After a short but exhausting search we found a better local organic feed source which is almost 5 dollars a bag cheaper! It was quite a journey, I was almost ready to buy a pallet of 45 bags to get the price we needed. That would have been a serious feed bill. We are so happy about this, feels like we have been paying an arm and a leg for feed. I posted a note on CL and received lots of helpful information and also made some new contacts, which will help later as we grow to a bigger as a family and a family farm.
On another meat chicken related note. Kelsi and I did a count tonight once all of the meat birds were in their coop safe and sound.We found out some pretty cool news. We started out with 40 baby chickens from the hatchery and we have 39 tonight! This is amazing success compared to the cornish cross breed we tried last time. The loss rate on the cornish cross was 20%! That cornish loss was only from them dying, no predation factors or anything like that. We have a 2.5% loss on the Delawares right now and we are pretty proud. I think this will be a good heritage breed for us to continue to raise. We also selected and marked some for breeding purposes. I should mention that the Delaware hen that we lost was the one Kelsi mention a couple posts ago. She passed away comfortably last night in a nice straw nest we made for her.
We also have a customer coming out tomorrow to tour and make a deposit if they think we are as cool as we think we are. She said they were interested in 20 chickens! Sweet! Sounded like pretty good people too.
These are the chickens a couple weeks ago.
Delaware male
Red Star Male
A bunch of Delaware females
The field view tonight. All of the white dots are meat chickens out for their nightly stroll
Another smaller group down the field pasturing
The garden is in full swing. So is Kels too!
Thanks for reading!
2 comments:
How many weeks does it take to get the Delawares up to slaughter weight? And the Red Stars? We want to raise meat birds next year, and I simply cannot abide the thought of Cornish cross birds. It's so good to see you having such success!
We got them around the end of May and we will process the end of september. So 4 months give or take a couple weeks. We really like the delawares though. They are pretty sweet. The redstar males are done now but we are waiting for the Delaware ladies to catch up.
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