240,000 Baby Chickens?????
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- Eric and I are both chicken farmers. Between the two of us, we raise 240,000 chickens at a time. We decided to do a video of how we get chickens back. We do this about 6-7 times a year. We will keep the chickens for about 35 days and get ready to do it all again.
#poultryfarming #broiler #farmerhunt
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We also grow for Pilgrims in Arkansas. We keep them for about 6 to 7 weeks it’s about a 6 lbs bird. We just sold our first flock and we are on the second one now. I have learned so much from y’alls videos keep it up!
Thank you! Good luck with your next flock. We are going to try to do more videos soon of our day to day poultry work
Hi ...Good luck..I also want to step in to the business, can we have a contact plz ..tnx
Thanks for posting! My father was a contract grower for Gold-n-Plump - at one time was their most tenured grower at somewhere near 25 years. But that was back in the 60-70's. I remember him saying during the time he was a grower they used to feed 4 lbs of feed to make 1 lb of chicken, and things steadily improved to 2 lbs of feed would make 1 lb of chicken. We raised them for 8 weeks, 5 weeks seems like a crazy fast turn around.
Pretty cool! Thanks for sharing. I bet that was some hard work back in the day before things got to be so automated. For the most part for us it takes about 1.6 lbs of feed to put a pound of weight on a chicken. Crazy to think in 20-30 more years what the chicken business will look like.
Love watching your videos
Thanks!! Glad y’all enjoy them. We’ve been slacking a little here lately but hope to get more videos up soon.
Great job
Thanks!
Good, can make video about the chickens housing construction with details
We'll try and do something like that sometime. We both bought farms so we didn't actually go through the building process.
@@FarmerHuntwhere you bought frame and how much dimensions of the building
@@meaprojects7309 I bought some existing houses. They are 40' x 500' long
My question is was that Eric with no shirt on 😂 thanks for sharing
😂😂yep! It was hot!
Wow 35 days sounds good i grow for perdue we keep them 49 days with 22 day turnaround we use the same turbo feeders but we have to put out 26 a house of those trays
We really like the 5 week flocks. Only negative I see is we get 6 or 7 flocks a year so there is more setup and cleanup compared to growing a bigger bird. Do you like the turbo feeders? We like them a lot. For this flock I did 20 of the trays per house.
Yes we like them alot i seen you all hang them on the wall did yal nail them up we pull them in and out with a trailer and leave them outside
We also have to put out 4 foot wide paper under the water lines and put feed on it. Keep up the videos i have learned somethings from you all and thanks
We ran sections of waterline string and stapled it to the post. The feeders just slide in and stay there when we aren’t using them. I think you can fit maybe 6-7 between a post. We’ve had them probably 2 years and so far it has worked great.
Do you think the paper helps? We have done paper under the feed lines before but felt like it wasn’t really helping. For a while pilgrims wanted us to put a really thin 1’ wide paper under all our waterlines. It was just a waste of time though. We finally told them we weren’t doing it anymore and they never brought it up again.
That was interesting. Thanks for sharing! How often do you check on them? I have heard stories about how my grandparents sometimes couldn’t attend church services together when they were in the business due to at least one of them needing to be there on the farm at all times.
That kinda depends on a lot of things but typically we check them first thing in the morning and go through all the houses. We remove any birds that died, check feed, water, ventilation etc. We’ll check them probably 2-3 more times throughout the day but those checks are just making sure the birds are comfortable and everything in the houses is working properly (fans, feed, etc)
We are hopefully going to do more videos of some point about the day to day chicken house work
Let's go!!!
Chicken time!!
i been watching all your videos on chicken . great stuff . i was just at a chicken shed where i went in the houses and seen that the flock was unbalanced meaning to say that some chicken were of good weight and some were small . would you have an explansation for that .
It's hard to say without knowing more about the flock. One possibility though is the chickens in that house probably came from different hen flocks. A hen will start laying eggs around 25-26 weeks of age. They usually lay eggs up until about 60 weeks old or so. Those first eggs they lay around 25-26 weeks are much smaller than the eggs that a chicken produces around 60 weeks. Typically any chickens that are brought out to our farm from a hen that was under 30 weeks old don't perform well. My guess would be that house you looked in had some chickens hatched out of a young flock and some hatched out of an older flock.
Do you think having more litter in the winter helps lower heating bills? I'm torn between keeping more litter so there's less air space to heat but the tradeoff with more litter seems to be more ammonia.
That's a good question... I always try to maintain about 4-6" of litter. I think you are better off with more litter than less litter. As far as saving money, I don't really think more litter leads to lower heating bills. It may, I just don't know that it does. I think having more litter though helps those floors maintain a warmer temperature which leads to better bird comfort. Again, that's just my opinion.
@@FarmerHunt My hunch is you are correct. I've had it 2-4" in the winter before and noticed them huddling together more than usual. I don't know the science of why less litter seems to make them feel colder but it looks like it does.
