Our current philosophy on how we go about creating food for our table and possibly food for others, puts us in a position to hold a lot of birds in a small space and put them on new fresh grass every day.
Today we were able to put our cornish cross meat birds on pasture in their new home. Typically, you want to wait until they are about 3 weeks old to put them on pasture. But with our temperatures in the low to mid 90's, we don't have any problems with doing it a lot earlier.
(Sorry for the sideways pictures. Still trying to figure out how to send pictures from my phone.)
The chicks do have supplemental heat in case they need it. The black rectangle is a heater and shortly after I took this picture, they were and have been roaming all over the tractor already eating snippets of grass and are not cold. They still like to take a nap all huddled up, but ultimately I believe they like their new domain. The blue tarp is temporary, as the white tarps have been shipped, yet not arrived. Hoping for those in the next couple of days.
The ducks aren't much different. These are pekin ducks and have acclimated just fine to their new house as well. We have another large John Suscovich tractor we are building for them as well, it's about 80% complete at this time.
Of course, we put our quail in tractors as well. You can read about that here: https://steempeak.com/homesteading/@squareonefarms/pasture-raising-quail
All in all, we really like this setup for our birds. So far, we seem to see very healthy and happy birds. We are increasing the fertility and improving our soil. And of course the product, whether meat or eggs, that these birds produce are so much more healthy than a 100% commercial feed diet. Absolutely everything about this setup has worked out according to plan so far. We will have a lot more knowledge about it by the end of the summer, but for now, this is how we intend to raise almost all of our birds.
We do have another setup for some other chickens and we use it to make our chickens clear, till and fertilize future garden/growing spots. It's called the Chickshaw 2.0, made famous by Justin Rhodes. We use it to collect eggs, house the birds and surround it with poultry netting in a very specific spot. You can watch me build it below.
