Well, I brought in the most recent batch of chickens in to be slaughtered. Since I had more chickens this time than before, I tried using cardboard boxes with 3/4" holes punched in them for transporting the birds to the processing center. Bad idea. I lost about 1/3 of my chickens in between dropping them off and the center opening up (I drop off for processing because I have to be at my day job by 6am, an hour before the center opens up). This kills our cost for the chickens - suddenly we just paid an extra 50% on each bird for feed and initial purchase price (but not butchering). The lesson to me - sometimes it's good to scrimp, because you can get away with little (the chicken's pen is old wood from pallets and scrap pieces of fencing from the egg chicken setup). Sometimes, like today, you pay more in the end for being cheap. So, sometime between now and 8 weeks from today, I'll be building cages of some type.

Alongside that, we got our next batch of 50 chicks and 6 Rouen ducks. The ducks are supposed to be good for raising, so I want to see if they'll lay eggs and raise ducklings for us. A few ducks every couple of months would be nice, and we'll have some ducks to keep around the farm. Compared to the chickens, the ducks have a lot more personality. The egg-laying chickens are very flighty and tend to make me think more of wild birds than pets. The meat-destined chickens are lazy and inanimate - they evoke more an image of white fluffy boulders than an active animal. The ducks, however, are a nice mix - alive and active, but not quite so skittish as the chickens. They eye us, one side of their face cocked to us at a time. When I approach the pen they flee as a group - providing comic relief as they slip and get stuck upside down, without big wings to flip themselves over. They vocalize much more in a chatter than the chickens.

Part of my goal is to track this batch of chickens more closely, so I can calculate approximate costs. Therefore, some of these posts may be low on story and high on concise details, so I can go back and find out when something happened, and get counts (bags of food, etc.) To start these chicks we have a 50-lb bag of chick starter from our local feed store.