Preview of chicken experiments for 2012
After
a year of chicken research, I feel like I'm ending with more questions
that I started out with. Here are some of the experiments I want
to
explore over the next year.
Pasture
optimization.
How
often do we need to cut back heavy weeds to keep the succulent new
growth coming in? Does it make sense to add another type of
animal to do this brush-clearing, or would we be better off renovating
our pastures by hand? Which traditional pasture plants will our
chickens enjoy the most? Can I figure
out the perfect ratio of tree cover to give our chickens a more
diversified food source without shading the understory too much?
How much more pasture area do we need so that I don't feel like our
ground gets overgrazed during the summer and winter lulls? Does
it work to plant annuals for those seasons of low pasture productivity?
Chicken
breed selection.
We're trying out three new breeds --- Cuckoo Marans, Black Australorps,
and Light Sussex. I'd love to narrow that down to one or two, but
want to find birds that will go broody, lay well, forage avidly, and
have a low feed conversion rate. Assuming I decide on a good
breed or breeds next year, in 2013 it will be time to learn about
poultry genetics and how many birds I need to keep a flock going
without undue inbreeding. It's also worth considering whether a
hybrid of
two of our breeds would exhibit extra vigor and bulk up faster for
broilers.
Broiler timing. Raising
four small sets of broilers made sense on paper, but given what I now
know about pasture productivity, it seems like I might make better use
of our pasture by lumping them together into two batches. Right
now, I'm thinking that I'll start eggs incubating in March to hatch in
April and go out on pasture in late April to early May, then have a
fall batch that starts incubating in July to go out on pasture in early
September. That will probably mean learning how to make a broody
hen set on my schedule rather than hers. Or it may mean more work
with our incubator.
It looks like I've got a
fun year of trial and error ahead of me. Stay tuned to our chicken blog for details!
This post is part of our 2011 Chicken Experiments lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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