Tips To Share What We Learned From Raising 60 Chickens

Hallelujah, hey Mark, heads up, they call me the goat guy here and this is my shop at Ripple Ranch and we like to try to be helpful and kind to the agricultural world and the world of life studies, ranching, agriculture and all that. fun stuff and farmer people of Ranchi and my specialty is goats so if you need to learn something about goats you can find it on patgoats.com make sure you go there we have all kinds of free downloads download that stuff and then I will be on contact me and I will help you so I wanted to talk today because people keep asking me about the vacuum sealer and how the BL Defelders are doing.

We actually raised a lot of meat

chickens

this 60 year and we have a lot of grasshoppers here on the ranch and we wanted to control the grasshoppers, feed the

chickens

grasshoppers to keep the grasshoppers from eating the goats' forage and then we have something else called Mormon cricket which is just a big nasty cricket that we also wanted to control with things like guinea fowl and meat. chickens, so now that the experiment is over, I want to

share

with you a lot of

what

we

learned

and I think this will potentially help guide you in decisions you might make in this same field in the future.

Number one is chicken food. so expensive that if you have to feed chickens, you're not actually going to save much money

raising

chickens for meat instead of going to the grocery store, if you're buying junk, you know, a whole chicken at Walmart, I don't know. I think you can raise a chicken for as cheaply as you can buy it and resell it. Is incredible. I still think they're making eight or nine dollars for a whole chicken right now and there's just no way you can use the food and feed. a chicken and raise it and I still only have eight or nine dollars in gross costs.

That's not including paying yourself for time and energy, so in my opinion

raising

chickens is more about trying to find a bulk feed option to mitigate that or finding a natural feed option like grasshoppers or just the personal satisfaction that you grew your own food, that you know how it was raised and that's the reason we did it primarily, we had a lot of parts, but I'll do this again just because I ate a chicken. that we raised and we know not only how he was raised with the intention of love, kindness and consideration and then killed with that, it was really beautiful, the people that we slaughtered, we all prayed, you know, before we killed the chickens that we held them with reverence and respect and you know intention matters, animals hold energy in their body and then that energy is transferred to us when we consume it and you know if they are never revered throughout their life or held with any kind of Respect , I believe that the energy in our body appears, so it is enough for me to do that.

We ended up with a raw cost of about 12 fish to raise chickens per bird. And then that didn't include or it did include like We're also in the process of trying to put the equipment together, but things like Pluckers to do it realistically, you need the plucker, you need the big pot to boil them to scald them, you need those things or you just don't go to make any kind of bulk and peel them in my opinion is a big mistake because then you lose one of the most important parts of raising your own chicken, which is having the fat that's all in the skin, the other thing is this vacuum sealer that people keep. wondering about it because I posted photos.

It makes one whole chicken, so you can see it's a frozen whole chicken that we put in the vacuum sealer and this vacuum sealer is called vac Master. It's really old-fashioned equipment. I don't know how old this one is. I bought it used for 500 dollars, they cost between two and three thousand dollars new, they are expensive, very expensive and the big ones cost like five thousand dollars and this one is something like that. Don't know. You know, maybe they're a third of the way there, they make big ones that are big, like cabinets and stuff, and you have to change the oil and stuff, I mean, it's legit, it's got a motor, it makes a lot of noise, this thing. from here it has to It weighs 200 and probably 25 pounds, so we keep it here and we plug it in, we use it here, we'll carry it instead of us because it's too heavy to take two people to carry and it's really cumbersome.

So, but it works amazing on all levels and I've had it for years, if you can buy them that would probably be the way, so the other thing I want to talk about is the difference in breeds of chickens, so I went with two races. I've bred Red Rangers before. I like them. Unlike the Cornish crossing. Now Cornish crosses are so cowardly manufactured by hybridization. So bad that they gained weight so fast that they can't walk and you know they gain weight. and their joints and legs stick out to the sides and half of them limp, some of them can still walk as they grow, but to me it's really like one somehow it's like one and I'm not saying it. with judgment if you grow corn I'm not judging you at all, but to see the animal try to exist in the skin that we put it in, he can't um and it's disconcerting to see that so Cornish crosses yes They are sensitive to having a more natural bird May you have a better quality of life until you die.

