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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2IQa9tF
missbuster replied to your post “unicornduke replied to your post “ugh it’s so hot! it’s so hot. I…”
The only other thing I could think of was extending the shade edge of the pens by using a tarp/tent pegs and some rope.
We were going to replace the tarps with shade cloth, or stretch a length of shade cloth above the enclosure, or even just go pitch an EZ-Up or similar tent up there to cast a shadow. But as it happens, we think it was just that the waterers were in the sun and the chickens were genuinely unwilling to walk in the sun.
The gross and brutal truth of it is that we killed all the survivors today anyway so it doesn’t matter; the smaller chickens are light enough to endure the heat, and it’s not likely to be a problem again this summer, or next. We don’t get heat waves like this often.
But we sure won’t forget this lesson. It’s actually worse than the time we had an entire batch of chicks get eaten at 3 days of age by rats in the brooder, because we’d spent eight weeks of feed and work on these guys, but it’s similar in impact. A couple grand of income, lost. However, it’s not too late to up future orders of chicks from the hatchery to make up the shortfall over the course of the rest of the season, and because of the timing, we had very few fresh customers for this batch. (Usually we have like 80 preorders of fresh chickens, but because of the holiday, we had precisely 11 this time.) So it happened at a fortunate time, anyway, if it was going to happen.
(Your picture was not posted)
missbuster replied to your post “unicornduke replied to your post “ugh it’s so hot! it’s so hot. I…”
The only other thing I could think of was extending the shade edge of the pens by using a tarp/tent pegs and some rope.
We were going to replace the tarps with shade cloth, or stretch a length of shade cloth above the enclosure, or even just go pitch an EZ-Up or similar tent up there to cast a shadow. But as it happens, we think it was just that the waterers were in the sun and the chickens were genuinely unwilling to walk in the sun.
The gross and brutal truth of it is that we killed all the survivors today anyway so it doesn’t matter; the smaller chickens are light enough to endure the heat, and it’s not likely to be a problem again this summer, or next. We don’t get heat waves like this often.
But we sure won’t forget this lesson. It’s actually worse than the time we had an entire batch of chicks get eaten at 3 days of age by rats in the brooder, because we’d spent eight weeks of feed and work on these guys, but it’s similar in impact. A couple grand of income, lost. However, it’s not too late to up future orders of chicks from the hatchery to make up the shortfall over the course of the rest of the season, and because of the timing, we had very few fresh customers for this batch. (Usually we have like 80 preorders of fresh chickens, but because of the holiday, we had precisely 11 this time.) So it happened at a fortunate time, anyway, if it was going to happen.
(Your picture was not posted)
