Broiler Chickens

We had 40 broiler chickens arrive at the end of March here at the little farm. After 9 weeks,  we had 36 that made it to the slaughter date.  Our max dressed chicken was 9lbs and the smallest 6lbs 14oz. I calculated the cost per lb of chicken to be $1.39/lb. I figure I can lower it to around $1.09/lb when I get another round of broilers in the fall. I am also not going to get any more than 20 broilers, processing 36 broilers took around 8 hours.

Day old chicks in the brooder

4 week old chicks, time to get outside

8 week old broilers

8 week old broilers

We tried a couple of things while raising them this time.

• Invested into electric poultry netting
• Brooder nipple waters while raising them as chicks
• Bulk poultry feed from Leland Mills

I will speak, in more detail, about each of these below 

Electric Poultry Netting

After the dog attack,one day before slaughter date, last year that wiped out 80% of my broilers we were determined to defend our investment. We purchased a Premier 1 PoultryNet Plus 12/48/3 electric poultry netting. I deployed it 5 weeks with a solar powered energizer when they were big enough to not fit thru the netting. I was extremely happy with the setup and it kept away all predators. All in all I would highly recommend it.

Electric netting deployed around the broiler coop

Brooder Nipple Waterers
I ordered a four of these small brooder nipple waterers. They worked out great.  If you have ever hated  cleaning out the wood chips, poop, and feathers from those small mason jar waterers every 6 hours you would love these waters. I highly recommend them. In fact, I plan on expanding nipple waterers to the whole flock soon.

Bulk Poultry Feed

We are luckly enough to have a great feed mill around 20 miles away, Leland Mill.  If you provide your own container, we put ours in 35 gallon galvanized cans, you can get 100lbs of 24% crude protein broiler mash feed for $20.35. Each can carried up to 200lbs of feed. This is about the max weight that I can move around the farm by myself without the tractor.  We got a total of 850lbs of feed for broilers from here.  It really helped lower the cost of  raising the broilers.  I highly Leland Mill for bulk feed.

Full 35 gallon cans

All in all, it was a good experience. We learned a lot and have a bunch of delicious fresh farm raised chicken. I can't eat the factory farm raised chicken anymore, it has no taste.

GARLIC AND SHALLOTS

I love this time of year.  The feeling of Winter slowly thawing and the garlic and the shallots breaking their dormancy. That means that Spring is just around the corner.

Next Saturday, is February's Farm Day around here and that means we're  building some chicken brooders and grow out coops. We have 40 broiler chickens arriving in about 3 weeks. It will be the largest single chicken brooding we have ever done here. We are looking forward too it!

It has been a long time...

WOW! It has been a while since I last updated.  A lot of projects were completed in 2016.

• Grass in the front and portions of the backyard. The kids love it.
• New chicken coop(still needs paint and some finishing touches)
• Turkey pen/enclosed breeding pen.
• Raised and slaughted some chicken broilers (qty 15).
• Raised and slaughtered some turkeys (qty 8).
• Leveled and planted seed in the future pasture.

My improvement goals for 2017 are as follows:

• Raise a majority of of our own poultry meat that we consume.
• Put fruit and nut trees in the orchard area.
• Fence in the pasture area.
• Use the pasture for supplement feeding for our poultry.
• Redo the composting area.
• Add grains to the garden area.
• Finish painting the new chicken coop.
• Design and build brooder/grow out/laying coops(qty 2).
• Design and build a chicken tractor for use on the pasture.

I will do better on keeping this updated; hopefully, the updates will be on progress of the 2017 improvement projects.

Chicken Coop Sensor

Well, the soil sensors are taking a little bit of a back seat on this post.  What we did was use some of the guts of the soil sensor to help monitor temperature and humidity inside the chicken coop. The 3D printed enclosure is 3 pieces. The coop side round boss can be changed out to accommodate different wall coup thicknesses, i.e. longer for thicker wall, etc... Of course it is solar powered and I tried to keep the installation of it as simple as possible.

• A Drill
• 2" Hole Saw
• A qty of 4, #6 X 3/4" wood screws

Figure 1:  Sensor and US quarter for scale

Figure 2: Another view

Figure 3: Coop side showing DHT22 sensor

Figure 4: Isometric coop side view

Installation was a breeze..... no running wires. Just use the hole saw to create the hole and screw in the 4 wood screws to attach the unit to the chicken coop.

