The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Poultry & Waterfowl => Topic started by: Clansman on November 21, 2014, 01:29:35 pm
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I never got round to this over the last few months but things are moving with it now. :thumbsup:
My original idea was to buy some year old broiler parent stock from a depleting commercial farm but that is proving harder than I thought! or at least legally it is! :innocent:
A broiler is the commercially reared chicken you see being sold for meat in the supermarkets.
They are hatched from eggs produced by parent flocks which are essentially two different strains of birds bred together.
I'm now looking at buying some day old parent stock which I can rear and breed myself, therefore allowing me to hatch out and grow my own broilers.
I'm not talking huge numbers, I'm probably looking at a flock size of under 20 which should give me around 50-100 hatching eggs per week for either hatching or selling.
This way I can have a constant supply of meat birds available.
rearing the breeders would ideally require a bit of care in respect of lighting and feed rationing etc,
these birds will pile on weight if fed ad lib/free ranged and really require to be kept to a lighting program during the rearing and laying period so probably more suited to an indoor environment if they are to perform to the best of their ability.
At a year old these hens should be around 4Kg with the cocks over 5Kg and that is with strict rationing, they are BIG birds.
I'm still talking to the breeding companies and don't have definite prices etc yet but they are quite happy to deal with the small numbers i'd be looking at.
Would anyone else be interested in some day old breeding stock?
A group purchase would be possible.
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I would first like to know more about the welfare of the breeding stock as some of the stories I hear are awful. But they may just be stories.....
At the end of the day, the hatched bird cannot survive for more than 8-20 weeks so that means the parents are 'odd' and I think have to kept to some pretty harsh feeding routines.
Instinct tells me not to go near it. But, if it can be done in a better way by caring folk, then maybe that is a good thing.
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Ok this is going off on a bit of a tangent but i'll do my best to answer any questions you have.
Breeding flocks, as with any commercial flock are kept within very strict welfare standards, yes you always hear about the odd horror story but this is down to individual people not doing things they should be doing, its not the common commercial practice.
I keep reiterating the point but it is NOT in the interest of any commercial poultry company to keep poultry in anything other than the best of conditions, from both a financial perspective and the fact that the welfare of poultry is now so closely monitored.
The days of poultry companies being in charge of their own practises are long gone, all the big supermarkets now have their own welfare teams crawling all over commercial farms so nothing is out of place.
The last thing ASDA, Tesco, Sainsubrys etc want to see is a welfare issue on the news from a farm which supplies them.
Commercial birds are kept in far better conditions than many back garden/smallholding birds are kept.
The poultry we should be worrying about are the ones kept in back garden environments, these are the ones I see suffering.
It's wrong to say the hatched bird (the broiler) cannot survive more than 8-20 weeks.
they certainly can, but its not what they have been bred to do and keeping them that length of time is asking for trouble, they will become too heavy for their frame and start to suffer from all sorts of problems.
These broilers are bred to grow as big as possible as quickly as possible, they were never intended to be kept over 8 weeks of age and from a welfare point of view it would not be allowed on commercial farms.
They will usually be killed between 5 and 8 weeks, i've never heard of standard broilers being kept over 8 weeks of age commercially and would not advise anyone to do so.
The breeder parents are indeed kept on rationed diets to keep them in breeding condition, they are bred to grow fast and to grow big.
if they weren't rationed and a check kept on their weight then by the time they reached breeding age they would be too large to breed and probably have lost a great deal in terms of fertility.
We cannot do it in a "better" way than it is being done by commercial farms, I worked many years on commercial broiler farms, all these people are caring folk and care about their birds, their welfare and quality of life.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. I suppose I did. I have a neighbour who is massively into commercial poultry and some of the things he comes out with freak me out. Like what time of day is best to hatch so the POL hen will have cost 2p less to get to POL etc.
I accept that the days of Ixworth as a commercial bird are over, other than for a niche market.
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When I was growing up chicken was a once-a-week treat and even then it was a wing joint, not a whole bird. If supermarkets supply cheap-as-chips broilers then intensive farming is the only way it can be done. I don't ever buy 'em and I doubt very much that an intensively raised bird has a better life than my home-reared rare breed large fowl, and I'm certain they don't have a longer one, but it's horses for courses.
