It's been said many times that there's never a dull moment in our lives. That has certainly been the case for the three of us. We thought it would be fun to tell you what your co-hosts have been up to lately, both in our lives and with our birds.
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Check out the Poultry Kepers Podcast YouTube Channel -
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It's been said many times that there's never a dull moment in our lives. That has certainly been the case for the three of us. We thought it would be fun to tell you what your co-hosts have been up to lately, both in our lives and with our birds.
You can email us at - poultrykeeperspodcast@gmail.com
Join our Facebook Groups:
Poultry Keepers Podcast -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/907679597724837
Poultry Keepers 360 - - https://www.facebook.com/groups/354973752688125
Poultry Breeders Nutrition - https://www.facebook.com/groups/4908798409211973
Check out the Poultry Kepers Podcast YouTube Channel -
https://www.youtube.com/@PoultryKeepersPodcast/featured
Hi! Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. I'm Rip Stalvey, and together with Mandelyn Royal and John Gunterman, we're your co hosts for this show, and it's our mission to help you have a happy, healthy, and productive flock. Hello, Poultry Keepers podcast listeners. We haven't really talked about us, what we're doing in a good long time. Mandelyn has just started a job it's, she's running hither and tither and trying to get all her birds going and everything done. Mandelyn what's up with you lately?
Mandelyn Royal:I'm neck deep into a feed trial, where I'm growing out 55 chicks now. And we're looking to find the FCR of how much feed does it take to bring these birds up to market age. And right after I started that trial, I started back to work. Thankfully, I'm part time now because it was way too much to keep track of, but now I'm refocused, re centered, and everything is going smoothly there. I kept hatching, and now I have every single brooder full.
Rip Stalvey:Folks, if you're not sure what she's talking about when she said FCR. It is the feed conversion ratio.
Mandelyn Royal:Yes, very important data to know if you're going to do anything with market birds.
Rip Stalvey:Are your birds laying well this time of year? They should, I'm thinking they probably should be, but.
Mandelyn Royal:Most of them are giving me the six eggs a week that I would like them to do, but I have noticed that in my older lady pen, there's a 50 percent production and. I'll have to check and see if it's an obesity problem, because with the American Bresse they can get a little too fat in time, and I'll probably get in there and find the worst hen in the pen and processor and see what's going on and if I need to do a molt ration on a couple of them and split that pen up to bring the better ones back into production.
John Gunterman:How old are these birds?
Mandelyn Royal:Some of them are up to three, four years old.
John Gunterman:Okay, so if they haven't been through a good hard molt yet, they probably need to shed some internal fat to get back into laying trim?
Mandelyn Royal:They're definitely shaped like bowling balls.
Rip Stalvey:But really, if you stop and think about it, a 3 or 4 year old hen laying at a 50 percent rate, that's not all that bad.
John Gunterman:I'd be happy with that, even with a good hard molt.
Mandelyn Royal:Normally, they'll take longer breaks as they get older for me, but when they are in active lay, it's still that 5 6 eggs a week. They just don't do it for as long of a period of time before they take another little break.
Rip Stalvey:Gotcha. Sure. John, I know you've been immobilized here for a little while.
John Gunterman:It's been a spring. In the middle of doing a classroom hatch at the preschool where I chef and do farm to preschool education at I had a rather unfortunate incident something called a trimolar fracture of my right. But onto the important things is I'm going to be non weight bearing on my right foot for, I'm six weeks in and my surgeon says that I can start thinking about weight bearing in another six to eight weeks wheelchair for six months minimum. So we had to make some serious changes around the farm.
Mandelyn Royal:Wheelchair during mud season is a common thing.
