Chicken Farm Photos

There are those that are curious as to what a chicken farm looks like. That way they can have a picture in their mind of where we live and better understand the chicken farm stories. I want to try to use this blog to make a little picture story for you.

 

The first picture is looking down from our house towards the farm. You can see the shed/office on 

the right side. That is a small office building attached to the shed where we keep our John Deere tractor and tractor accessories like mower, blower, spreader, trailer. All those things that end in -er. On the left you see three of the six chicken houses we have. They are 40 feet wide and 500 feet long. Each one holds about 22,000 chickens. In this picture the doors are open because it is between flocks and we are cleaning it out and getting it set up for the next flock.

In the second picture you see inside the chicken house after we have cleaned it out, had pine shavings spread on the floor, laid down paper under the feed bowls, and dropped down the feed bowls and outside drinker lines. This is my favorite time of the flock. The houses smell very nice with all the pine shavings on the floor, and it is nice and level, and no worry about stepping on a chicken. Currently we are between flocks, but are still in the process of having the litter removed. After that I blow all the dust and cobwebs out of the house with a high powered blower that runs off the power from the tractor. Next, I call the shavings people and they back a truck into the house and drive it out, spreading shavings pretty evenly all over the floor. 

The next step is for the company to come and deliver the baby chicks to us. A large heated tuck comes filled with baskets of chicks. Each basket has 100 chicks in it. They take them off the truck and slide them onto our trailer. They put how ever many chicks will go into one house on the trailer and then we back the trailer into the house. Once in, the tractor driver, currently my dad, drives out of the house very slowly. 

As he drives forward the two guys who drove the truck to the farm and myself dump the chickens out of the basket onto the floor. There are a lot of baskets to dump out, so the tractor never stops going forward towards the door, and we never stop dumping the chickens onto the floor as quickly as we can. If the tractor stops it would allow the chicks to run under the wheels, so we can't stop. The chicks are dropped right next to the food, and once the trailer is out of the house drinker lines are lowered. There are four lines of drinkers and two lines of food. Also notice that between the bowls are piles of food.  For the first week the food gets dropped into the bowls and onto the floor twice a day. This allows all the birds to have access to food to get off to a good start. After the week is over the food only goes into the bowls to reduce waste. The chicks are big enough at that point to eat from the bowls. 

In this picture the chicks have grown. They are about five weeks old here. I can tell that because they are almost through molting. They have changed color from the cute yellow baby chicks into the white feathers of the adult chicken. If you look closer you may be able to see some of them still have yellow heads, which tells me they are not quite there yet. Usually around six weeks the yellow is completely gone. 

This picture shows the length of the house. At five weeks there is still plenty of room on the floor for them to move around. By the time they are eight and nine weeks old the floor is white from one end to the other and walking through the house is practically impossible, but still necessary.  The bight light at the end of the house comes from large tunnel fans which suck the air through the house. 

Finally, after about 63 days the chickens have grown to hopefully near an average of 8 pounds. I then get scheduled for a pick up. The company comes to the farm with two crews of workers, two fork lifts, and an unending flow of tractor trailers to carry the birds away. The crews go in and pick up the chickens by hand, placing them into cages which the fork lifts pick up when they are full and load onto the trailers. They work about four hours per house to empty about 21,000 chickens out. The crews typically do two houses and then are replaced by another crew. I believe a crew that goes into one house is about 8 people. So each guy in the crew picks up around 2,600 eight pound chickens and puts it in a cage. I would not want the job. 

They take them away, weight them, and process them. After that they give me an estimate for how many days I have before they bring my new chicks, and I get back to work cleaning the houses out and setting them up again. So that is a tour of our farm. 

Chicken Farm Photos

There are those that are curious as to what a chicken farm looks like. That way they can have a picture in their mind of where we live and better understand the chicken farm stories. I want to try to use this blog to make a little picture story for you.

The first picture is looking down from our house towards the farm. You can see the shed/office on 

the right side. That is a small office building attached to the shed where we keep our John Deere tractor and tractor accessories like mower, blower, spreader, trailer. All those things that end in -er. On the left you see three of the six chicken houses we have. They are 40 feet wide and 500 feet long. Each one holds about 22,000 chickens. In this picture the doors are open because it is between flocks and we are cleaning it out and getting it set up for the next flock.