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Exactly but that's where we are. You can't compete in money terms and the industry does a good job of dressing it up well.
I wonder if there is a middle way to produce a decent broiler but in good conditions. Like Salatin maybe. It's got to be economic at the end of the day.
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What breeds are you looking to breed ?
And will you be doing the free ranger types ?
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I'm going for the Ross 308 which is the most commonly used one.
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I just buy my birds at a week old from a farm for 40p each it's not worth hatching your own
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If you do any of the Sasso free rangers I will buy of you.
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I just buy my birds at a week old from a farm for 40p each it's not worth hatching your own
If you're buying week olds at that price then its not! ;D
I reckon at that price they either have to be a wee cash sale or you have an admirer :innocent:
For me it will be worth it though
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If you do any of the Sasso free rangers I will buy of you.
I'm going for the Ross 308 which is the most commonly used one.
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I doubt very much that an intensively raised bird has a better life than my home-reared rare breed large fowl, and I'm certain they don't have a longer one, but it's horses for courses.
It all depends on your definition of better I suppose but try a little comparison with your birds and commercial ones.
Commercial, intensively reared broilers certainly don't live long, 5-8 weeks is the norm.
They are kept at a constant temperature, they never get cold.
They don't get wet
They aren't exposed to parasites, diseases, wild birds etc
They don't get killed by predators
They are fed a completely balanced diet at every stage of their life, they will commonly be fed six different rations to exactly match their requirements.
They have light usually 23 hours per day so the longest they are in the dark without access to food and water is 1 hour, birds reared in wintertime on natural light have to endure over 16 hours darkness without food and water.
So yes it is a short life but it is a comfortable one.
From a financial perspective it can't be done any better, as soon as a bird is exposed to lower temperatures it eats more to keep warm therefore the food costs rise, the amount of food they gain from free ranging sadly does not offset this cost.
This applies to all aspects of intensive growing, lighting, temperature etc all hugely affect the growth rate/financial cost
Unfortunately unless we want to go back to the one chicken joint per week way of life or become willing to pay a lot more for free range/organic type birds then we're stuck with this method of producing chicken.
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Clansman, you don't mention the right of all livestock to be able to express their natural behaviour. Hens are forest creatures and need to peck and scratch around. I think that constitutes a large part of their welfare, not just getting a carefully measured ration of food and being kept out of the wet.
Your concern only with the finances of production down to the nearest penny makes me very uncomfortable.
I would be perfectly happy to go back to the one chicken a week we used to have, as a Sunday roast. People use chicken breasts or wings or legs as the basis for a curry or stew, without even seeming to be aware they are eating an animal which has had a life and a death - to them they might as well be eating soya protein...which might be better. When chicken is so cheap, it's not valued :chook: :chook: :chook:
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Lightbulbs in substitute for the lovely sunshine, I don't really like intensive farming full stop to consider it small scale seems even crueler :-\
Chickens love the rain, dust baths, insects to peck and fresh air to breath, acres to forage, puddles to drink from & places to roost!...I'd much rather pay the price for 1 smaller 'free range' chicken than a poor love that's been sat in a warm barn for 8 weeks & had a poor quality of life piling on weight to save me some penny's!
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I would have liked to purchase breeding stock with you but I am unfortunately rather over worked at the moment and don’t have time to collect. However if you do have spare eggs from your breeding flock when it's up and running I would be very interested in purchasing some next year for growing on.
Good luck with your project
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We all have our own views on this and there is no point falling out about it. There are always lines you can draw. I'm now thinking of penning all my hens in smaller, higher pens to stop another fox attack. They have been in large electric nets. Some might even think that is too limiting but I'm considering taking some space away so I can protect them better. It's all relative and you have to make your own mind up. It's a tough thing. I pretty much know that if I let mine free range in the fields they are in, they would be all gone within a week.
I do though have a few comments about Clansmans post. Saying that these birds enjoy 23 hours of light instead of 16 hours of darkness is not always a good thing. I suspect the level of lighting is nothing to do with the bird's welfare and more to keep it awake and eating. Humans who have lived in Iceland all their life struggle to cope with all day sunshine and then all day dark. I feel my hens cope very well with the changing light levels and just go into shutdown in the winter. They still seem happy and enjoy a sunny day when it comes. I would rather they had this rest time. In terms of a broiler of course, there is no time to rest.
