Tag: chicken

Overnight Fermented Chicken Feed

I constantly read how awesome it is to ferment the chicken feed — except we’ve got a lot of birds, and it is cold outside (or hot) much of the year. So we would need a row of five-gallon buckets inside the house to manage the approaches I’ve seen where the feed sits and ferments for three to five days before it is used. I was curious how much fermentation you could get in 24-hours if you had some starter. So I took a scoop of chicken feed into the house & added a bunch of water. I let it sit on my nice, warm countertop for a few days. Then I put a day of food into a five gallon bucket & added my starter. Poured water over the whole lot of it & let the one bucket sit until I was going to feed the chickens the next morning.

Result? It’s got a nice sour/sweet aroma, was bubbling happily, and was well hydrated. The birds love the chicken food mash anyway, and a nice bucket of 70 degree mash on a cold winter day seemed like a nice treat even if the fermentation hadn’t gone anywhere. But it worked! I pull about a quart of the fermented feed to use as a starter, bring the bucket out to feed the birds, add more pellets to my empty bucket, pour the starter in, and cover it all with water until tomorrow when I do the same thing all over again.

Incubating Eggs

We’re about to start incubating eight duck eggs, so I wanted to record the temperature and humidity settings that I’ve found for the chicken, duck, and turkey eggs (well, future turkey eggs! We managed to get five male turkeys last year)

DUCKS
Start End Temp Humidity
1 25 99.5 55-58%
26 28 98.5 65%
28 hatching 97 70-80%

 

CHICKENS
Start End Temp Humidity
1 18 99.5-100.5 45-55%
19 Hatching 99.5 65-70%

 

TURKEYS
Start End Temp Humidity
1 24 99-100 50-60%
25 Hatching 99 65-70%

 

Chicken Tractor

We put together a chicken tractor to give our chicks to keep them where they’re supposed to be. We’ll put a tarp over one half of the tractor so they’ll have somewhere to hide when the eagle come about (and a place to hide from the rain). And it’s got a low-motion swing!

We used a 1×4 for the swing and mounted the rope to both the top and bottom of the tractor. This approach leaves the swing move a few inches each way, but it doesn’t swing when they hop on and off. They seem to like it — I’ve seen each chicken hanging out on the swing today.