Chapter 18
The Learning Curve
Now that we have been successful at raising pastured and home-processed poultry, many people are interested in duplicating our model and we encourage that. It's the ultimate human praise.
But I always smile to myself at how many people think it sounds so easy. Lest we appear to have just stumbled into a neat agricultural scheme, allow me to share some of those major learning curve experiences that accompany pioneer ef-
forts .
The problem the first year was processing.
We started with a big kettle over a wood fire. As a teenager, I had raised layers in these portable pens and dressed the culls. I cooked the birds, picked off the meat, and sold it as precooked, boneless chicken at a local farmers' market. A
real delicacy, it sold easily to convenience- minded consumers. At 14, I had purchased an old galvanized work table and a tiny table top picker.
That was what I had used to pick and eviscerate cull laying chickens. By selling just cooked, boneless meat, I didn't have to worry about a few
feathers staying on the skin. The skin pulled off real easily after cooking.
But these broilers were a different story.
We didn't know about the 145°F water, and with the wood fire varying the water temperature, it would burn one chicken and not scald the next one enough. It took Dad, Mom, Teresa and me to process about 10 birds an hour, mainly because of feather picking problems. That was when we decided we were going to have to do better on the processing.
The following year, therefore, we raised fewer birds (300) and rented the local small locker plant's poultry processing room. But that year, the birds were no larger than pigeons. They just wouldn't grow. We concluded that we had crowded them too much in the pens. We put about 150 in a pen, instead of 100 or fewer. That was when we learned about crowding stress. We transported the chickens to the locker plant in our dump truck. When we arrived, 16 of the biggest ones were dead. They had piled up against the tailgate and suffocated. We learned the impor- tance of crating these birds so they don't pile up during transport.
Processing went well, though, despite the small birds. But the hassle of taking scales to weigh the birds, being away from the farm, and meeting customers there made us conclude that we needed to process as efficiently as the locker plant, but do it at home. We sold some equipment and invested in a brand new automatic feather picker.
By putting an ad in the rural electric cooperative magazine, we located a small thermo- statically controlled scalding tank on the other side of the state. With our new picker and a 2500 watt scalder, we were ready for year number three
and let the orders go up to 800.
As the season got underway, the weather
turned terribly windy and cold a day or two following the arrival of our first chicks. A day or two into this last blast of winter, chicks started dying. They would just drop over and I was desperate to find the cause. It was pneumonia, due to cold, drafty conditions inside the brooder house. As soon as we got a warm, sunny day, we moved the remaining chicks out into a little pen in the yard. Made of some scrap boards propped up with bricks, the enclosure had no roof on it, affording the chicks full sunlight luxury.
Meanwhile, I tightened up the brooder house and purchased more heat lamps.
Things went fairly smoothly after that until the following year when I went out to the brooder house one morning and noticed that the chicks, huddled under the brooders, were extremely quiet.
Chicks should be boisterous, chirping and singing as they go about their work. I couldn't tell that any were missing but they certainly acted scared.
The temperature was fine.
Later that day, we found a pile of dead and dying chicks under some old feeders and gunny sacks in an adjacent room where we kept barrels of feed. After consulting with several neighbor- hood farmers, we concluded that it must be rats.
That night, we moved an old army cot into the feed room, cleaned out all the junk, and prepared to do battle with the rats. I took up residence in the chicken house, sleeping there every night for a week, with a broken baseball bat as my weapon. One night about midnight something startled me and I rolled over to see a rat about a foot long climbing up the outside of the brooder house wall. His white stomach was about a foot
from my nose. But he didn't bother the chicks.
hole I could find to make the brooder house rat proof. A couple of years later we had a similar attack, up through a gnawed hole in the floor, through the deep bedding. Rats will take chicks and just stuff them down a hole, many of them still alive. After surviving the rats, we wondered what else could go wrong.
We were soon to find out, for the next catastrophe occurred just after I had moved the first batch out in the spring. A 2-inch rain that night turned depressions into ponds and water was running everywhere. I pulled out bucketfuls of dead 3-week-old chicks. That was when we learned about the need to stay on top of things when earnest rain sets in for a long period and water begins running across the top of the ground. Over the years, we have gone out at numerous times in the middle of the night, Teresa carrying a
flashlight and me carrying two bales of hay, to put down a dry hay pad and gingerly scoop wet chicks up onto the dry hay. Sopping around inside that cage, with the manure and panicked chicks,
is certainly not fun. But that is the price for chicken worth eating. There is no free lunch.
Fortunately, it doesn't happen often.
During the summer of 1987, we had a terribly hot spell. I went out in the morning to move the pens, and found several dead birds at the back of each pen. We were just a few days from slaughter and these were the biggest birds. They had suffocated from the intense heat the previous day. By propping up the rear of the pens during the early afternoon, we solved that problem.
