chickens

Yard fence

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I came home early on Friday just so I could work on the Gizmo fence. He has learned the many splendors of the snack potential in the barn and surrounding area. As soon as we let them out to potty he is running for the fence and squirts through the 4×4 hole. Once he is out of the yard he will not come back. It does not matter if you can see him and call him. He pretends he doesn’t hear you hollering “I can see you!”. So I will be installing a 2′ chicken wire fence using hog wire clips. It was cold, windy and rainy that afternoon. I used 1500 clips before I got cold. I only have a few hundred clips left and will have to order a few thousand more to finish the job.

I went to Bimart to get bagged dirt for our elevated trough beds in the back yard. It was a wonderful sunny day so I grabbed a bunch of different herbs with the intention of planting them outside. Once I had all the dirt unloaded and planters ready I opted to actually check the weather on my phone. No go on the herbs, its supposed to snow three days out of the next week. So I took them up to the breezeporch to survive another two weeks. Annmarie wants to create planters that go inside a tin can on our 3D printer so that all the herbs can go in the kitchen windowsill. I am afraid the herbs won’t get big enough if we keep them inside. We are starting to really like cooking with fresh herbs. I am really starting to like the idea of an underground greenhouse 10×20 feet long. I want to grow a few citrus trees, tomatoes year round, herbs year round and greens year round. I think it will be very cool. Water will be the real issue but I think I can store a few hundred gallons in 50 gallon barrels that will get us through the winter. Annmarie has agreed to listen to the plan and it is on the list for next year. I am sure it will cost $2-4K. Our wood trim arrived on Friday. Everything stained and finished I just have to cut it and install it. This is everything for our entire house. All the doors, all the windows, all the floor trim and the trim necessary to complete the stairway. It of course started raining and wind blowing on Saturday that caused me to finish covering the trim. I had covered it up after delivery but I had left open the left end and a few garbage bags with some tape closed it all off. I cannot install any of this until I finish painting so on Saturday I started to paint the downstairs. My goal is to finish all painting this week. So hopefully I can start installing the trim next week. My plan is to bring in the air compressor and then setup the chop saw on the front porch.

We had another set of twins born this week! The babies just keep coming. Next weekend we will have to tag and band the babies that have not been touched yet. This mother was so crazy we felt the need to lock her up with the twins in the momma area. She jumped out over the back wall! I am now going to have to raise that wall by 18 inches and raise the height of both gates just to keep these crazy mommas inside the pen. We locked her in the barn alone with her twins for four days so they could gain some strength to be able to keep up with the herd. Our internet sucks and is slow. I have discovered a way to speed up my picture uploads to the blog. I climb up the ladder 24 feet in the air and use my cellular data plan. Instead of each picture taking me 2-4 minutes they only take 10 seconds. This is a farmer update that most people will understand.

Internet hotspot at the top of the ladder!.

Chicken Financials 2017

Steve Hardin2 Comments

These are the financials for all of 2017. I want to preface theses numbers with a disclaimer. I have not even reviewed the numbers prior to writing this blog entry so as to not be influenced by its results. While inputting all the chicken egg financials I noticed one disturbing trend, the chickens kept getting more and more unproductive as the year progressed. They were laying machines at the beginning of the year. When we went on vacation the chickens started getting eaten by a raccoon and we lost seven while being gone 16 days. We went from 23 hens down to 15 then I bought 10 grown hens in December in the hopes that they would lay better. This was a bad deal as most were just freeloaders which is probably why someone else was getting rid of them.

On average I had 20.1 laying hens (A decrease of 4.3 from 2016) giving me 8 eggs/day(increase 0.6eggs/day) for a productivity rate of 39% (9% increase). Again, they were laying gangbusters the first half of the year. I am feeding on average 154.2chicken feed/month(decrease 12.5#/month) for a grand total of 1850# for 2017 (150#decrease). My monthly feed bill is $32.32/month (decrease $6.37/month). My feed costs are $2.00/doz (decrease of $0.28/doz)with my total cost of production at $2.32/doz (includes feed and bedding and ten adult hens). My chickens are consuming 0.64 lbs food/egg produced (decrease 0.10 lbs/egg). I believe a large part of this is the decrease in number of chickens but one could assume fewer chickens eat less food but it doesn’t really work that way. It is costing me $0.13/egg (decrease of 0.03/egg) in feed. This feed decrease will go away this year. I had horrible problems with mice last year and they destroyed about 400# of chicken feed. I had bought in bulk to save on feed expenses but I am unwilling to have the mice destroy that much food and they lower the quality of the feed. So we are combating this problem by importing cats. We have homed three fixed cats that are still kicking and have two more in a kennel as I write this acclimatizing themselves to the barn before we let them out. We are going for four more barn cats. When we can see one or two throughout the day we have enough. It had gotten to the point were you could go days without seeing a cat. That causes a lot of mice problems. It also causes raccoon, skunk and possum problems. The cats won’t fight those animals but they do pressure them to not stay. I have collected 2912 eggs to date (increase in 217eggs). My total feed costs are $425.64 (decrease of $37.75).

In summary my income was $792 and my total expenses were $424.88. In 2017 I made a profit of $367.12!

This will be my best year for a while. I expect to pay out an extra $150 in feed costs due to not buying in bulk. So I made $30/month for the year for approximately 6 hours a month. So $5/hour, seems fair. This for the BEST eggs you will ever eat. Ours are true free range that have access to running water year round, bugs, grass, animal poop and all the bugs they can eat. All that protein makes a huge difference to how the eggs taste and the variety of their diet makes for some amazing flavor. Annmarie does product testing and infection control by eating a raw egg in her smoothy almost every morning with nary a side effect. Buy them from us, first dozen is free!

