Pullet Pasture Move Out & Late Summer Grazing & Rooting!
The biggest accomplishment of the week was moving the rest of the young pullets out to their pasture coop!
And a few years of rotating in one field, we moved this coop back to a section of our original acreage that hasn’t had chickens rotated on it since 2021. That field will rest some chicken manure for about two years and then we’ll evaluate if we move it back to that field for the next Flock 2!
We raise our hens from day old chicks. They start in brooder stalls in the barn with heat lamps (this flock came in late February) and then at about 4-5 weeks old, we move them into a hoophouse with deep litter bedding where they can continue growing to full size, before moving out to pasture.
By the time they start laying, they get their wits about them a little better when it comes to avoiding aerial predators.
Unfortunately, it seems that every flock catches on at different rates to laying in their nesting boxes, so while we have no doubt that they’ll eventually figure it out, currently it’s an Easter egg hunt collecting eggs around the pasture and under the coop every day!
As more and more of the hens start laying, we will have our pullet eggs on sale. The more dozens you buy, the better deal it is! And it won’t take long until their eggs get bigger and they settle into laying mostly larges and extra larges. And they should be up to full egg production and bigger eggs by the time the two older flocks decline in production because of their annual molt and the decreasing daylight.
The cattle and goats are doing their thing with the thick late summer forage. We had to install one more section of rebar posts to divide the field the cattle are in this week into three full sections, so they stayed in the first section a little longer than usual, with some supplemental feed.
We’re aiming to start seeding rye grass and other cool season annuals in early October, so we’re fine with them knocking down the area pretty hard.
And the little calf from the big white cow is doing great and figuring out how to find the shade!
Meanwhile the goats have access to two fields — one that the cattle just left last week and it pretty well picked over and one that was recently bush hogged. So in that one, there’s lots of new growth of morning glory, blackberry and grasses they love.
And the sows seem to be loving life in the new section of woods! The dominant spotted one always hogs the water trough, even if only half her body can fit it in now!
When they aren’t laying around, they are hard at work rooting up the cogon grass we are relying on them to help eradicate and they’ve got plenty of shade and pine trunks to scratch on. Pretty ideal pig life!