Monday, March 28, 2011

When Projects Fail...and Succeed

When just about all projects on the farm are created and built on-site, it is only inevitable that something is going to fail.  It is also inevitable "Murphy's Law" will take effect and the failure will come at the absolute worse time.  Well, we beat Murphy this go-round!  Matt created some new brooders for our sebrights, who have a problem on dying in the brooder in the barn and of making the whole house smell like chicken when kept in the brooder in the livingroom. 



The temperature in the brooder held steady all weekend, so Matt put all our sebright chicks into them Sunday night.  Monday I came home from work and just happened to glance into the sunroom and towards the brooder.  It appeared all the chicks were piled on one end, so I went to check it out.  The sunroom was HOT (it has been cold and rainy all weekend).  The brooder was literally dripping condensation like rain.  And half the sebrights were dead.  The other half were hanging on for dear life.  They were all soaked, much like a newly hatched chick.  They also all had large air-pocket looking bubbles coming off their chests, with larger bubbles on the dead chicks.  I moved the live chicks back into the brooder in the livingroom, where we have lost a couple more but the rest seem to be drying out and pulling through.  Sebrights are hard to raise.  I am considering raising our price from $8-10/chick to $800-1,000 per chick!!! 


Even though the new brooder may not have gotten the job done, the new moveable rabbit coops sure did.  We moved our two bred blue does into a moveable coop as an experiment to see how well the coops prevented predators and how their litters hold up raised on pasture.  Well, a dog got to the coop and completely demolished it, but the rabbits were safe, trapped in their nest boxes by the smashed wiring.  One was missing a little fur on the back of her kneck and they were both wet from the rain, but they got moved back to the barn and both are healthy and happy, ready to relive the tale to their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandrabbits.



RIP Sebrights Lost in the Sunroom Scare of '11

1 comment:

  1. Very disappointing. It certainly goes to show that raising livestock/farm animals can be very challenging. Getting food on the table is hard work!
    www.cdycattle.blogspot.com

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