Multiple irons

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I have been playing catch up last week.  I am trying to do multiple things at once.  This is not working well for me. I just keep flitting from one thing to the next. I had to put the baby chickens outside. I wanted to paint and they are so dusty I needed to dust every day. I called it quits when they started sitting on top of the water dish. They are growing like weeds out in the baby area of the chicken coop. I have also managed to not catch the coop on fire this time with the heat lamp. I have enough concrete board to line the baby area this summer so it is fire proof.

I am currently trying to convince a coworker to raise two geese for me past the gosling stage or about 2 months old. I want to try keeping them up at the spring head and see if they cannot keep the waterway clean. If they can then I will move them to different sections of the waterway to keep it clean versus me having to pitchfork it clean three times a year. I am trying to let some livestock work for me. I hope it works. img_5553

I have one wall in the dining room done and the kitchen done. Next up is to get the color on the wall near all the windows. Our trim is stained and ready. I just need to get it delivered and then start installing it. That will be a big job. I figure it will take about 2-3 weeks to get it all in.

Chicks are here

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Annmarie and I were commiserating about our lackluster effort by our chickens on Thursday night. We came to the conclusion that we were going to have to start pullets instead of trying to buy adults. Pullets take a minimum of six months before they start laying. It was decided that sooner rather than later was good timing.

She called me on Friday morning to say that she had purchased 18 Easter Eggers! The local feed and supply store had just gotten them in and she snapped up half the easter egger pullets. They let her pick her 18 and she paid for them so they held them all day for her. I knew the brooder needed to be bleached out but figured I would have time after I got off work. I got off late and was bleaching the brooder, lid, waterer and feeder when she got home. I had pine shavings down in the root cellar so I figured all was good. I dried it all off and filled up the brooder with pine shavings from the root cellar. Cedar shavings are bad for chickens. I placed all this in the library downstairs and somehow managed to do it without Annmarie noticing then went out to do chores. She smelled the brooder and said it smelled like chemicals. I told her I used bleach only and it should be gone by now. It was then that Annmarie asked me if I was still storing herbicides in the root cellar and how long had the pine shavings been down there? After killing off most of my chicks one year by using varethane inside the house at the same time they were present we are more cognizant of chemicals. So I had to throw out the bedding and used a cardboard box and newspaper to get us through the night until I could go back to the store and get fresh bedding.

This also put the kabash on any painting dreams I had. I tell myself that I was going to tear it up and finish the entire house over this weekend but now we will never know because I was thwarted by baby chickens.

We like the easter eggers as they are very calm. They lay multicolored eggs and have been the best breed in longevity, laying habits and non broody.

Last little bit of help

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We took a few days off of the farm house to go work in town for my mother. This week we finished up the last few things that I needed some help with. The entire back porch is clean now and no longer a tile work area. This makes a huge difference in appearance. We also put the door display back together. They are two doors from this house that had been removed years ago and were out in one of the outbuildings. The shelves are made from the kickboard I removed from the upstairs floor. There was no kickboard downstairs. We had to trim off 1/2″ from the bottoms to accommodate the new floor height. I had cutouts in the door for the light switch and outlet that had to line back up. The new white color of paint we used is great! It actually makes the yellow cupboards look good. So we are going to paint the whole kitchen white and ignore the cupboards for a few more years. We thinned out the shelves by almost 50% on the cookbooks and the flower vases. Hard to believe Annmarie got rid of two full paper grocery bags of cookbooks and I got rid of 9 flower vases!

Mr. Experience and I moved the sideboard, piano, table, and TV stand back into the living area. We left them out away from the walls so that I can paint the entire downstairs. I also call and start badgering the trim place next week to get ours started and stained. They will deliver it all stained and finished. We just have to cut it to size and install it.

We cut the oak kickboards for in the kitchen. I was short on oak so need to buy another 2′. The last ten years we have hung our kitchen towel over one of the under sink doors draped over the door so it cannot close. Annmarie suggested we stick a hook on the side of the stovetop near the sink where we cannot bump it so we can actually close the sink door. It works very nice, now to just get in the habit of using it. We also leveled the fridge and switched the door opening to the left side. So now when you go to fridge from stove you can just open the door and don’t have to step around an open door to reach stuff. It makes the kitchen feel bigger.

I will be drawing up plans for out new kitchen island soon. We are going to have the frame made of metal. I will build custom wood shelves for it and top it with a solid piece of granite so that Annmarie can use it to roll out dough and cookies on. We will also design it to have a two seat kitchen nook so that we can eat our meals in the kitchen. The dining room table is for guests not mail and a horizontal storage area I am told. The problem with this is the front door is narrower than the island so it will have to be made in two pieces and bolted together in place.

We are still waiting on our wooden intake grate for the heating return box I made. They said 3+ weeks and they were not padding the timing schedule to look good.

Mr. Experience hooked me up with a source for food grade 50 gallon metal barrels with locking removable lids. I have two in the chicken coop now and have two more coming. Between these four and the two metal trash cans I can start stockpiling chicken food again. I really like to buy in bulk during the sales but now when the mice destroy it. Now I can just put the entire bag into the 50 gallon drum and pull out each bag individually. This lets me track my monthly expenses better. When I open the bags and dump them into the trash cans I charge them out for that month even if it takes me two months to empty the trash cans. So one month has a feed charge and the other does not. Its not as accurate.