Figure 5: Attached chicken coop sensor

Figure 6: Coop side 

It is now up on Thingspeak right now, https://thingspeak.com/channels/48131

So, if you get bored take a look.

Improvements to make to the sensor.

• A HTU21d to measure ambient temp and relative humidity OUTSIDE of the coop.
• Enlarge clearence holes to a #6 woodscrew passes easier though it.
• Dust cover to help partially enclose the DHT22 from dust, etc...
• Add ammonia sensor

 I need to give a quick garden update. The peppers did great this year as well as the tomatoes. However, the watermelon did so-so this year. The garlic and the shallots will need to be planted soon. I can't wait; I love planting those.

Mother Node PCB and the Garden

Well,  Mother Node Rev 0C(the gateway for all of the other nodes in the garden) is completed and functional. We are chasing a few bugs but they appear to be minor coding issues.  The picture below shows Rev 0B(breadboard with RTC) on the left and Rev 0C(PCB board) on the right. Next up is the case for the Mother Node.

Figure 1: Mother Node comparison

We are working on getting the Mother Node to talk to Thingspeak to post the gathered garden node data. See www.thingspeak.com for more info about Thingspeak IoT open data platform. 

In the garden the randomized watermelon cultivar trial is going well.  3 varieties were planted:

• Crimson Sweet
• Moon & Stars
• Navajo Winter

Through just simple limited observational data, the Navajo Winter is growing superior to both the Crimson Sweet and Moon & Stars.  The Navajo Winter emerges earlier and is more prolific. 

Figure 2: Navajo Winter

However, there are other factors that go into the overall evaluation. We'll see how the disease resistance and tastes is of the final product. I will do a final write up of the watermelon trial at the end of the season.

On the pepper front. Things are going great for Anaheim, Hungarian Hot Wax, Scottish Bonnet, C5 Purple Lilac, & California Wonder. However, things are not doing well for the Peach Habenero and Ghost Pepper. Those two peppers have minimal flowering and no viable peppers....... so far.  I am still trying to diagnose what is causing the lack of peppers with those cultivars

Figure 3: Anaheim pepper

Some random Anaheim, Hungarian Hot Wax and C5 peppers

The 50ft row of peas did wonderful this year. Over 40lbs of Sugar Snap peas were harvested and consumed. I am definitely going to plant multiple succession rows next year. I will change the trellis system from Jute twine to simple panel fencing next year. The jute twine simply took too long to setup and gave marginal results as a trellis(relaxed more than expected and higher maintenance).

Figure 5: Picking peas

The garlic went well. We had a input to output ratio of 1:6. Meaning for every 1lbf of garlic planted we got 6lbf at the end of harvest. Next, I need to grade(fancy talk for sizing) the garlic. I am wondering if the distribution of sizes will be Gaussian? We will see.

Figure 6: Duganski garlic dried and ready for grading

Well, that is it for now.

SMD and Garlic

The SMD versiom is here and the components populated, see the picture below to show the evolution of the board. From left the 1st prototype with the 2nd generation in the middle with the 3rd and current generation on the far right.

In other news we harvested our 1st garlic, a softneck Susanville variety, from the field. 

I think I am going to let the other Susanville garlic stay in the field a bit longer. The Duganski, a hardneck variety is shooting up scapes and will be harvesting those those today to make some bacon wrapped garlic scapes. With the scapes up the Duganski garlic has about 1 month left until full harvest.

Well that is it for now. The PCBs for the Mother Node should be arriving any day.

Another Node and Garden Update....

I realized I had not posted anything about the OSH Park node boards. So, here are some older pics of the node boards being installed in the nodes.

The next revision of the board should be here tomorrow. It is approximately 25% smaller and using a SMD 328P instead of a DIP version.

The garden is going good and we are enjoying fresh lettuce on a daily basis. It is amazing how well a nice bowl of fresh lettuce tastes with a little turkey,cheese, and some dressing.Here are some random pics from the garden.

Tomatoes and peppers going in.

Overall view