Apparently the meat birds are tasty

As we mentioned in our last chicken post, we did get the meat birds out on past year. We have a few critiques thus far.

Let’s just say the system has pros and cons. First the pros:

Super easy to do the chores. Just put the feed in the feeder put the water in the water and move the shelter one length forward.

Seppi can almost but not quite, move the shelter himself.

You can do a job, or…

You can do a job with a hat. In this case the hat is the cap for the top of the chicken waterer.

Takes about 10 minutes tops.

Another pro is that the chickens are apparently delicious, as evidenced by their popularity with the local predators.

We have lost three chicks to three predators and three nights.

I actually don’t know that there were three predators, I just put that in there because it sounded cool. It could’ve been just one predator.

We have tried adjusting the electrical netting in a bunch of different ways, and we’re out there pretty late on Friday night trying to get it hooked up to the main electrical fence line.

When I say we were out there quite late I mean we were out there until after dark.

Nevertheless, despite our best efforts, there was another dead chick this morning, and one of the live chicks has a wound on its breast.

We are not sure whether it is an aerial predator or land predator. If an aerial predator that would make sense that it hasn’t eaten much of the chicks that it didn’t kill. If it’s a land predator then how is it getting through the electric netting? The answer seems to be that the electrical netting isn’t as effective in our climate, as it is in some of the other climates of popular youtube homesteaders who review it.

When we test it, we were never able to get more than four or 5000 V, and the average isn’t great. Last night one of the kids was kneeling on the ground and actively touched the fence and didn’t get shocked. But this morning the dog nosed against it, and got shocked enough to send them yelping away.

So we think that the ground is so dry from not getting any rain for the last couple of months that it isn’t enough conduction to push the electricity to ground. In the morning, with the dew on the ground, it conducts just fine.

So we have a couple of possible solutions.

Long-term, we will probably end up building a different style of chicken tractor that is completely enclosed and relies on the physical barrier to keep predators out. Since the shelter that we are using now was built completely free with scrap materials, Thanks to Papa, no great loss there.

In the short term, however, we need to try to keep these chicks alive for another four weeks until they are old enough to butcher. Over the weekend we are going to try using these guys.

They are big, they are mean, and most importantly they are noisy.

If they can avoid gorging on all of the meat birds feed, they might be just enough to keep predators out for a few weeks.

Next week, we may try a combination of increasing the voltage by buying a bigger, fence, charger, and/or adding a suspended bird netting above the whole system, so any aerial predator that sweeps and gets caught in it.

We will keep you posted on how it goes. Stay tuned.