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I stole this picture from my sister’s FB but it’s too cute not to share the context. See, you can’t see Farmbaby’s feet, but she’s wearing Avengers crocs. (These, in fact, handed down from some cousin or other I’m sure.)
The day-old chicks are seeing the bright colors of her shoes– blue, red, white, green, the Hulk’s face, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor– and think they’re food, so they’re pecking her shoes.
These poor lil floofs almost got lost by the Post Office, someone didn’t scan the label at their intermediate stop and so they weren’t at the destination post office this morning in time for pickup, so B-I-L frantically called all over the place and got the postmistresses of both the origin and destination on the phone, because it’s one thing if your urgent delivery of, say, books or electronics goes missing over the weekend, but quite another if it’s a box full of live animals that gets left on the wrong truck or sits on a loading dock or something.
There is nothing, nothing in this world sadder than receiving a box marked “live animals” that ought to be peeping, but is not making any noise.
Fortunately for these guys, they were only delayed about four hours, and every single one arrived alive.
For a different experience, B-I-L drove to MA yesterday to pick up 100 laying-age pullets to expand the egg-laying flock, and those arrived on a tractor-trailer from PA, thousands of them, in crates, and he was sort of shocked and horrified at how some of the other farmers were transporting their share of the flock home. (A whole bunch of smallish farms went in on buying the whole truckload; the largest purchaser got 1300, another farm got 500, while B-I-L and a friend from a farm in MA split 300 between themselves, and innumerable small outfits got 20-50.) “People just don’t treat chickens very well,” he commented. That 100 hens spent a night in quarantine getting used to their new digs, and are already out on pasture today, and it’s clear they’d never seen grass before. They’re goddamn delighted.
He did see how some of the bigger on-pasture operations do it, and it involves each rolling chicken house having its own self-contained solar panel, power inverter and battery, and the big water cube being inside the house so the chickens’ body heat keeps it from freezing; the solar-powered battery runs a timer that turns the lights on and off, opens and closes the nest boxes to encourage or discourage laying, and I think even dispenses feed. It cuts down on labor and lets you run a lot of chickens with minimal effort; most of the labor goes toward moving the rolling chicken houses weekly to fresh grass. So… we’re shopping for solar panels.
I stole this picture from my sister’s FB but it’s too cute not to share the context. See, you can’t see Farmbaby’s feet, but she’s wearing Avengers crocs. (These, in fact, handed down from some cousin or other I’m sure.)
The day-old chicks are seeing the bright colors of her shoes– blue, red, white, green, the Hulk’s face, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor– and think they’re food, so they’re pecking her shoes.
These poor lil floofs almost got lost by the Post Office, someone didn’t scan the label at their intermediate stop and so they weren’t at the destination post office this morning in time for pickup, so B-I-L frantically called all over the place and got the postmistresses of both the origin and destination on the phone, because it’s one thing if your urgent delivery of, say, books or electronics goes missing over the weekend, but quite another if it’s a box full of live animals that gets left on the wrong truck or sits on a loading dock or something.
There is nothing, nothing in this world sadder than receiving a box marked “live animals” that ought to be peeping, but is not making any noise.
Fortunately for these guys, they were only delayed about four hours, and every single one arrived alive.
For a different experience, B-I-L drove to MA yesterday to pick up 100 laying-age pullets to expand the egg-laying flock, and those arrived on a tractor-trailer from PA, thousands of them, in crates, and he was sort of shocked and horrified at how some of the other farmers were transporting their share of the flock home. (A whole bunch of smallish farms went in on buying the whole truckload; the largest purchaser got 1300, another farm got 500, while B-I-L and a friend from a farm in MA split 300 between themselves, and innumerable small outfits got 20-50.) “People just don’t treat chickens very well,” he commented. That 100 hens spent a night in quarantine getting used to their new digs, and are already out on pasture today, and it’s clear they’d never seen grass before. They’re goddamn delighted.
He did see how some of the bigger on-pasture operations do it, and it involves each rolling chicken house having its own self-contained solar panel, power inverter and battery, and the big water cube being inside the house so the chickens’ body heat keeps it from freezing; the solar-powered battery runs a timer that turns the lights on and off, opens and closes the nest boxes to encourage or discourage laying, and I think even dispenses feed. It cuts down on labor and lets you run a lot of chickens with minimal effort; most of the labor goes toward moving the rolling chicken houses weekly to fresh grass. So… we’re shopping for solar panels.