Secondly, no diseases. I'm sure that a broiler house is full of all sorts of nasty pathogens which is why they have to pump them full of so many drugs (which must stay in the meat).
I don't know what the answer it. We are probably never going back from the broiler houses unless there is some hideous disease which wipes out half the human population. Chicken is now just a product. I've been mucking around with Ixworth etc. to see if there is some kind of market for a chicken who gets a decent life and who's parents also get a decent life. It's always going to be niche and elitist but that's the way the world has gone.
So far, the Ixworths I have hatched are too slow growing and not big enough at the end to be any better than a copper Marans. Back to the drawing board.
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Clansman, you don't mention the right of all livestock to be able to express their natural behaviour. Hens are forest creatures and need to peck and scratch around. I think that constitutes a large part of their welfare, not just getting a carefully measured ration of food and being kept out of the wet.
The freedom to express natural behaviour is actually one of the five freedom requirements in the welfare code, all commercial poultry MUST adhere to this.
Jungle Fowl are forest creatures, the hens we have are domesticated and have been significantly altered by us, to be pedantic, thats a bit like saying we should let our pet dogs hunt in packs like wolves.
Your concern only with the finances of production down to the nearest penny makes me very uncomfortable.
Don't think I ever said that, can you show me where I did?
I keep poultry for eggs and meat, they are not pets. its not a money orientated hobby although if I can save money without compromising the quality of life of the bird I will.
I would be perfectly happy to go back to the one chicken a week we used to have, as a Sunday roast. People use chicken breasts or wings or legs as the basis for a curry or stew, without even seeming to be aware they are eating an animal which has had a life and a death - to them they might as well be eating soya protein...which might be better. When chicken is so cheap, it's not valued :chook: :chook: :chook:
Yes we could go back to that, back to the pre 1950's when chicken was expensive and many people died of malnutrition, we cannot feed all the people cheaply from free ranged, slow growing chicken, the maths don't add up.
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Lightbulbs in substitute for the lovely sunshine, I don't really like intensive farming full stop to consider it small scale seems even crueler :-\
Chickens love the rain, dust baths, insects to peck and fresh air to breath, acres to forage, puddles to drink from & places to roost!...I'd much rather pay the price for 1 smaller 'free range' chicken than a poor love that's been sat in a warm barn for 8 weeks & had a poor quality of life piling on weight to save me some penny's!
Can I ask why you consider small scale intensive farming even crueler? why large scale is cruel? or why you think they have a poor quality of life?
I have this debate regularly with a neighbour who says it cruel for me to keep birds in runs.
She free ranges hers and has just lost her whole flock (20+ birds) to a fox, for the third time in two years!
Is it me thats being cruel or is it her? maybe a bit of both but I know where my birds would rather be!
Unfortunately not everyone can afford to buy free range chicken, as I mentioned in the previous post, it can't be done at the scale we need at the cost we need without intensive farming.
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We all have our own views on this and there is no point falling out about it.
Agreed, I don't want to fall out with anyone.
I'm not some mad preacher of commercial poultry practices, I just see a lot of views from the general public which are based on hearsay, misinformation or gleaned from someones cousin that used to know someone who worked on a chicken farm once for a week!
Publicly, commercial poultry get a bad press, I'm just trying to give a fair and unbiased opinion on what its really like.
I'll tell it like it is, good or bad.
Fair enough everyone has their own opinion but make sure that opinion is based on fact to begin with.
I do though have a few comments about Clansmans post. Saying that these birds enjoy 23 hours of light instead of 16 hours of darkness is not always a good thing. I suspect the level of lighting is nothing to do with the bird's welfare and more to keep it awake and eating.
It is everything to do with their welfare which also interlinks with their ability to keep eating and drinking, they still rest and sleep with the light on, it doesn't keep them awake.
these type of birds by design eat a lot and if the light is off for any length of time there will be a panic for food and water when it comes back on, it keeps the stress levels down.
Humans who have lived in Iceland all their life struggle to cope with all day sunshine and then all day dark.
Good example! humans can put a light on to drink and eat, chickens can't..
For everyone that keeps their birds overwinter on natural daylight, as a little experiment, try going 16 hours without food and water yourself and see how that goes for you.