(Photos 18-1 and 18-2)
During these early years we were changing the feed ration, trying to eliminate all syn- thetic vitamins and minerals. We used kelp and switched the straight soybean meal to part soy,
Photo 18-1. In extreme heat, we pick up the back end of the pen and prop it up to let air in to the birds.
Photo 18-2. For ventilation, the crack can be quite large before mature birds can get out. The prop
part peanut meal, and part roasted soy.
Toward the end of 1988, when we were three batches away from the end of the season, the little 12-day-old chicks began showing signs of some sort of paralysis. Their curled toes put them off balance and they would rock back on their hocks. In advanced stages, their legs would trail out behind them and they would scoot about pathetically on their breasts, flapping their wings against the litter. More were coming down with this strange malady every day.
Whatever the problem was, I figured getting them outside would cure it. Even though the weather was threatening, we moved them outside,
and promptly had a deluge that left several dead of suffocation. But the paralysis continued until it began slacking off around day 25 and seemed to run its course by day 28. We lost about 30 percent of the chicks. What could be the problem?
The hatchery had warned me that these chicks were from a new breeder flock. Pullets, because they lay smaller eggs, produce smaller chicks.
The hatchery warned me to treat these chicks like
"preemies." They were smaller, but otherwise appeared to be healthy. Then this malady occurred.
The next batch did the same thing at day 12.
I began noticing some birds going down. After consulting my Merck Veterinary Manual, 1 deter- mined that it was curly toe syndrome caused by a
riboflavin deficiency. Grabbing some beef liver from the freezer, I fed it to the chicks and the problem stopped immediately. Even the paralyzed chicks began walking again. Since putting brewers' yeast in the ration, we haven't had the problem.
In 1989, everything was going fine when all of a sudden the chicks in the brooder house quit eating feed and began drinking water like fiends.
They absolutely went crazy over water. They jumped in it, got soaking wet, then piled up and suffocated trying to get warm. They wouldn't eat.
I was desperate. What could this new problem be?
I noticed the feed seemed a little discolored and heavy. The bottom of the feed tank held what came out of the truck's auger first. Could there have been a residue of something toxic in the auger?
Normally the feed trucks just hauled dairy pellets, which were fairly compatible with the broiler ration. The bigger birds out in the field, on the same batch of feed, were fine. I brought in some feed from the field and the little
chicks immediately began settling down. They ate it like they were starving to death. I called the feed mill.
The truck driver, prior to delivering my feed, had made a haul of mineral supplement to a local dairy and had not cleaned out the auger between that haul and mine. The residue left in the auger came out first in my tank, and as I got to the bottom of the tank, comprised a major portion of the feed I was giving the chicks. They were being fed calcium and salt. No wonder they were thirsty! We lost about half the batch.
Needless to say, the truck drivers are very careful to follow clean-out procedures before they bring chicken feed to us.
Another point in our learning curve occurred after a customer called with car trouble and we had to refrigerate chickens overnight. We learned that the birds must always be put on wire racks. When placed on the solid bottom of the refrigerator, or on a solid shelf, air movement is restricted underneath the birds and it will
spoil them even overnight. Poultry is extremely perishable, and must be protected from even a few hours without adequate ventilated refrigeration or ice.
What else could go wrong? In April of 1990 we had had our first batch of 1200 chicks a week when we received a wet, heavy, 10 inch snow. April snows are highly unusual here, but this one came anyway. Around midnight, the electricity went off. The temperature was right at freezing. The chicks were just a few days old, and suddenly were plunged into darkness and no heat. We grabbed the shipping boxes the chicks had come in and madly began scooping chicks into the sections, trying to stay ahead of the birds as they panicked and piled up inside the brooder house. In an hour, we had all the chicks reboxed and stacked in the house, near the fireplace.
I slept on the sofa all night to keep the fire going. All the ruckus kept me from sleeping too soundly. By morning, the power was still out and we had 1200 thirsty, hungry chicks in the house.
What to do?
There was no alternative but to turn the kitchen/dining area of the house into a brooder
facility. I went to the shed to get a roll of poultry netting which I planned to tie with baler twine to the legs of the furniture, creating a big circle. Newspapers would be okay for litter until the power returned.
When I came back in with the netting and walked in the door, the lights flickered and came back on. Teresa shouted "Hallelujah!" We danced a jig, donned coat and boots, and began taking out boxes as fast as we could. In a few minutes, the chicks were all back in the brooders, as happy as could be. The total loss was about 20 birds.
What else can go wrong? Who knows? The reason for sharing this is to make you aware that ours has not been an enterprise built of ease, but one fraught with a host of Waterloos. Each one taught a valuable lesson. We don't want them to occur again, and by God's grace they won't. Be assured that other crises await us of which we know not. Won't it be fun to see what they will be and what we will learn from them?
