(Continued from Part 2.)
Water for the Flock
For the first several years of raising fowl, I had a 20-gallon rubber water tote in the chicken coop. Every couple of days, I would have to dump all the water out and refill it because the chickens would sit on the edges of the tote and defecate into the water. In the heat of summer, the water would turn green within a day or two, spoiling all the fresh water. I was wasting more water and time than necessary. I began designing a gravity fed water system with a livestock auto-feeder bowl. We tried the chicken water nipples but did not have very good luck. I want to try the watering nipples again in the future when I rebuild and expand our current chicken pen.
The final design is two, fifty five gallon stock tanks manifolded together with ¾ inch PVC piping. I chose stock tanks, because they come standard with a threaded drain hole, which accepted a threaded, ¾ inch spigot coupler perfectly. The two tanks are outside of the chicken pen, so the birds cannot sit on the rims. On the top of the tanks, I used screen door screening material to keep large debris out. I installed two ball valves, one at each tank to control which tank the water comes from. At the manifold of the two tanks, where the two pipes become one, I installed a “t” coupler. Off that “t”, another ball valve was installed in the downward position to purge the tanks if necessary. When opened, the water dumps straight into the chicken pen. After the “t” coupler, the homerun section connects to a livestock auto-fill waterer. The water bowl is lag screwed into a two by six piece of lumber which is screwed into a four by four pressure treated post which supports the chicken wire fencing. The bowl is about a foot off the ground. Because these tanks are gravity fed, the PSI is not great, so filling from empty can take a little while. This setup has been a total success! Under the bowl, I placed a medium sized river rock. Young chicks can use the rock to jump onto the rim of the bowl and access the water.
During the summer heat, I allow the chickens to free range almost nonstop. The devour the fallen fruit from the trees, the bugs are rampant and there is more shade under the fruit trees than in the pen/coop. Plus, my orchard gets watered daily making the soil beneath the trees cool and moist. Because the birds only come back to the coop at night, where the previously mentioned watering bowl is located, I place multiple water stations placed the property to ensure they can stay hydrated. During the hottest part of the day in the summer, a sprinkler on a timer in the main chicken pen goes off every six hours for five minutes at a time. Often, the wet ground dries quickly, but the birds love taking dust baths with the cooler dirt. Despite all my efforts, without fail, I still lose a couple birds to heat each summer.
About an hour’s drive from my home is a large fruit processing facility. This facility makes jams, jellies, etc. During a recent visit, a friend was talking with a tour guide about the vast quantities of large storage tanks onsite. The tour guide said the tanks were used to transport liquid ingredients for the production line. The guide also said their excess tanks are free to the public, if they have a way to transport them. The reason more people do not take these tanks is because they are so wide; most standard trailers will not work. The tour guide said most people who can transport the tanks have a big rig truck with an “OVERSIZED” sign on the back. Most of the tanks are between twenty-five hundred and five thousand gallons. I want to install a five thousand gallon, black tank and fill it with rainwater during the winter to provide year round water for the birds. When I rebuild the chicken pen in the next few years, I am going to cover the entire structure with corrugated tin roofing. This will help keep the pen from getting too muddy in the winter when the chickens don’t free range very much. I plan on installing a gutter system around the entire pen to collect rainwater and have it plumbed into the holding tank.
Feed for the Flock
Throughout the year, I keep two, fifty-five gallon drums full of pelleted chicken feed in one of our fully enclosed sheds. I only supplement my flocks diet with this processed food during the winter and early spring months when natural food, and/or the garden bounty is in short supply. The other months of the year, I let my birds free range as much as possible, because of the abundance of food around the property, only occasionally supplementing here and there if needed. Through trial and error, I have learned to keep the lids off, or loose on the feed bins. On more than one occasion, I have had to throw a lot of feed into the compost pile because it became moldy when the lids were sealed tight. The pelleted food must have a small amount of moisture in it, even though it seems 100% dry, because once those lids are sealed, nothing, even moisture can get in. Since throwing so much food away, I now keep the lids off the feed bins. The only issue I run into with the lids off is the occasional rat getting in and eating some feed.
When necessary, I purge our freezers of the old, freezer-burnt items. All this spoiled food goes to the chickens or to the compost. A couple years ago, I had a deer shoulder that ended up at the bottom of the freezer. It was past the point of no return, so instead of throwing it out, I let it thaw and cubed the entire shoulder into small chunks. I took all the meat to the chicken coop and was amazed at how fast the birds devoured every scrap. I call chickens “beaked pigs” because they will attempt to eat almost anything. After Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, I take the turkey carcass to the coop and in no time, it is picked clean.
On occasion, the eggshells tend to get thin. When I notice this happening, I throw a few handfuls of crushed oyster shells in the chicken pen. The oyster shells provide calcium for the birds, which helps thicken the eggshell(s). The more the chickens free range, the less supplements of any kind I need to provide. Nature takes care of itself.
For obvious reasons, ducks do not have the same diet as chickens, at least when it comes to scraps. When we raise ducks, they eat the same pelleted food as the chickens, but we provide them with a more vegetative diet with greens, hay/straw and fruit.
