Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (93 page)

Indoor confinement

Pasture confinement

Range feeding

The last two methods are sometimes grouped together as pasturing, a method favored by those of us who prefer our food to be produced as naturally as possible. Since the first two methods involve confinement and the last two involve
pasturing, the middle method, pasture confinement, bridges the gap between indoor confinement and the freedom to openly forage.

Indoor confinement is the preference of large commercial growers because it lets them maximize capacity in terms of capital investment and facilities. It is also favored by small-flock owners who don’t have much space for raising meat birds. It involves housing chickens on litter and taking them everything they eat.

Indoor confinement requires less land than the other two methods (all you need is a building) and less time (set up your facilities properly, and you should spend no more than a few minutes each day feeding, watering, and checking your birds). The goal is to get the most meat for the least cost by efficiently converting feed into meat.

The standard feed conversion ratio is 2:1 — each bird averages 2 pounds (1 kg) of feed for every 1 pound (0.5 kg) of weight it gains. To get a feed conversion ratio that high, you must raise a commercial strain developed for its distinct ability to eat and grow.

On an industrial scale, feed-conversion efficiency is improved by adding antibiotics to rations. No one is quite sure why it works, but some researchers speculate that antibiotics thin a bird’s intestinal walls and thereby improve nutrient absorption. While no detectable drug residues are legally allowed in commercially produced meat, in practice no one seems to be minding the store and inevitably some residue remains. Antibiotic residues in meat are harmful to humans for several reasons: they disturb the natural balance of microflora in our intestines, they can induce a serious reaction in those of us who are allergic to antibiotics, and they cause resistance to prescription drugs. But not all commercial producers use growth promoters. Like most small-scale flock owners, some producers rely on careful management and good sanitation for efficient feed conversion.

Even if your management is meticulous, you can’t raise broilers indoors for the same low cost you would pay at the grocery store. For starters, the cost of chicks by the dozen is much higher than the cost of buying by the thousands. The same holds true for buying feed by the bagful, rather than periodically having a truck roll in to fill your silo.

You won’t get the same high feed-conversion ratio, either, unless your facilities are designed to encourage feed consumption, right down to conveyor belts that keep feed moving to attract birds to peck. On a small scale, the best you can do to pique the flock’s interest in eating is to feed your birds often to stimulate their appetite.

Efficient feed conversion also means keeping housing at a temperature between 65 and 85°F (18 and 29°C), which entails providing supplemental heat or crowding birds enough for them to keep each other warm. If you give your meat birds more room than the minimums shown in the chart below, be prepared to either heat their housing or feed them longer to get them up to weight.

Another aspect of efficient feed conversion is controlled lighting. Compared to artificial light, natural light causes birds to be more active. As a result, they use up more calories and grow more slowly. Because birds in confinement have little else to do, when they’re not eating, they get bored and resort to feather picking. If you let your confined birds enjoy natural light through windows or screened doorways, you’ll have fewer picking problems by closing the openings to limit natural light to no more than 10 hours a day.

During the rest of the time, provide just enough light to let the birds find the feeders but not enough to inspire them to engage in other activities. Get chicks started eating and drinking under 60-watt bulbs, placed in reflectors 7 to 8 feet (2 to 2.5 m) above the floor. After 2 weeks switch to 15-watt bulbs. Allow one bulb-watt per 8 square feet (0.75 sq m) of living space.

The total number of light hours meat birds should get per day is a matter of debate. The trend in commercial production is to shorten daylight hours for chicks 2 to 14 days old. Shorter days give them less time to eat, slowing their growth rate and thereby reducing leg problems and other complications resulting from too-rapid growth. After the birds reach 2 weeks of age, light hours are increased to encourage them to eat and grow.

Raising broilers under continuous light is a bad idea, in any case, since they may panic, pile up, and smother if the power fails. To get the birds used to lights-out, turn lights off at least 1 hour during the night. Some growers contend that as little as 14 hours of light per day is enough for efficient growth. During hot weather, when chickens get lethargic, turning lights on in the morning and evening encourages them to eat while the temperature is cooler. Putting lights on a timer will save you the trouble of having to remember to flick the switch.

MINIMUM SPACE FORCONFINED MEATBIRDS

Since rapid growth characteristically causes weak legs, don’t provide roosts for your meat birds. Leg injuries can occur when heavy birds jump down from roosts. Perching can also cause blistered breasts and crooked breastbones. Injuries and blisters may also occur when heavy birds are housed on wire; wood; bare concrete; or packed, damp litter. Avoid these problems by housing confined meat birds on a soft bed of deep, dry litter.

Like indoor confinement, pasture confinement involves keeping broilers in a building, but this building is portable, is kept on range, and is moved daily. Pasture confinement is suitable for hybrid and purebred strains alike, although (as with indoor confinement) the former will grow more quickly than the latter. Furthermore, since Cornish broilers were developed for climate-controlled confinement, they won’t do well on pasture if the weather is much cooler than 65°F (18°C) or much warmer than 85°F (29°C), while other breeds have a much wider range of temperature tolerance.

The up side of pasture confinement is a slight reduction in feed costs, especially if you move the shelter first thing each day to encourage hungry birds to forage for an hour before feeding them their morning ration. On the down side, you need enough good pasture (or unsprayed lawn) to move the shelter daily, and without fail you must do it each day. As they reach harvest size, birds will graze plants faster and deposit a greater concentration of droppings, so they’ll have to be moved more often — at least twice a day — for the health of the broilers and to avoid burning the pasture with too much nitrogen-rich manure.

A good plan is to arrange your shelter rotation so the chickens don’t get moved farther into left field the bigger they get. Otherwise, you’ll end up hauling greater quantities of feed and water a longer distance, and have to transport all those pudgy broilers back to home base for butchering.

During the first few moves, the birds will be reluctant to follow their shelter, and if you’re not careful, they’ll pile up, and some may get hurt. After a few times, they learn to walk along when you move their floorless shelter. Don’t be tempted to try making the move easier by adding a wire floor so you can lift the birds along with the shelter. For one thing, adding the birds’ weight makes the whole shebang heavy and unwieldy. Furthermore, while their shelter is in motion, the birds tend to stabilize themselves by curling their toes around the wire, causing toes to get crushed by wire when you set the shelter back down.

The pioneers of modern small-scale commercial pasture confinement are Joel and Theresa Salatin of Swoope, Virginia, who describe their method in detail in their book
Pastured Poultry Profit$
(see Recommended Reading on
page 422
). The Salatins confine up to 100 broilers per 10 by 12 by 2 foot (3 by 3.5 by 0.6 m) pen made of chicken wire stapled to a pressure-treated wood frame and roofed with corrugated aluminum. Weather permitting, chicks may be moved from the brooder to the pen once they reach 2 weeks of age. For broilers to do well on pasture, they must begin foraging by the age of 25 days.

Using a homemade dolly, the Salatins move each pen daily, requiring a total of 5,000 square feet (465 sq m) of good grazing per pen per 40-day growing period.

Pasture confinement requires enough good range or unsprayed lawn to move the shelter to new ground once or twice a day.

The couple raises a commercial strain that reaches a butchering weight of 4 to 4½ pounds (1.8 to 2 kg) in 8 weeks, the same as they would if confined indoors. The management differences are basically twofold: feed costs are reduced, and because the birds spend so much time grazing, they have less time to pick at each other. The end result is meat that contains less fat and more omega-3s and other nutrients than confinement-fed broilers.