Chicken Raising 101 - The How To Thread

anyone have the plans on how to build this???

http://www.mypetchicken.com/Coops_without_Chickens-Chicken_Tractor_101-P360.aspx


I love it! lol! or something like it... I like the 'barn' look. altho mine wont need wheels, and would be up higher with a ramp ...also a much bigger run!

that shouldnt be too much efort but there is a lot of detail in that barn isnt there

:o) ya lots of detail... which will peak DH's interest.... he doesnt like simple scrap wood designs.... he's a woodworking hobbyist....so more detail ...means much more interest.

oh cant wait to see the finished product if u decide to do it

There is a book at Borders about building coops--it is a big book by Pangman (I think) in the farm/ecology section. Lots of general plans for all kinds of coops from 3-4 bird urban chicken chalets to Salatin's massive chicken tractors. I bought it, but now I can't find it:0(

lol Cat. After we built our brooder out of the wooden bed frame, it is just so simple to make one. Make the top or sides however you want it, easy to access every inch of it. Mine is from the top, in that, then make sure you can bend over to get into it. We used small chicken wire and left about 6 inches to lay off the side and covered it in dirt. I have one end enclosed on 3 sides, with vinyl shirting and it is vented. The vinyl is pretty inexpensive I think its like 4 or 5 bucks a stick and they are very long, We didnt even use half of one. I think I may just get some more today now that I think of it the build onto the coop. Sure is cheaper than metal.

l2g--what kind of vinyl? I can't quite picture it. I have to build my Nankins and Sebright a little coop this weekend--the Nankins fly like songbirds.

Catscan.......I just bumped L2G thread about her brooder. There is a pic of it, vinyl and all on the post made on July 5th at 6:41pm.

Thanks!

YW : )

Awesome Idea there Tam. Will do that one next. The vinyl is mobile home skirting. The price may be wrong that I have I have not priced it in a while. I am sure you could go to a mobile home sales place and they would probably give you some scraps. I am going to post on Freecycle see if I can get some there. Oh gosh these bantams are soooooooooooooo cute and tiny. Everyone arrived alive and well. I am sold on Ideal.

do your ducks ever go in your pools if any of you have any how would they go i chlorene

I have a question, Inbreeding of chickens?????? Can you, do you want to? If not how do you know when you are ordering them from say like Ideal, that they are not from the same parents?

There will be a lot of folks that know a lot more about all of this than I do, but I know inbreeding is a no no for sure. Yesterday DH ordered 50 pullets of 5 different breeds for the chicks we want to hatch next year. Guess what my job is for today? In addition to everything else, I am to do a search to hunt down roos of those same breeds from another hatchery. Might be a tough order this late in the year, but maybe not. That's just what we are doing. Oh yeah, when we get them all we will be putting leg bands on them so we know who came from where. Like pink for all the pullets and blue for what are supposed to be the roos.

Christy

Oh gosh great. Now the next question is, do these hatcheries get their eggs from the same source or do they raise the birds them selves. I sure dont want 3 legged or 2 headed chicks. I do love Ideal, so far I have gotten some really healthy birds.

I'm not really sure Tia. Like I said, someone that knows more will be by shortly, I'm sure. For me, I am going to look at their web sites to see if it talk about if they raise their own, our outsource them. One hatchery I was looking at the other day said that they had their own birds and breeding stock but all the chickens were bred and raised at surrounding people's farms. I don't know what arrangement they have for that, but I imagine with that company they probably have their own bloodlines. The more I think about it, the more I think on how complicated it could get.....like, where do they get THEIR new blood in from?

Christy

inbreeding with chickens isn't so bad as mulitple deformities. just end up with possible poor stock

. some hatcheries use the same breeders, some places like Ideal breed their own. i think it is just fine [to breed hens and roos that come in the same batch]. once you start your flock you can do one of two things: keep good records, or replace the rooster every year.

most breedsr rotate the roos every three years, i.e., retire the roos at three years of age, while having two year old and one year old and cockerels to continue replacements. a breeding pen may have 100 hens with 12 roos. so they don't know who the roo and hen are.

smaller breeders, maybe breeding for preservation, hobby or show, will have smaller pens and match up their breeders and keep good records.

you rselcetion for breeding should include many other things besides just how closely related they are. perhaps you rDH is wanting to be sure he gets good qualities and diverse genes, maybe these breeds can be already so line bred that they don't have the qualities he wants. just getting a roo from another place does not insure that. i fhe wants certain characterisitcs, he should be LOOKING at the breeding stock and asking questions about hardiness and feed consumption and production.