Cooking Egg-Layers
Once, during a hunt in South Africa, I asked a local how they cook Guinea Hens. The fellow looked me in the eyes, and with a straight face said, “Clean the bird and put it in a pot of water. Place a brick on the bird and let it sit in the water for three days. At the end of the third day, pull out the bird, throw it away and eat the brick!” I have tried cooking homegrown, egg-laying chickens/roosters just about every way possible. Most of the time, the meat is overly tough and chewy, and I think of that joke every time. Now, I cook their meat in a slow cooker. Recently, when I culled our rooster population, I slow-cooked the meat for about fourteen hours. I put two cups of water in the cooker with one and a half tablespoons of chicken bouillon and let it cook. It was the most tender and flavorful chicken meat I have ever had. Home-grown and homemade food is always better!
Ducks
I have an extreme love/hate relationship with ducks. Peking ducks, the only ducks I raise, mature exceptionally fast and have a lot of meat when fully grown. The ratio of cost versus meat production with ducks is fantastic because they reach full maturity in about two months. But ducks are incredibly messy. They poop everywhere and scatter their feed all over the place. Ducks make a mess out of everything and dirty any body of water in no time. This past year, I raised four ducks solely for meat. The local feed store was sold out of chicks, so I reluctantly brought home the ducks. After they were fully-feathered, and placed in our duck pen, I filled up a small, blue kiddie pool. For the next month, I changed out the water almost daily because it was always filled with mud and poop. The water makes amazing fertilizer, but I quickly grew tired of emptying the pool each day and refilling it.
I enjoy watching and listening to ducks. They are fun to watch and make the kids laugh. I plan on raising five to ten ducks each year, to help add a variety of meat in our freezer. I harvest ducks the same way I do chickens.
Guinea Fowl, Geese, Peacocks
I have no experience raising or caring for any of these birds. A friend of mine has several Guinea Hens roaming their horse property. The are beautiful and fun to watch but can be excessively loud.
Goats
We have raised goats in the past, and I am not convinced we will do it again, at least not on our current property. Goats are escape artists and can be very destructive to any vegetation they see. The day I bought our first two goats (they were fully grown) I placed them in a twenty foot by ten foot chain link pen. Within a few minutes, one of the goats was ramming the fencing looking for weak spots. About an hour later, the same goat would go to back corner of the kennel, get a running start towards the front of the kennel, jump and try to climb her way out. The fencing panels were six feet tall and she had no trouble clearing the top after a few attempts. I should mention, these were Pygmy goats. That night, I placed nylon poultry netting over the kennel and had no more issues with her escaping. A few days later, I finished building a forty-foot by forty-foot pen using hog panels and topping the eight foot t-posts with a strand of wire at the top. Not five minutes after moving those two goats into the new paddock, my wife and I looked over to see the same goat roaming free, eating everything in her path. My wife and I rounded her up and put her back in the original pen.
We decided to install an electric fence around the inside of the pen. After a lot of research, I installed two strands of high tensile electric wire (one at the very top of the fence with yellow t-post wire caps, and another strand about a foot off the bottom held in place by six-inch-long yellow plastic wire insulators. I purchased and connected the wires to an internal battery, solar-powered fence charger. After installation, I put the goats in the new pen, where, very quickly, they both zapped themselves on the fence. Neither goat ever tried to escape that pen again. My wife and I were planning on artificially inseminating those two goats, but after having them for a short time and learning their idiosyncrasies, we decided to let them forage on some weeds and then slaughter both.
NOTE: The next paragraph might be too graphic for some readers.
When the butcher day came, my wife and I put a halter around the goats and, one at a time, led them to a nearby tree with a lead rope. Both goats were worked up and excitable having the halters on, so we calmed them down by walking them around the property and letting them graze. Normally, when I am planning on harvesting a domesticated animal, I do not provide feed. This way there is no food in the esophagus. When cleaning and removing the insides of an animal, you need to separate the esophagus. If there is freshly chewed food inside the esophagus, some might come out in the cleaning process and stick to the meat. If this happens, remove the food remnants and wash the area. The food has not been digested, so there is no need to worry. When the goats had calmed down and were grazing quietly, not paying any attention to me, my wife loosened her grip on the lead rope and stepped back. I placed the muzzle of the pellet gun at the back of their heads, where the spine and skull connect and pulled the trigger. Both goats dropped instantly each time. I used a .22 caliber Benjamin pellet gun for dispatching. (I wrote a short article for SurvivalBlog about this pellet gun a few months ago.)
After dispatching the animals, I hung both goats in a tree and began butchering them the same way I butcher deer. The anatomy of the two species is basically identical. The two goats gave us quite a bit of good, healthy meat in the freezer. Goats have a unique flavor. Our favorite way to cook the meat was in Cajun Goat Meatballs. After deboning, the carcasses were buried in a deep hole text to a peach tree. The next year’s fruit yield from that tree was unbelievable!
Though I do not see raising goats anytime soon, I do have plans to raise sheep. We plan on raising three hogs this year for a good majority of our winter’s meat supply in addition to what whatever I harvest during hunting season.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 4.)