I feel my hens cope very well with the changing light levels and just go into shutdown in the winter. They still seem happy and enjoy a sunny day when it comes. I would rather they had this rest time. In terms of a broiler of course, there is no time to rest.
Thats it exactly, they COPE with it, they have no choice in the matter, try putting a light on at midnight and see how quickly they start looking for food and water.
Wild birds cope with it because they have to, we have a responsibility to domestic birds to make sure they are free from thirst and hunger (another part of the welfare code)
Secondly, no diseases. I'm sure that a broiler house is full of all sorts of nasty pathogens which is why they have to pump them full of so many drugs (which must stay in the meat).
And back to my point about ill informed views… can you possibly tell us more about all of these drugs that are pumped into chickens?? or indeed all the nasty pathogens they are exposed to??
Hormone use is another one that regularly gets banded about but hormones have been banned in poultry for many, many years now.
I'm not saying disease never happens but I've seen a lot more sick and ill birds in backyard flocks than i've ever seen on poultry farms
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Clansman,
Thanks for the discussion - very interesting, and I certainly don't think you should be getting hassle for what you're saying. It's just that context is everything, and one backyard flock is not the same as another, just as one commercial broiler house may be very different from another.
We took a small batch of hubbards to a commercial slaughterhouse for the first time last year. I filled in the forms and gave them to the vet. He gave them straight back to me and said "no, where it says % mortality, you have to put the number that died. You've written n/a."
I explained that we only started with 30 of them, and all had survived. He then said "you've also written n/a under drugs administered. We need full details of everything you've given them". Again, I explained we hadn't had to give them anything.
Finally he said 'ok, let's go out and see these birds of yours', and when he did, exclaimed "Wow! OK, I've got it now! Your chickens have got feathers!"
OK, commercially we made a loss, and I won't try to pretend otherwise. The whole experience did give me pause for thought though.
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Yes we could go back to that, back to the pre 1950's when chicken was expensive and many thousands of people died of malnutrition, we cannot feed all the people cheaply from free ranged, slow growing chicken, the maths don't add up.
Chicken was expensive but I don't think many people in the UK were dying of malnutrition, irrespective of the price.
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I can only speak from personal experience. When I put a light on in the house, they start having a go at each other. They are locked in, trying to roost and the pecking and bullying starts. Broilers I guess are a whole different ball game. I can see what you mean about panic eating when the lights come on. Should I put lights in the layers house? I still think I won't but it's personal choice.
As for drugs, the largest use of anti-biotics in food production is pig and poultry meat. Many chicks are now given a dose through the egg before they even hatch. Meat birds are routinely given vaccines and anti-biotics. The latter is given even if no health hazard is detected. I live next to a big poultry rearer and know what he gives the birds and these are just layers which go to dealers for sale as POL.
The fact is, if you can't keep poultry in clean conditions, you have to use drugs. I'm no better. I deeply believe in all the fresh grazing ideas and land rest etc. but when it comes to it, it's very hard to do. I myself have fallen foul (sic) of trying to treat my birds as if they were organic but not backing it up with moving them enough.
I don't have any real answers as yet. So I'm not condemning anyone and I appreciate Clansman's insight and expertise in the real poultry meat industry.
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Yes we could go back to that, back to the pre 1950's when chicken was expensive and many thousands of people died of malnutrition, we cannot feed all the people cheaply from free ranged, slow growing chicken, the maths don't add up.
Chicken was expensive but I don't think many people in the UK were dying of malnutrition, irrespective of the price.
A lot more folk then grew a lot of their own food. You can argue that those people are probably healthier now than the current generation of kids will be in 60 years time. With all the processed junk they eat, I can't see how they are going to be better off than someone who grew up with hard work and a lean but clean diet. I don't think malnutrition was a huge problem in the 50's, but obesity is a crisis today.
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It's not what you know it's who you know ha ha
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Lightbulbs in substitute for the lovely sunshine, I don't really like intensive farming full stop to consider it small scale seems even crueler :-\
Chickens love the rain, dust baths, insects to peck and fresh air to breath, acres to forage, puddles to drink from & places to roost!...I'd much rather pay the price for 1 smaller 'free range' chicken than a poor love that's been sat in a warm barn for 8 weeks & had a poor quality of life piling on weight to save me some penny's!
Can I ask why you consider small scale intensive farming even crueler? why large scale is cruel? or why you think they have a poor quality of life?
