Raising broiler birds..Tips and Tricks! food/water/health/safety

hey folks this is Josh Stern a rich farmer welcome to another video in our video series in conjunction with Myer hatchery on raising chickens welcome to the farm blog today so today we're going to talk about the baby birds they've been out here in the mobile coop for a week they're approximately three weeks old now there'll be four weeks old next week they are growing like crazy so we're going to show you our mobile coop we're gonna talk a little bit about the mobile coop that we're gonna build and we'll just talk a little bit about what you can expect with your baby birds on week number three with meat birds these are Cornish cross little meat birds alright so let's go have some fun here on the farm vlog [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this morning I wanted to speak to you a little bit about feeding and the appetites of these birds and how much food you can expect to feed these birds per day we're at a point now where we're not feeding them constantly okay so we're feeding them 12 hours on and 12 hours off it just so happens that we start feeding them in the morning the Sun Goes Down we don't feed them all night long so what we do with these birds is we're gonna move them today and our little mobile coop and I'll show you how we move them food consumption wise they're probably consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 pounds of food per day at this point now 50 Birds 5 pounds of food if you had 25 Birds probably two and a half pounds of food per day they're producing at least four pounds of manure on the yard here and I have them right here in front of my house just to show you that if you do this right you're not gonna have smells you're not gonna have a bunch of flies you don't see flies buzzing around my face if you do this right your birds get a little bit of grass they get a little bit of reference from the soil they get to move around a lot more than they would if they were confined in a coop or a brooder so that's why we have them we're moving them around the yard this is a great option now we'll be building a PVC all PVC mobile coop that'll be so light you can just grab it with one hand and pull it around and want to eliminate with that PVC coop some of the problems that you have when we move these birds and I'll talk to you about that as we move them here okay so you're about to see one of the major challenges that you're faced with when you have this Salatin style mobile coop here and basically it's a little mobile cooking we just drag it throughout the yard when we get done moving them I'll show you the areas the little paddocks or squares where the birds have been for the last few days basically the way we move this it has skis on the back of it and mounted and we'll just grab this little rope off of my bill pretty little purse and we'll grab this rope and we'll just give it a tug okay and it's pretty easy to move just give it a little tug but the worst problem you have with these mobile coups is that the birds will get hung up on this back row so the coop tends to catch them what we do to solve that problem is we take advantage of the birds voracious appetite and we'll set the feeder in and we'll move it about this far or this far and then we'll move the feeder and that way all the birds are up on this upper end as we move to a new spot of grass the hope when we build our PVC coop is that it'll be ultra ultra light and that will eliminate this problem of fishing birds when I first did this we actually killed some birds as well one bird we actually caught him up in there and his feet got caught and he was so tiny you just just killed him and it was so sad it's just no really no excuse for that so you've got to be smart to pay attention to what you're doing and this seems to be the best method to get this job done now basically this is a five gallon water pail these fifty or so birds have been drinking this entire water pail per day now the temperatures have been in the low 90s here and they're actually going to get up to like 95 today so we're gonna fill this water and another small water one thing you need to know is if you're on an incline if you're moving birds like this always keep this little spout down the hill so if it's facing down the hill ever so slightly and sometimes we just hang it up in here but it's so heavy it won't stay right now if it's facing down the hill that causes the water to stop if it's facing up the hill it'll just keep running and run all the way out so if you've got to go to work and you fill this up in the morning you come back your birds might be dead because of a dumb mistake that you've made so pay attention to that so let's show you right now what the areas look like that the birds have been on for the last few days and we'll just kind of walk through and I'll talk you through it so this is day 1 & 2 2 & 3 3 & 4 4 & 5 6 & 7 now we'll have to move these guys in two days and they're on fresh grass and they just love it they absolutely love it this is what you can expect the progression of grass so you can see out here closer to the truck over there it looks healed what this is doing is just adding biologic material to my lawn right here great now folks before we go there's one more thing I'd like to talk to you about and I'd like to address there are literally thousands of farm channels out there that are talking to you about chickens and their chickens and their experiences of raising chickens the biggest take-home message I can give you is take things with a grain of salt here okay a lot of these folks are experiencing losses with their birds illness with their birds they're experiencing troubles with their birds there's always some sort of drama going on with their baby birds there's no drama here there's just birds that we care for so you've got to use common sense keep the birds in a clean environment keep them in a safe environment where predators cannot access the coop when you're building a chicken coop you're not building a chicken coop to keep the chickens in you're building a chicken coop to keep things out that can harm them it's your responsibility to take care of these birds it's your responsibility to do the right thing use common sense and think like a predator as you're moving these birds as you're taking care of these birds think like a predator and think like a chicken you got to think like a chicken and put them on fresh grass don't leave them in a big pile of manure keep it clean keep it neat don't let them get too overcrowded and take care of your birds don't let them get too hot and don't let them get too cold use common sense they're just like babies so folks I hope you learned a little bit about raising chickens today on the farm vlog there's lots of cool stuff to come here so be sure and subscribe click the little bell down there they'll notify you when I post a new video and pound that like button down below there'll be a link in the video description to my or Hatchery it's a link a custom link from Stoney Ridge farmer so click that link and go to Marr hatchery and check them out alright thanks a lot guys we'll see you next time on standing ridge farm I appreciate you and I hope you learned a little bit all right Pierce we've had some way suppose Denise Tony Reed Oh