Cornish Cross and Chicken Tractor Part 1

Cornish-Cross - an amazing and, at the same time, grotesque breed of chicken. It is the primary breed used in the meat industry and by many pastured poultry producers. The hatchery we typically order chicks from describes them this way:

This is the most remarkable meat producing bird we have ever seen. Special matings produce chicks with broad breasts, big thighs, white plumage, and yellow skin. The rapid growth of these chicks is fantastic and the feed efficiency remarkable.

However, like any hybrid, the Cornish Cross has "issues." The hatchery does not "recommend breeding, since they will not produce the same high quality in the next generation and due to the extreme rate of growth they will be too large at time of sexual maturity to breed successfully." The birds also struggle with a number of health issues due to their rapid weight gain as well as being almost completely void of natural chicken instincts. The price we pay for perfect, tender, juicy meat!

Our order of 50 Cornish Cross chicks arrived two weeks ago. They spent their first week in a large stock tank inside the stock building. We had one fatality in the first day or two, but the remaining chicks all seemed healthy. The hatchery sent 51 chicks, a common practice which assumes a small percentage of loss due to the stress of shipment. After a week the chicks were getting too big for the stock tank, so we spread a deep bed of sawdust on the cement floor and set them out in a larger area. At 2 1/2 weeks the chicks are about 50% feathered out, plump and eating like their barn yard neighbors, the pigs.

As the birds get bigger, feather out and no longer require heating lamps, we'd like to move them outside so they can forage on pasture (or our lawn, which is primarily dandelions and clover). However, unlike our laying hens, the meat birds do not do well as "free-rangers" for a number of reasons. One reason is that they simply will not stray far from their feeder. These chickens go from a .75 ounce chick to a 6 pound mass of meat in 6-8 weeks. In order to put on that much weight these little chicks need to do a lot of eating! Another reason the meat birds don't range well is because they are not as mobile as the hens. The breading that has created this amazing, tender, meaty animal has also created an animal that has trouble walking and is prone to leg injuries, heat strokes and heart attacks. Instead of ranging over the barn yard and fields, nimbly scratching up dirt and pecking up bugs and greens, the Cornish Cross lounge, loaf, and generally remain blob-like in close proximity to the feeder. Sadly these birds need help grazing.

Laying hens who know how to scratch and graze!

How does one help an over sized hunk of meat on two drumsticks graze?

A chicken tractor!

Essentially a bottomless, portable cage, a chicken tractor is used to intensely graze an area of pasture. The tractor is moved to a fresh section of pasture, typically daily, but more or less depending on the size of the tractor and the number of chickens in it. Many urban chicken owners use a tractor for a small flock of laying hens, in which case the cage is equipped with nesting boxes and a roost; however, a tractor works quite well for meat birds too. The open bottom allows the bird to literally lay on the ground and graze the forage around it. When the pen is moved the birds get fresh greens and leave behind a layer of wonderful fertilizer.

Although there are pre-made tractors available they are really only suited for a small flock and primarily for the urban homesteader. 95% of the information available online is for homemade tractors, mostly constructed from random things the farmer had laying around. I found several informative resources and blogs, such as The Deliberate Agrarians two posts, and a few sites about Joel Salatin's style of tractor (Salatin was one of the first American farmers to start "pasturing" meat animals and has written several books on the subject.)

As I researched I was able to put together a list of requirements:

* Secure and predator-proof

* Lightweight and easily portable

* Provide enough shade/shelter from rain

* Large enough for all 50 birds

* Accessible so refilling food and water is easy

* Constructed as cheaply as possible, ideally from junk on hand

With these criteria in mind I went hunting through the outbuildings to see what I could find.

Cold Frame and Garden Update

The construction of the cold frame was completed several weeks ago and it was placed in it's permanent spot shortly thereafter. It has been as useful as we hoped: Onions, leeks, cabbage, kale and tomatoes were all hardened off in it, peppers, which found it too cold to sprout in the basement, quickly popped up once placed in the warm bed, and heat-loving cucumbers have been planted in the frame, where they will remain the entire summer.  With the help of the cold frame, a stretch of warm weather and lovely spring showers the garden has taken off.

Cold Frame with Tomato Plants

Peas

Cabbage

Row of Young Beets

One of the Raised Beds with Lettuce, Cabbage and Kale
(Shortly before this picture was taken a large hole was discovered in the bed
where a cabbage plant had previously been located.
It is uncertain as to how said hole appeared, but we did find a muddy-pawed pup nearby.) 

