shaz68 wrote:
Wow, what a great setup!
So how many would you fit into each compartment, and at what age would they need to be moved out of here? Is that bar going right across the front for food? How easy is it to clean?
You can hypothetically fit 50 or 60 to each compartment, but we breed our fowls in much smaller weekly batches of anything from 10 to 25 because we can then stagger them to show.
We're not commercial breeders who sell an overabundance of chicks.
We move them out when they have good wing feathering, approximately four weeks, and they then transfer to a large pallet sized crate with a lamp for comfort.
The bar across the centre is for bulk feed as they get older. When they are up to five days old we feed them in very tiny little containers and for the first three days of life, plus we add a separate little waterer with their CRD/Vitamin mix.
Cleaning is simple. Inside are triple mats which filter the droppings to a tray below. The chicks can't get to the tray as it's under the floor of each tier. When the chicks are finished in the tier, we just remove the mats and the tray, clean the tier, the mats and the tray with a good disinfectant and start again.