Chapter 19
Sickness and Disease
vaccines, antibiotics and hormones, housing sanitizers and chemicals so permeate modern poultry production that the idea of raising healthy birds without these crutches sounds incredible to most poultry producers. The risk of sick birds, they say, far outweighs the advantage of nontoxic production. But in all our years of producing poultry, we never had one outbreak of disease or sickness. The conventional counterparts in our area have had several.
That is not to say we never have sick birds.
Anytime we deal with living things, death is inevitable. But this mortality accounts for only 2 or 3 percent of our total. Most of our losses, when they occur, are due to weather or predators.
And yet, even with these figured in, our mortality is no higher than industry standards, and is normally lower. Anything under 10 percent is considered acceptable.
The first concern is toward sterilization of the house between batches. When we clean the brooder house, we only use a scoop shovel. We do not sweep out the corners or disinfect it in any way. Beyond what the naked eye can see is a
tremendous battleground. The good critters are fighting the bad critters. Given a healthy environment, which includes a carbon percentage high enough to eliminate all traces of ammonia smell in the litter, the good critters will hold the bad ones in balance.
Sterilizing agents are broad spectrum and kill off good bugs as well as bad ones.
Environmentally harmful substances hurt the good bugs more than they hurt bad bugs, and the
surviving bad bugs develop resistance to the spray, fumigant, disinfectant material and be- come more virulent. This resistance factor makes what scientists call "super bugs, " which are much harder for the good bugs to hold in check. They are also harder to kill with poisons. Steriliz- ing, then, can easily set the stage for epidemics.
When a new batch of chickens arrives at the brooder house, they will stay healthier if there is a good population of good critters in place to maintain balance.
•
Vaccinations are unnecessary if the produc- tion model is healthy enough. Animals are born with immunities, and the more we tamper with those, the more we reduce the natural immunities and the more likely we are to develop a generation that is immunodef icient. Does that sound
familiar? Today, with all the vaccination going on in the livestock industry, it is no wonder that the human population is becoming more and more immunodeficient. The reason the animals need vaccination to survive is because the production systems are not meeting the needs of the animal.
Return the animal to a natural, healthful element, and vaccinations are neither needed nor desirable.
is pneumonia in new chicks. Temperature fluctua- tions must be minimal on these new arrivals, and especially drafts must be eliminated. Putting burlap around the hover and leaving just a couple of access holes for the chicks to come out and eat and drink can help cut down on drafts where they are sleeping.
They just need a completely draft-free place to sleep and lounge that is within a 10-degree tolerance (853-95°F) all the time. Greater
fluctuations in temperature will bring on pneu- monia. The telltale signs are light birds, discolored, spindly-looking legs, and ahunkered- down appearance.
The chicks should feel solid when you pick them up. You want some bulk and weight. A chick with pneumonia will feel like a cotton ball; there is just no weight. They feel like they have wasted away. A healthy chick will walk upright, standing tall. A chick with pneumonia will appear stunted;
its wings stick out a little, and it has a humpback, or hunched over, appearance. The definitive sign is the legs, which should be deep yellow on a healthy chick, but turn brownish orange on a chick with pneumonia.
Short of antibiotics, I do not know of a cure for birds with pneumonia. I think everyone who raises birds needs to experience it one time just to realize how seriously to take the admonition:
no drafts and a warm, dry place. It's another one of those situations where until you've experi- enced it, you simply cannot understand the importance of this admonition. If you see two or three birds showing pneumonia, realize that you are to blame, not the chickens. Make sure their temperature is not fluctuating drastically and get rid of all drafts. They don't mind coming out in the cold - even 3(?F to eat and drink - as long
as it is not drafty and they have a warm draft- free lounge area.
Generally the pneumonia will run its course in a week. That's the tragedy of it. By the time you realize they have it, it's too late to save many of the birds, and you just stand and watch helplessly as more birds show the telltale symptoms and die within 24 hours.
Take heart, though, because seldom will you lose more than 50 percent, even in a bad outbreak.
Take your lumps, learn your lesson, and do better next time.
Once the birds are a week old their tolerances seem to take a quantum leap. They still should not have drafts, but they can take 20° or 30° F variations, they need not be warmed beyond 75?F, and they are just about over the hump
from ever getting pneumonia.
The only other time you may see pneumonia is out in the field during long bouts of extreme damp, cold weather or when dramatic fluctuations (more than 4CPF) occur between day and night temperatures. The symptoms are the same. I call
it "shrivel up syndrome." That is exactly what the birds appear to do - just shrivel up and waste away.
If you cut them open, you will find their entire body cavity full of fluid. Often they smell funny, too. The probiotics are invaluable in preventing pneumonia.
Coccidiosis is a major concern of the poultry industry. Coccidiostats in feed or water
are thought today to be as important as the nourishment itself But this disease, called cocci for short, is caused by unsanitary condi-