Asparagus - not as straight as store-bought, but fresh and tender! 

Sophie Snoozing on a Garden Table

Rhubarb Bed

It is very nice having perennial plants like asparagus and rhubarb in the garden.  They are the first plants to sprout up from the cold, semi-frozen ground, helping you believe that spring will actually come to the tundra known as Wisconsin.  As such, they are the first plants ready for harvest, which means one can enjoy fresh produce far before any other plants are even close to maturity.  It also means that they are done being harvested just when the other spring plants ripen, thus avoiding "harvest overload" (which will occur in late summer when the 39 tomato plants, 72 cucumber plants and 348 other plants in the garden all decide to bring forth prodigious amounts of produce all at once - an event I greatly look forward too).  For now I am happy with cutting a few stalks of asparagus each day and harvesting an arm-full of rhubarb every week.  Along with the pie I made a few weeks ago, I also cut up and froze a total of 47 cups of rhubarb.  The rhubarb seems to have liked the old chicken bedding I side-dressed it with.  We still have a few weeks to go before its harvest season is done - I wonder how much we'll end up with?     

Spring

Spring has sprung and it's been a busy few weeks on the farm.  Baby chicks and turkeys arrived, the garden blossomed and required weeding and harvesting, we organized our first egg delivery to the Twin Cities and a tree was struck by lightening during a storm, which fried our modem, router and water pump. Ahhh, life on the farm is great!

Here are some pictures capturing the events of the past 2 weeks.

Week old chick

Chicks lounging under heat lamps

Meal time!

Week old Turkeys

Standard Bronze and Standard White

Rows of Lettuce

Hildy and a Massive Harvest of Rhubarb

First Fruits - Asparagus and Rhubarb

Strawberry-Rhubarb Custard Pie

Hildy

The Slaying of Rex Goliath

Today's blog post is coming to you from the Cafe Wren in Luck, WI. We awoke this morning to a terribly violent thunderstorm buffeting the house with rain and wind, filling the sky with lightning and rattling the earth with thunder. Around 7:20 a.m. lightning struck a pine right behind the house and the power went out. As both of us are dependent electricity and internet access for work, we had to flee the coop to get to the Wren (and its free wi-fi) by 10 a.m. when Steph has to punch in. All of that to say, if my diction and grammar seem a little more... earthy... you'll know why.

This Saturday was a day long foreseen, though anticipated more with a sense of foreboding than of excitement. That's because Saturday was the day of our first home chicken butchering.

You'll recall, we'd been given four roosters in our order of hens back in October. Well, for chicken raisers only vaguely interested in hatching out future birds, four roosters is far too many. So around 8 a.m. Saturday morning in the wet and chilly air we set about our work. Steph's mom, Sue, a seasoned pro at chicken butchering, came to teach us her ways. In addition to the three roosters we also had to butcher a hen that Hildy had wounded when playing a little bit too roughly.

We started with the roosters. Steph administering the death blow, all of us plucking, me cutting off feed and heads, and the ladies (whose smaller hands fit inside the birds) performing the interesting task of eviscerating.

Thanks to Sue's guidance and skill We were done and cleaned up by 10 a.m. and off to a tasty breakfast, which had prudently been put off until after the butchery. Both Steph and I were in a pretty charffy state most of the morning, but being hungry made it better.

The title of the post comes from the name of one of the roosters. When you order a batch of mixed breeds they always include a rare breed. Our rare breed was an enormous and glorious white rooster, whom named after a bottle of wine we once had that has a big picture of a rooster on it called Rex Goliath.

Rex and the other roosters are in the process of becoming chicken broth. We threw the sick hen in a crock pot to make dog food, since she had an open wound and all.

The only lasting trauma from the morning was that our hands smelled all day of the death we'd wrought -- more literally than Macbeath's too I might add. Just did a sniff-test and it looks like I'm finally in the clear. We're guessing that the smell is actually from the grease, but who knows.

Figured poultry butchery might not quite be the right occasion for photographs on our family friendly farm blog. So here are some other pictures.

Hildy's still a flopper

Our surviving rooster with Henny Penny

Finally, my father-in-law Mike thought it would be a good idea to take a video of the pigs, his favorite of our animals, eating some fun slops. So here's our pork-tet gobbling up some hard-boiled eggs, courtesy of Mike and Sue.