just getting something from another hatchery won't guarantee anything. although, i must admit, i have thought about keeping a few from ideal to breed to the ones that came from privett and welp. all of them are far enough away from each other. BUT breeders SHIP hatching eggs to hatcheries...

since i had so few hens and only two roos of differeing breeds, i was able to free range mine [except for the second roo] and still know whose egg was whose. and i could also see the difference in coloring at hatch, i have pics of the hens when they hatched. with Buckeyes, their is still great variation in color. i have found that the colo rmy sone prefers is actually not the best type for the breed. also i have seen some Buckeyes that are not as heavy as mine, they have too much gamebird in them. so far my "flower name line" is the best, with Pansy, Purple Petunia, Morning Glory, and Spunky Monkey. i had not decided fo rcertain, but thought i would likely cross them back to best, their roo. as opposed to breeding them together {MG is the roo}. but now i have 25 SR buckeyes on order, so i could find a roo i like in that bunch...

i am new to all this, but have studied a lot. and have two ag degrees which involved business and animal husbandry, just not chickens LOL. chickens is OTJT i think!

Christy, hold off on those roos. good news is, sexing of pullets at hatching is 90% at best, so you could end up with one roo of each breed! wait and see if he likes them before you replace them. you don't want two roos to nine hens!!!

tf

p.s. many breeders have "closed flocks" which means they don't bring new blood in....

oh lordy, lots of info. After looking at some hatcheries a minute ago to see who had what we wanted I am about more confused than ever! So, if we want good healthy chicks that turn into good healthy chickens...what do we do?

I think my DH was just thinking about the overall health and bloodlines. That is why we already got rid of (sold) our 2 roos....he figured they had done their job for what we wanted this year and we would get in new blood.

I think when so many things are based on bloodlines and inbreeding it is hard to wrap my brain around it not making so much of a difference in chickens. So you are saying that your roo can really breed their offspring, mothers, and sisters and the only thing to really worry so much about is a weaker chick or bird from it? I just want to make sure I have that right, or if I am completely misunderstanding what you are saying. (which is entirely possible)

Christy (getting off here to let my brain unwrap itself a little : )

well, i fyou are talking one roo and six hens, that would be a little too inbred. but with say 25 hens and three roos, you run less chance of it. even if they all started fromt he same hatch, they likely are NOT all full siblings.... think about it from the point of view if you are gathering eggs and incubating. even with one rooster, the most you could set from one hen would be ten eggs. if you are setting hundreds of eggs at the same time, to fill orders, don't you think there would have to be hundreds of hens and dozens of roos?

wish catscan were her today, i know she has good books on gentics, it must surely metnion breeding. i ahve read pelnty of articles only, no books. why dont' you do a search, you could find online publications, etc. google it, some book sites let you read excerpts from the books...

it just isn't possible to "select" your breeding stock from a chick... they must be at least half grown to show their breed characteristsics. now that i have said that, i can see five or ten breeder jumping in here telling me i am wrong! sure you can see a lot in a chick, i agree. but the breeders i know won't even sell extra chickens till they are six months old...

and when you are breeding, there are always those recessive genes that will come out in the offsrping, things you dont' know about inless you have had a closed flock for many years...

tf

I'm back!

I would think silkiechick, ncchicken and others would be good people to go to for breeding strategies.

Line breeding is widely used to fix desirable traits--which is one reason why you need to cull, cull, cull if you are breeding to the standard. My "book" (Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens by Damerow) says: The most common form of pedigree breeding is linebreeding, in which the influence of a superior sire or dam is concentrated by mating the bird to his or her best descendants. Pullets are mated to their sires or grandsires, cockerels are mated to their dams or grandams."

But then there is the risk of inbreeding depression--which is probably what your DH is worried about, LBA2--because as you concentrate the desirable genes--you also concentrate the undesirable. If you start to see signs of inbreeding depression--reduced rates of lay, physical deformities, poor fertility and hatching--then you outcross--breed to unrelated lines (which will also bring in some new undesirable traits as well as better vigor--more culling). Outcrossing is said to lead to hybrid vigor--chicks that are more vigorous and reproductively sound than their parents. But it also dilutes your blood line--you will risk losing the expression of desirable recessive traits and mask undesirable recessive traits that may pop up later.

You need to keep meticulous records to see the direction and success of your breeding program. And you should start with the absolute best birds you can find--so you are dealing with as few undesirable traits as possible.

