Next and To Do Differently

I have a list of things I would like to do differently, however I am trying not to be too hard on myself:) (If you are reading this post, you might want to visit the other posts to get caught up to speed.) I will break it down into to stages.

Brooder:

• Use pine shaving for bedding. I used hay and it compacted too much and held too much moisture. I suspect that the moisture contributed to the birds I lost.
  
• Clean brooder every day. I know this seems obvious, but I thought tossing new hay over their old, soiled bedding would save me time by not having to clean it out.
• Make sure the waterer does not leak. I had an auto waterer in the brooder and it leaked in one corner. I thought it wouldn't be a big deal, because the birds wouldn't be in there long--wrong.
• Build a brooder with a bottom that can be scraped clean. I am not sure what will work best, but I have a garage with a concrete room. It might work best. My only concern about it is the cold that radiates from it. I suppose with three inches of shaving on the floor that wouldn't be a problem.

Tractor

• Build a more portable tractor. The tractor I built would have worked with more space, however it was so big, I couldn't rotate it enough in our back yard. The manure became too much to manage. I felt like the birds had a lot of room to roam, but I only moved the tractor four times in 30 days--too much poop in one spot!
• Put the tractor on the side of the house. The smell wasn't too bad and the noise wasn't a problem. However, with a small tractor and new location I figure I will be able to move it every day and it will only visit the same spot twice in 30 days.
• Make the feeder easier to access. My girls helped a lot with feeding the birds and because the hatch was hard to access there was a lot of spilled feed.
• Make the waterer easier to access. My auto waterer was not cool. It didn't work well and I suspect it was my fault:) We ended up buying a five gallon waterer, but it was raised off the ground with bricks. If I move the tractor everyday, I need to figure out a way to keep it suspended.
  

Butcher Day (Probably the easiest part of the whole process--thank you youtube and local resources)

• Try to coordinate the scalder and plucker with another neighborhood "insurgent." The cost is not bad--25 bucks--but the set up and cleaning is the same for 25 or 100. It could also be a good way to bring more of the neighborhood together.
• Use different bags for the finished chickens. I knew I should have used other bags, but we had gallon bags in the house--the four pounders fits fine, but the five pound fellas didn't.

Feed and Misc

• I was happy with the feed and price.
  
• Maybe raise more birds. I wonder if I could do 40 if I moved the pen everyday. I don't want to get greedy or do more than my patch of ground can handle, but the work is all the same. I will go out and talk to 5 birds or 40 birds.
  
• Welp Hatchery is worth another try. I lost 9 birds. One right away, two were a different breed and got smothered, one died from a heart attack, and the others died from what I am calling a failure to thrive. I know it is not chickenese, but they did not look like the others. The birds that made it to term were, healthy and feisty. They didn't charge shipping, which shaved 24 bucks off of the order.
• I am sure there is more.
  

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