Chickens & Eggs

As February passes the halfway mark I am thinking about firing up the incubator.  I have been incubating chickens on the farm for several years.  Unfortunately in 2015 I didn't add any new hens and the girls that were here were upwards of three years old.  The incubated eggs from last spring did not do well and we had less than 40% hatch/survival rate.  In order to increase that rate this spring, thirty one new birds were purchased from the feed store and added to our flock last fall.  One rooster was purchased to freshen up my breeding stock and the remainder of the birds were allegedly pullets.  Amazingly I now have seven roosters in my flock when I went into winter with only three.  So far the extra boys haven't been too much trouble.  As the weather gets warmer, they will start to fight over the top roost in the coop.  In addition to my seven boys there are 53 girls.  

Before the new birds were added to the general population, most of the older hens got three days solitary confinement in the brooder box to see who was laying and who wasn't.  Each of the girls who gifted us with an egg got a blue band.  Those that didn't lay an egg gifted us with a good meal.  This year, depending on my hatch rate, between 12 and 25 birds will be ordered from the feed store.  I will choose a different breed of heavy layer, this time by color alone.  Last year it was golden comets and silver-laced wyandottes, each of them got a yellow band.  I will probably go all white or all black for a stark difference.  All seven boys are completely un-related to the girls so my hatching success should be much better.  The choice of band color will be left up to Little man.  Anyone who doesn't have a this years color band or a yellow band will go into the freezer at the end of the 2017 season.  Birds that are given to us or traded to us will get yellow bands if they were last years birds or blue bands if they were the year before that or older.

In addition to keeping better track with a physical identifier, I have been much better at keeping track of numbers.  Little man's father collects the eggs most days and he and Little man count them as they are put in the refrigerator.  That number is entered onto the calendar and once a week they get entered into a spreadsheet.  Unfortunately for some of the girls, the number of eggs being produced (20-22 on average) is far less than the number of birds (53 laying hens) in the coop.  It will be time again to start segregating birds.  The brooder box will be solitary confinement until a few days before the eggs are scheduled to hatch then it will be cleaned and made ready for babies.  Since we have been pretty good at eating down last years stores, there is room in the freezer for chicken n' biscuit or chicken soup chicken.

I've thought about getting rid of all but a few of my chickens for personal consumption but many of the summer visitors to our small town enjoy bringing their grandchildren down to visit the birds as they run all over the farm.  Next winter, however, I will need to do a better job about lining up customers so that I am not carrying 50 - 60 dozen at any one time in my refrigerator.