I think this is mostly of concern to serious breeders who are breeding to show or develop their own strains. Other strategies include multiple-sire mating with selection and distinct-line breeding--both of which introduce a bit more variability than strict line breeding. And then you can worry about reciprocal crossing--where there can be subtle difference between the progeny of crossbred hybrids, depending on whether the male is of one breed or the other--like crossing a Buckeye roo with a Leghorn hen vs a Leghorn roo with a Buckeye hen.

Sigh. I just like my chickies.



This message was edited Jul 18, 2008 2:35 AM

speakig of crosses, while i was gone the boys let Brandywine out to browse and be milked [i wasn't HERE to milk!] and she went int he chicken pen and stepped on, killed, Road-e-o...

notrhing like coming home to a dead pullet.

catscan, thanks for that info, i knew you had it!

Oh no! Sorry for your loss, tf.

oh sorry tamara :( it realy dose suck losing chickens dosent it

Thanks for all the info tf and Catscan! Wow, a lot of info to process. I'm pretty sure we are not going to do show birds....though at some point we might get into 4H and the fair. We aren't really looking for anything too fancy. We are at the beginning stages and are looking for egg production and hatching healthy chicks. It seems like a lot to learn, I got some work to do.

Christy

lol u are gonna hav som fun

ummm yep.....fun. : )

Christy

LOL Christy, you know its fun, how did the butchering go last night?

yeah, most of the time it is. The butchering...you just reminded me I have to go skip over to Farm Life. We tried the hanging them on the clothes line method and I don't know if something went wrong or not, but it did not seem like a very peaceful death to me. All I heard about it from the kids and DH for what seemed like forever but was really only about 10 min or so was what an awful method it was. My DH would only do the one that way, the other 3 at the time he used the old way. Then we sat down to pluck....I got to pluck the one using the new method, I insisted on it in fact. I could not believe how easy the feathers came off. and had DH pull a few to see. He couldn't believe it either. I even beat him and got done plucking before he did....a first. He is now talking about doing it again and finding out if we did it the right way. With having to hand pluck so many of them, every second we can save REALLY counts!

Christy

I would like to know that easy way. And i am sure hubby will do the chop method.

If your going to skin them instead of plucking them, I'm not sure if it matters about the chop method or not, except for maybe bruising to the meat.

Here is a nice site for links on chicken genetics: http://www.poultryhelp.com/link-genetics.html

cool site catscan

cat i totally agree with what u wrote. line breeding is inbreeding. yes u breed back to the best of the best from the generations to origional stock to improve the lines.

i band my breeders with different color leg bands and keep records of who the breeders are i obtained them from and my flocks r seperated by breeder pens. i try to keep to the standards as close as i possibly can because i do show. each has 1-2 colored leg bands and pda #' ed leg bands so they r easier to keep records of and so i know who is breeding with who in what pens. every 3 years or less i rotate a new roo or 2 in from other bloodlines with qualities i'd like to add into my flock. the older roos or hens get sold off as i gain better younger stock.

closed flock doesn't mean u don't add new lines in, it just means for biosecurity reasons u will not allow any birds in unless it is from like a npip flock to show it is disease free to protect ur whole flock. it doesn't mean we still don't hatch fetile eggs from private breeders to add more blood either to add new quality. most diseases r spread bird to birds not bird to egg so it is safer to hatch.


if u want to show or u want excellent stock. start with good stock not from the bottom up. don't buy from a hatchery, hatcheries breed for quanity and demand not health and quality usually they r pet quality with flaws and week stock. not like we private breeders do and try to breed out to get rid of. there is a big difference between exhibition and hatchery stock. if u ever buy stock from anyone always ask to see pics of the breeder flock or see them in person. if someone is not gonna show u parents and several generations don't buy from them because u don't know the potential of the stock u r getting.

here is an example to show u rather than explain. this is a pet quality hatchery silkie hen my friend has.

this is one of my exhibition silkie hens. look at the 2 and see if u can tell the big differances between the 2

your one has much more feathers on the head and feet so it would be better breeding stock am i correct??

and here is the 2 hens in the picture aboves mother

as u can tell your silkies are of better quality than mine

but i still lik them all the same they are not for show so it dosent realy matter how they look i guess

This message was edited Jul 19, 2008 7:27 PM

this is a line bred baby from my flock and it's a young pullet who will be going to show with her mom in aug. for the first time. linebreeding can hatch some really gorgous healthy babies if ya know what u r doing. :0)

don't get me wrong there is good hatcheries out there, but if ur gonna spend all that money, then u need to get what ur money is worth and what u paid for.