The Cornish cross is pretty hard to get because they literally can't walk and if they overeat so much when they're babies they get heart attacks and we literally know that they were bred to try to kill them at about eight weeks and eight to nine weeks and that it's just not natural, so the closest hybrid to that is still a functional chicken, but we did have a couple of lame ones. not bad, but we had a couple of lame ones, the Red Rangers and the Red Rangers, we hoped they would be more like their name and eat our grasshoppers, but they never realized they were too dumb.

We would let them go out to the grass. full of grasshoppers and they would just hang on the edges and wait to be fed again. We actually spent some time trying to teach them to walk into the field and I still wonder if there is more we can do when we do it. they are younger to teach them how to be a chicken and go out and start looking for grasshoppers and do that and I think we could if we really worked on it so I still feel like that experiment is not finished but the red Rangers in terms of body mass They are more than

what

we are used to buying a chicken at a grocery store compared to the BL Defelders.

Now I'm disappointed, so let's talk about temperament first and then talk. meat so temperament of the beelda felders they are a legit chicken they have long legs they grow fast they are super voracious a grasshopper doesn't stand a chance within 100 yards they cleared all of our lower seven acres of every mormon cricket and we don't There are no grasshoppers you usually walk in this time of year and you have a raft of grasshoppers flying anywhere between them and the guineas. We don't have any, so they did an amazing job cleaning up the grasshoppers and the Mormon crickets, but what they didn't do was grow a very nice chicken breast, so in comparison, that's the comparison, so they had a very narrow breast and their fat was super yellow, almost disgusting to look at, yellow, good tasting, but the difference of a Felder beelda is exactly the difference in the temperament of the bellefellers. they're much more like a wild bird, they really are, they're, the reason people like them and the reason I was drawn to them is they're a bird that will do it all, they'll lay eggs, they'll hatch. a meat bird and they will raise chicks for you so I liked the fact that we would have some builders raising chicks because then it would allow me to kill 10 at a time instead of 60 and have this ongoing task and we can still decide that.

Bldfelders because of that component, the fact that they eat grasshoppers, the fact that they will serve multiple purposes and the fact that they will raise chicks for us that we can then kill, that can make the decision for us to go with them. but in terms of a bird that eats, the Red Rangers have no questions, they have a big, they have big meaty legs, they have the legs on the beelda. The felts looked a lot like a pheasant or, uh, not a chucker because they weren't like. that but they are like a more sensual pheasant the difference between a wild turkey and a domestic turkey more sinewy darker meat more chewy you don't know again we have trained ourselves as humans to eat babies and hybridized animals designed for flavor and to please the palate human, we have become a little soft in what we like, but I have to say that I like the Red Rangers more, if I could teach the Red Rangers how to eat grasshoppers, there is no doubt that I would choose.

There are benefits to both and I wanted you to see the results of our experiment and what we did and also if you are going to try to raise anything more than 20 chickens and you don't have access to a plucker, an automatic plucker and a necessary to rent one, borrow one, or pay someone to let you use theirs or work with them like we did. In fact, we hired a couple to teach us how to do the entire process. I've done it before and I know what I'm doing, but I really wanted to see how an expert did it and it was really valuable to watch the little nuances of speed, they were fast and efficient and then we went home. and I packaged them up and did all this and this is another part of keeping chickens really good.

Now remember that many people don't understand what it means to keep meat in the freezer. Keeping meat in the freezer is not about creating thickness around what is in the freezer. it's about creating a lack of oxygen because it's oxygen that creates freezer burn, so when you suck all the oxygen out of the bag, there's no room for freezer burn to occur on the chicken, so you take a chicken that would normally last in the freezer six months to a year to be three to five years now. I would never keep this there for three to five years and I would say it might be a bit long.

I'd say in my experience it's one to three years, but it's still double or triple the time and you won't get freezer burn, so vacuum sealers are essential. I got tired of the crappy you know the little countertop models but I understand that we can only afford what we can afford and yeah, it's not like they work decently but they definitely work better so I hope you find it useful. Don't forget that we are launching the life study movement where we will start organizing seminars here at the ranch and bringing in experts. about things like chickens and all that, and if you like these types of videos, click to subscribe, leave us a comment and let us know if you want to see more things like this, so I hope you find it useful.

Mark Morkey signs off.