In the second picture you see inside the chicken house after we have cleaned it out, had pine shavings spread on the floor, laid down paper under the feed bowls, and dropped down the feed bowls and outside drinker lines. This is my favorite time of the flock. The houses smell very nice with all the pine shavings on the floor, and it is nice and level, and no worry about stepping on a chicken. Currently we are between flocks, but are still in the process of having the litter removed. After that I blow all the dust and cobwebs out of the house with a high powered blower that runs off the power from the tractor. Next, I call the shavings people and they back a truck into the house and drive it out, spreading shavings pretty evenly all over the floor. 

The next step is for the company to come and deliver the baby chicks to us. A large heated tuck comes filled with baskets of chicks. Each basket has 100 chicks in it. They take them off the truck and slide them onto our trailer. They put how ever many chicks will go into one house on the trailer and then we back the trailer into the house. Once in, the tractor driver, currently my dad, drives out of the house very slowly. 

As he drives forward the two guys who drove the truck to the farm and myself dump the chickens out of the basket onto the floor. There are a lot of baskets to dump out, so the tractor never stops going forward towards the door, and we never stop dumping the chickens onto the floor as quickly as we can. If the tractor stops it would allow the chicks to run under the wheels, so we can't stop. The chicks are dropped right next to the food, and once the trailer is out of the house drinker lines are lowered. There are four lines of drinkers and two lines of food. Also notice that between the bowls are piles of food.  For the first week the food gets dropped into the bowls and onto the floor twice a day. This allows all the birds to have access to food to get off to a good start. After the week is over the food only goes into the bowls to reduce waste. The chicks are big enough at that point to eat from the bowls. 

In this picture the chicks have grown. They are about five weeks old here. I can tell that because they are almost through molting. They have changed color from the cute yellow baby chicks into the white feathers of the adult chicken. If you look closer you may be able to see some of them still have yellow heads, which tells me they are not quite there yet. Usually around six weeks the yellow is completely gone. 

This picture shows the length of the house. At five weeks there is still plenty of room on the floor for them to move around. By the time they are eight and nine weeks old the floor is white from one end to the other and walking through the house is practically impossible, but still necessary.  The bight light at the end of the house comes from large tunnel fans which suck the air through the house. 

Finally, after about 63 days the chickens have grown to hopefully near an average of 8 pounds. I then get scheduled for a pick up. The company comes to the farm with two crews of workers, two fork lifts, and an unending flow of tractor trailers to carry the birds away. The crews go in and pick up the chickens by hand, placing them into cages which the fork lifts pick up when they are full and load onto the trailers. They work about four hours per house to empty about 21,000 chickens out. The crews typically do two houses and then are replaced by another crew. I believe a crew that goes into one house is about 8 people. So each guy in the crew picks up around 2,600 eight pound chickens and puts it in a cage. I would not want the job. 

They take them away, weight them, and process them. After that they give me an estimate for how many days I have before they bring my new chicks, and I get back to work cleaning the houses out and setting them up again. So that is a tour of our farm. 

Life with Q

Being a baby has its good side and its bad side. The bad side, I suppose would be trying to get these dim witted beings called parents to figure out what it is you need so you can stop crying. As parents, sometimes it is easy to figure out the reason for the whimpering, or the soft crying, or even the screaming. Other times it is just a Hilary Clinton type throw everything including the kitchen sink at it debacle. We scramble to try to feed her, rock her, change her, sing to her, and amuse her to make it stop. Sometimes you guess right and the screaming subsides, and other times you keep trying until she just gives up or passes gas. The good news for us is that "this too shall pass".

On the flip side I think being a baby has its great moments. Well, I think so since I am so jealous of her life style at the moment. It reminds me of myself on summer vacations during high school. Eat, sleep, poop, and a little play time to break up the monotony when you can't sleep.

Two days a week I get the opportunity to take care of Q all by myself for the day. If you are a husband who has to take care of his child, be advised that calling it baby-sitting can be detrimental to your marital relationship. I luckily dodged that bullet because the first time I had to define to another person what it was I was doing I luckily said I was taking care of the baby. When L said," I am glad you are not one of those guys that thinks it's babysitting when it is their own child." I knew that saying 'baby-sitting' would be a bad thing. See, guys are capable of learning. That is not the only thing I have learned. In fact I learned something just today.