I have this debate regularly with a neighbour who says it cruel for me to keep birds in runs.
She free ranges hers and has just lost her whole flock (20+ birds) to a fox, for the third time in two years!
Is it me thats being cruel or is it her? maybe a bit of both but I know where my birds would rather be!
Unfortunately not everyone can afford to buy free range chicken, as I mentioned in the previous post, it can't be done at the scale we need at the cost we need without intensive farming.
I find the idea of wanting to re create a smaller version of intensive farming just horrible, intensive farming exists to create a cheap end product giving the animal the very very basics of care required - (in my opinion not even providing the basics - no perches, nothing to forage, no natural day light = poor quality of life)
The 'freedom food label' gives buyers the option of supposedly higher welfare - more space, enrichment & even natural light!!...these things should be compulsory!
I will never agree with creating false/fake/ un natural environments to create maximum profit & cheap food what ever the scale.
I'd quite happily become vegetarian :-J I don't think many of them have died from malnutrition! :)
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This is a really interesting thread and it’s nice to see a good discussion going on without anyone getting too bent out of shape.
Clansman, I would have liked to purchase some breeding stock with you but unfortunately don’t have the space or time to collect and look after them at the moment. I would however really like to purchase some eggs from your flock for growing on if when you have some available.
Despite the comments above I think the economics of doing this on a small scale mean that the birds naturally have better welfare. (IE a few dead chickens to a producer with 10,000 is nothing, a few to someone with 30 is disaster!) Small scale also gives the keeper a much better chance of seeing problems as obviously there are less chickens to look at.
I also don’t think the “natural environment” discussion is valid at all, the natural environment for these strains of chickens is a broiler type house, wrongly or rightly humans (that includes all of us, we can’t avoid this by saying I wasn’t us personally) have selectively bred these birds to be like this. If we were serious about natural environment surly we would have to take into account jungle fowl’s home and provide a forest habitat, with almost equal night and day lengths and a mean temperature above 17?C all year round.
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I find the idea of wanting to re create a smaller version of intensive farming just horrible, intensive farming exists to create a cheap end product giving the animal the very very basics of care required - (in my opinion not even providing the basics - no perches, nothing to forage, no natural day light = poor quality of life)
Again, this comment EXACTLY makes the point I keep making about most people's idea of commercial production, have you actually seen one of todays broiler farms NicandChic?
The intensive broiler farms I worked on previously now all have perches for the birds, windows to give them natural daylight (they also have artificial lighting), toys hanging up to play with etc etc
the supermarkets rule the roost now, poultry producers have to do it exactly how they say its to be done and the supermarkets are driven by what the consumer wants..
Anyway, if anyone is interested in some, I have gone for Aviagen's Ross 308 parent stock and have 100 females and 13 males coming at the end of January.
Depending on vaccines etc they'll be around £4 per bird and should be starting to lay around the end of June so I hope to be hatching my own broilers in August :thumbsup:
I may well have a go at crossing them with some pure breeds too, at the end of the day they are just fast growing large birds and one of these crossed with virtually anything else should give decent sized offspring
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Clansman, I would have liked to purchase some breeding stock with you but unfortunately don’t have the space or time to collect and look after them at the moment. I would however really like to purchase some eggs from your flock for growing on if when you have some available.
Hopefully I'll be able to do that next summer, I wasn't intending to keep much more than 20 of these as a breeding flock but if selling hatching eggs and chicks meant offsetting the costs a bit it may well be worth keeping a few more.
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Going to order these on Monday.
if anyone else wants some you have until Sunday midnight or forever hold your peace :thumbsup:
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Placed the order this morning :thumbsup:
Should be here either late January or February depending on transport, as its only one box i've ordered i'll just need to organise to meet up with their lorry on its next big delivery to this area.
I managed to get some extra males so should now have 20% males instead of 10% so everyone who asked for 10 females can have two males instead of 1 and a bit more peace of mind
They will come vaccinated against Marek's and Infectious Bronchitis.
It looks like the cost will be £4.10 per bird but will wait till the invoice arrives just in case!
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These are going to be arriving in the next 2 or three weeks :thumbsup:
Will start a separate thread showing the whole process of rearing and breeding these.
http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=55467.0 (http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/forum/index.php?topic=55467.0)