeration. The refrigerator is a big deal due to our dairy production and is what accelerated the purchase after the 3 generator deaths in a 3 month period.

Finally, my boys and I had a building project... making a solar oven. We used a styrofoam cooler as our box and lined it with aluminum foil. It works to heat water and can reheat food but not super good for actual cooking. It needs a little help yet.

How the months go by..

It's been some time since I posted last. A lot has happened but I don't think I could relay even half of it.

First, my pregnancy continues. Not much time left before our new arrival gets here!

We purchased some Tunis ram lambs... well they were banded when I picked them up. I didn't like donut banders before but now I can detest them with a passion. The lambs scrotum just barely fit. So here's my best guess. Banded + scrotum falls off prematurely + raw wound gets infected + rotten flesh + maggots set in eating away everything including live tissue + fly strike sets in + septic infection = death. Lost 3 of 6 lambs before getting it somewhat under control.

To start I went out and cleaned the wound with tea tree and lavender essential oils and scraped the maggots out which required tea tree oil application so they wouldn't just crawl back in again. The tea tree oil kills the little buggers. The lavender oil was applied at the end to promote healing among other things. I've been using a 1% tea tree/water solution (20 drops tea tree to 100mL water) to spray on the fly strike. Tea tree oil is apparently a natural insecticide. Then I also started limit feeding Fertrell's Rumicult 40 Gold. *gasp* It has copper in it! Don't care! Fescue pasture = copper deficiency. They've reduced how much they eat on their own now, but I still limit how much they get. So the results of this treatment still equated to two dead lambs. ACK! What finally turned it around was the homeopathic remedy Lachesis 30x. The maggot infestation in the raw wounds reduced after 24 hrs. The Lachesis is used for treatment of gangrene in traumatic wounds as well as septic infection. After 48 hrs, the maggots in the wound nearly nonexistent and healing had started. Still continued to put tea tree and lavender oils on the wounds to help as well. The two lambs in worse condition were showing severe weakness in the back legs so I dosed them with Conium 30c. Only took once, as they were showing improvement in a few hours. I'm down to battling fly strike on two of them and just putting the essential oils on the wounds. The third I caught early enough that he didn't progress to fly strike buy real improvement didn't show until homeopathic treatment started.

We don't do antibiotics. And vets do antibiotics.

I almost won a battle with Coliform mastitis in a ewe with similar treatments but I didn't protect myself properly and got pretty sick for a few days. She regressed and died. She was healing up but discovered it was her water source that was contaminated so she couldn't win. If her water hadn't been contaminated then I believe I had gotten her far enough she would've healed up but I'm conjecturing. Homeopathic treatment doesn't work if you don't remedy the outside cause.

So that's my wonderful gross story for the day.. we'll see how the fly strike goes now.

'Tis the Season

We have had 3 cows calve in the last couple of weeks. This has brought us up to 5 milkers as we're still milking the two we milked through the winter. This means cheese making is picking up with the excess milk production. Yay!  Cheese!

The grass has finally taken off growing and suddenly it's trying to get away from us. We may even be able to make some hay for ourselves. There are two pastures, 20 acres worth, that could, possibly be hayed.

The garden is falling behind due to the sheer volume of things to do and I'm getting closer and closer to my own due date of July 4th. But I'm trying to make progress. If anything, we'll have lots of potatoes and onions. I'm trying to get green beans planted and have made some progress in that regard.

Otherwise, we have 300ish meat birds growing and goslings hatching.  A friend of ours is incubating 60 Silver Appleyard duck eggs for us. So MAYBE we'll have duck and goose to sell this year as well. I have 5 goslings and two broody hens are sitting on 16 eggs between them. Another dozen are being incubated for us. Just a ton going on.

My kerosene incubator is on the back burner for now but still will happen just maybe next year so we can start hatching our own meat bird chicks.

The pictures below are of our calf feeding/training bucket. It's a Kiwi system (meaning it hails from New Zealand, geniuses when it comes to 100% grassfed dairy). The nipples are halfway up the bucket and hoses go down into the milk.Technically, this bucket is meant for two calves. But I've been feeding three. Works fine. I add milk until gone then pour a gallon of water in toward the end. This cleans the system out to a small degree. It gets washed every once in awhile and a lid is left on when not in use. All in all, I like this waaay better than bottles.

Goslings and Incubation

Goslings are the messiest, most ungangly little things... We have White Chinese. We like them for their appetite. Yes, we want geese for weeding, though we have yet to use them as such. At this point we're just trying to figure out how best to propagate them, as odd as that sounds.

These one were incubated and hatched by a friend of ours. There were 7 (out of 14) but two died for no real apparent reason. One he thinks got on it's back and died, the other, he has no clue. He's been raising waterfowl for some time and knows what he's doing but as he says, he's still learning. He's also the only one who's been able to hatch our waterfowl successfully. I don't have an incubator built yet to even try. I've been too busy with everything else. So we sent 12 more goose eggs and 60 Silver Appleyard duck eggs to him when we picked up these goslings. Hopefully they go well and we get ducklings and more goslings.

I do know we both use dry incubation methods. What does that mean? It means, you keep the incubator humidity down around 50% rather than the regularly recommended 80%. The eggs NEED to evaporate liquid out of them or the baby inside will drown in it's own fluids. By the time they're ready to hatch they should've lost around 40% of their liquid. Now at hatching time you do want higher humidity so shells don't stick, something like 70%.

But I digress...

P.S. I made some adjustments to their watering and feed. They are staying much drier and cleaner. The big adjustment was putting a small cake pan under their waterer. Ducks and geese are horribly sloppy with their water when cleaning their beaks...

Raising Rabbits and Other Tales...

Sooo.. in the short amount of time we've been raising and breeding rabbits, it's certainly been interesting.

The most interesting is the doe that started methodically killing And eating her kits.. herbivores, right? Many would say environmental stresses others a protein deficiency. Curious, is what I call it. So why?  No idea. Once read a study about cows eating rabbits. Turns out it was a selenium deficient area and rabbit bones accumulate selenium. My father said they'd leave dead cows out in the pasture because the cows chew on the bones. Say, what?  Yup they roll them around and around in their mouths and would find bones in the water tank from time to time. Why?  Calcium and phosphorus was his reply. Go figure. Granted.. can't do that now..
It's always strange watching a cow eat her placenta and afterbirth. They chew and chew.. blah! Would I take it away? Nope. Part of nature. It helps guarantee no hemorrhage as a major dose of oxytocin causes the uterus to clamp down. I'm more worried if she doesn't eat it.

Now I've got myself thinking .. another favorite of mine is that geese are "true" vegetarians. Which is why, after a rain storm, I watch them eating worms with the best of them. We were both a little surprised on that one...

Muscovy ducks are excellent catchers of frogs and chickens are very good thieves of those frogs. My pond froze pretty thoroughly one winter and the ducks fiercely attacked the trapped minnows and ate handsomely for a good week.

It's just strange what you can observe and learn. Especially in a natural environment ...