Most days that I take care of the baby my wife, L, comes home and notices that I have used bottles, but I have not cleaned any bottles. Even after several days of comments on this she still failed to come home and see any bottles washed. Yes, I know you are thinking that is laziness on my part, and that probably is a little at play, but really I have gone there and looked at them with intentions to wash some. The problem arises when I would try to figure out how I would get my normal sized man hand into that tiny baby sized bottle opening to wash it no answers came to mind. So today when she asked me to wash them I just came out and told her I'm just not sure how that is done. The look she gave me was one of not being sure whether or not to believe that I am really that slow. Turns out I really am. Luckily I have a wonderful and patient wife who simply dug out the special tools required for the job. Who would have thought that there were special brushes for bottles, and for the nipple parts of the bottle? Well, now I know. Bottle cleaning lesson learned, and I will even wash the bottles today. No, don't laugh, seriously I will.

I also learned about diapers. The whole diaper thing was new to me when we had T. I wasn't sure about it, but in truth I did make an agreement with L that when she had a baby I would do my share of diaper changes. Like most guys, I was hoping my share would be on those days when no one else was around. (And possibly no one was within driving distance from the house, or at least a short airline flight.) Luckily for me we had a nurse at the hospital when T was born who didn't feel I had the right to stand around while the baby needed changed and my wife was in bed. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me over for the brief course in cleaning a baby bottom and applying a diaper. I seriously thank her for that forwardness. Sure, diapers tend to smell bad at times, but not as bad as one might think. It is just another type of bonding moment with your child that makes you a little closer to them. When I put Q on the changing table she looks up at me and smiles. Sometimes she even tries talking to me. We talk, and laugh and when we are done with the unpleasantness of cleaning her bottom we can stay there and lock eyes and have imaginary conversations. I imagine her babbling is actual words, and I wait for her to pause so I can talk and answer her question. Then I pick her up, all clean and fresh smelling and give her a kiss and a hug and carry her back out to the living room to continue her routine of eating, sleeping and pooping.

With T we used plastic disposable diapers, and I got used to that fairly easily. Then L wanted to change things again and use cloth diapers this time with Q. At first, I was not on board. I had in mind the type that my mom had to use in the 60's with a diaper cleaning service, safety pins, and the whole hassle. My loving and patient wife went ahead and explained to me how things work in the 21st century. You wouldn't believe it. They now make cloth diapers that are as easy to use as disposable diapers. The bonus is you don't have to feel so guilty every time people talk about the diapers that are overfilling our landfills. With the new cloth diapers they look like a disposable. They have the same shape, and even have velcro side tabs that you just wrap around the baby and fasten. It turns out that it is so easy to use that even I can do it. (If you want more information about these diapers you can probably find some on L's website (girl in ga). I have a link to it on the left sidebar.)

To summarize; Q gets to sleep a lot, gets changed frequently into a clean cloth diaper, and drinks milk often from clean bottles that are cleaned with special brushes that I now know how to find and how to use. I, her happy and slightly slow witted father, is willing to learn new things in order to be a better dad and to keep her happy, fed and clean. All in all, I would say things are working out well and I am glad to be able to spend these two days a week with my baby.

Life with Q

Being a baby has its good side and its bad side. The bad side, I suppose would be trying to get these dim witted beings called parents to figure out what it is you need so you can stop crying. As parents, sometimes it is easy to figure out the reason for the whimpering, or the soft crying, or even the screaming. Other times it is just a Hilary Clinton type throw everything including the kitchen sink at it debacle. We scramble to try to feed her, rock her, change her, sing to her, and amuse her to make it stop. Sometimes you guess right and the screaming subsides, and other times you keep trying until she just gives up or passes gas. The good news for us is that "this too shall pass".

On the flip side I think being a baby has its great moments. Well, I think so since I am so jealous of her life style at the moment. It reminds me of myself on summer vacations during high school. Eat, sleep, poop, and a little play time to break up the monotony when you can't sleep.