What is the interval cycle for changing the chicken bedding (sawdust)?
We used to always clean out once a year. When the integrator went antibiotic free, they recommended just doing partial clean outs. We went several years doing this, but now we are back to fully cleaning out again and probably will do so about once a year.
@@FarmerHunt We are in Malaysia and practice cleaning for every cycle, replacing the bedding. For a 40x500 unit, we can only fit 26,000 birds.
Y esa limpieza del galpón 🤔
Thank you for sharing! I had wondered how a commercial chicken house operates. Does the cost for everything, excluding the chickens themselves, come out of your pocket first? (Feed, water, transportation to and from, etc).
We don’t pay for the chickens, feed or transportation to and from our farm. We are responsible for the housing and all the utilities for the houses.
@@FarmerHunt we also grow chickens an just purchased a Lewis Bros windrower machine and would like to know when you level the litter out how do you gauge the depth ? The man who had been rolling our litter quit and his machine had skids to help level But ours doesn’t have skids Did y’all have trouble with your Lewis Bro machine?
Leveling out the litter comes with a huge learning curve. It's hard to get a feel for just how much litter you need to pull out of the windrows each pass. The only real piece of advice I have is get you some spacers to go on your hydraulic cylinder. Figure out about what height you want the blade of the windrower and put spacers in to prevent it from dropping any lower than that while unrolling. You'll have to remove those spacers when its time to roll it up again. Hope this helps
@@FarmerHunt thank you for the tip ,my husband worked at it yesterday and said he thinks he got some on it figured out.
Pilgrims Chickens only 35 days , What's the average weight when they leave . I Grow Organic chickens for Pilgrims till 49 days average and average weight is 6.5 pounds .
Our target weight is 3.8 lbs. sometimes they are closer to 4 lbs.
@@FarmerHunt Nice to know Thank You and Good Luck Friends
Same to you!
Yeah we don’t have that many chicken on our farm…..
Did you say the chicks are just a day old when y’all get them?
Yes, they all hatch that morning and are brought to the farm not long after that
kinda personal question but How much do you get paid for every pound of live weight? 7 cent?
It’s a tournament pay system so it can go up or down but base pay is .0719 cents per pound
I have a question how do packing plant buys your chickens?
We are paid for raising their chickens. There is a formula to calculate our pay. We actually compete with about 8-10 farms and are paid based on how our chickens do. Our base pay is .0719 cents per pound. Depending on how the birds do it could go up or down a little.
@@FarmerHunt so how long time take to reach farm to packing plant.
Maybe 20 minutes
Which company’s fan use in farm
Can they get to hot and how do you keep them happy this time of the year
Yes they can get too hot. We have lots of fans that pull air across the birds. We also have cool cells on our houses and if it gets hot enough water is applied to the cool cells. That helps cool the air some that is being pulled across the chickens.
Hello, my brother. I am Mazen from Iraq. I am also a chicken breeder. I want to know how much space is the chicken coop that you work with
Each house is 40’ x 500’.
@@FarmerHunt woow
@@FarmerHunt The total area is 20,000 square meters = 200,000 birds
@@user-oe9xe5ev8ymazen each house is 20,000 square feet. They hold right at 30,000 birds each
@@FarmerHunt I wish you and your brother all the best and prosperity
You mentioned you did not own these chicks. How does your business work?
We are basically a subcontractor for the integrator. We own the houses and provide all the utilities. They are responsible for the chickens, the feed and the transportation of birds to the farm and from the farm to the processing plant. We get paid based on how the chickens grow. It is a tournament system pay where we are competing with about 8-10 other growers to see who produces the best chickens with the lowest cost to the integrator. We are hoping to do a video in the near future going through the financial side of the poultry.
Thanks for the reply. I just assumed you guys owned the product Interesting stuff. @@FarmerHunt
Do you use any products to give the chickens through the injectors or medicators?
Occasionally we will run some apple cider vinegar or citric acid. Supposedly it’ll lower the pH of the water and help keep the birds from passing feed. Not sure that it really helps though.
@@FarmerHunthow about some vitamins or anything to help their gut? Any tips on how to save feed, help chickens gain more weight?I don’t know what I’m missing but I have been troubling with fed convo and weight . I raise them to about 35 days like you do
We rarely run any vitamins. I think I have in the past. Just never felt like they helped.
The main things we focus on are bird comfort, lighting program, plenty of water and not stressing the birds. The vinegar is supposed to help tighten their guts. Sometimes I feel like maybe it helps some and others it seems like a waste. Are you consistently having higher feed conversions than people you sell with?
@@FarmerHuntyes my feed conversion is high , not sure what I can do to lower it
how big are they at 5 weeks?
He can correct me if im wrong but id say they are growing a 4.5lb bird
Our target weight is about a 3.80. On a real good flock they may be a little over 4 lbs
What kinda death rate do you have
3-4% used to be average. For about the past year we’ve been dealing with some higher mortality in the first week and also during the last week. Average now is probably 6-8% each flock.