Two days a week I get the opportunity to take care of Q all by myself for the day. If you are a husband who has to take care of his child, be advised that calling it baby-sitting can be detrimental to your marital relationship. I luckily dodged that bullet because the first time I had to define to another person what it was I was doing I luckily said I was taking care of the baby. When L said," I am glad you are not one of those guys that thinks it's babysitting when it is their own child." I knew that saying 'baby-sitting' would be a bad thing. See, guys are capable of learning. That is not the only thing I have learned. In fact I learned something just today.

Most days that I take care of the baby my wife, L, comes home and notices that I have used bottles, but I have not cleaned any bottles. Even after several days of comments on this she still failed to come home and see any bottles washed. Yes, I know you are thinking that is laziness on my part, and that probably is a little at play, but really I have gone there and looked at them with intentions to wash some. The problem arises when I would try to figure out how I would get my normal sized man hand into that tiny baby sized bottle opening to wash it no answers came to mind. So today when she asked me to wash them I just came out and told her I'm just not sure how that is done. The look she gave me was one of not being sure whether or not to believe that I am really that slow. Turns out I really am. Luckily I have a wonderful and patient wife who simply dug out the special tools required for the job. Who would have thought that there were special brushes for bottles, and for the nipple parts of the bottle? Well, now I know. Bottle cleaning lesson learned, and I will even wash the bottles today. No, don't laugh, seriously I will.

I also learned about diapers. The whole diaper thing was new to me when we had T. I wasn't sure about it, but in truth I did make an agreement with L that when she had a baby I would do my share of diaper changes. Like most guys, I was hoping my share would be on those days when no one else was around. (And possibly no one was within driving distance from the house, or at least a short airline flight.) Luckily for me we had a nurse at the hospital when T was born who didn't feel I had the right to stand around while the baby needed changed and my wife was in bed. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me over for the brief course in cleaning a baby bottom and applying a diaper. I seriously thank her for that forwardness. Sure, diapers tend to smell bad at times, but not as bad as one might think. It is just another type of bonding moment with your child that makes you a little closer to them. When I put Q on the changing table she looks up at me and smiles. Sometimes she even tries talking to me. We talk, and laugh and when we are done with the unpleasantness of cleaning her bottom we can stay there and lock eyes and have imaginary conversations. I imagine her babbling is actual words, and I wait for her to pause so I can talk and answer her question. Then I pick her up, all clean and fresh smelling and give her a kiss and a hug and carry her back out to the living room to continue her routine of eating, sleeping and pooping.

With T we used plastic disposable diapers, and I got used to that fairly easily. Then L wanted to change things again and use cloth diapers this time with Q. At first, I was not on board. I had in mind the type that my mom had to use in the 60's with a diaper cleaning service, safety pins, and the whole hassle. My loving and patient wife went ahead and explained to me how things work in the 21st century. You wouldn't believe it. They now make cloth diapers that are as easy to use as disposable diapers. The bonus is you don't have to feel so guilty every time people talk about the diapers that are overfilling our landfills. With the new cloth diapers they look like a disposable. They have the same shape, and even have velcro side tabs that you just wrap around the baby and fasten. It turns out that it is so easy to use that even I can do it. (If you want more information about these diapers you can probably find some on L's website (girl in ga). I have a link to it on the left sidebar.)

To summarize; Q gets to sleep a lot, gets changed frequently into a clean cloth diaper, and drinks milk often from clean bottles that are cleaned with special brushes that I now know how to find and how to use. I, her happy and slightly slow witted father, is willing to learn new things in order to be a better dad and to keep her happy, fed and clean. All in all, I would say things are working out well and I am glad to be able to spend these two days a week with my baby.

Ready, Set, GO!

I know it seems that way, but not all of my blogs will be related to the bathroom. I do notice that it does end up being a funny place when a toddler is around. I'll make this one brief.
So, I its labor day and we are about to eat lunch soon. I figure it is a good opportunity to go to the bathroom quickly and wash my hands before we eat. I head into the guest bathroom, which is also T's bathroom. I start to do my business when in runs T. He sees me going, and decided he wanted to go to. He looks at me and states,"I can beat your pee! Keep going daddy!" I have never seen him get his shorts and underwear down so quickly. He drops his drawers and starts to go. Then he finished going. Apparently he was right, 'he beat my pee', since I was still going. Only three and already beat me at something.