John Gunterman:We were still snowing here when this happened. I slipped on the ice. It was nobody's fault but my own for not having my little ice grippies on the bottom of my feet. Things happen. We've since had a 2 plus foot snowstorm and a 3 foot. Snowstorm we're just now getting into spring and mud season. So luckily the VA has been hugely supportive of my agricultural and other endeavors and they fit me for a new wheelchair coming with big fat mud tires so I could, maybe continue chickening and not get, quagmired in the mud. When all this happened I reached out to some folks who were in line to do some testing for me on my breeding projects and said, Hey, would you be interested in a whole pile of really nice Chanticleers? And luckily one of our listeners Esther Feathers was very interested and she made the drive all the way up from New Hampshire and basically took all my current stock. Back home with her. And it's been so amazing to watch them grow out vicariously through her and watch their development and they're tracking just the way I would expect them to. But to keep the breeding program moving forward I can't take a year off because I know if I take a year off, it's going to set me back a year or three. So we're still working with somewhat smaller hatch, I think total was a hundred eggs set that we're keeping to sort through. And we're growing those out right now. Everybody's in the barn, they're doing well trying to mitigate the challenges of how to get them out to pasture while the pasture is wet and I'm in a wheelchair. So they'll probably stay in the barn for a little while longer. We've got a nice hatching time brooder and grow out pen cage set up for them to make it easier for me to manage from a wheelchair. A lot of it's just been, adapting to life from a seated position and keeping the breeding program moving forward. We have this responsibility to our birds to feed them and give them the best possible care despite our challenges. And I do take that responsibility heavily, and, I was grateful that somebody was able to step up and take the birds that I wasn't able to care for at the time. And I think that's important is to have a backup plan for catastrophic emergencies, we just weren't capable of caring for these birds, and somebody needed to do that, or I needed to put them down, and that would have been incredibly inhumane.
Rip Stalvey:I think another aspect of Esther having your birds is that's another satellite flock of your genetics should you suffer a catastrophic loss.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, definitely. I call them my seed flocks when I set up local people with them, and with the only stipulation that you got to keep that line pure so that they can keep moving forward from where they are, rather than interrupting them with a line cross and resetting the whole thing, because that turns into a three to five year project every time you do that.
John Gunterman:Sure. And now I have an outlet for, so I grew up these 60 plus birds, and I have more than I can keep that are keeper quality. They're gonna be first on my list. As, hey, I've got some great birds that I can't keep. Do you want them? And if they don't want them, I've got people, further down the line. But I, I think it's all about, when you have great quality genetics and people that are interested in putting forth the effort and expense to encourage them as much as possible, and it becomes a mutually beneficial arrangement. If I need to reach back for some of my genetics, I know they're available. If they have a problem, I can give them a rooster or send them a couple of hens and keep our lines strong. And the added bonus is they're pretty close to my upstream breeder, geographically. I haven't made the introduction yet, but they, I believe they're about an hour apart. Whereas we're
Mandelyn Royal:pretty well into setting up a little community network up there in. Upper East.
John Gunterman:Yes, between New Hampshire and Vermont we're starting to build a pretty strong following of Chanticleers, and we are starting to get an interest in the American Bresse. I've met another Chanticleer breeder who said that they would be very interested in trying to do a Bresse Chanticleer cross.
Mandelyn Royal:That's going pretty okay for the F1, the small batch of Eleven chicks I just sorted through, and half of them are feeling absolutely fantastic. And, these are neat to grow out, and seeing where they favor which breed is really interesting, and I don't see much breast on the outside, but I feel it on the inside.
John Gunterman:Yeah.
Mandelyn Royal:So that's where you go.
John Gunterman:Sure. Sure. And, ultimately, on the plate and on the spreadsheet. I've got a couple of breasts that I've hatched out from eggs of yours, and they're doing great. I deliberately put them in with a batch of Chanticleer eggs, and as far as the breasts know, they're not Chanticleers.
Mandelyn Royal:Are the horns picking up that rounded shape yet?
John Gunterman:They are! Even at this age, the breasts are distinctly larger. And the blue feet is a dead giveaway, as well as the combs are starting to come in. They're at such a cute age. They're like two and a half weeks, so they're in that awkward, I call it the teenager, gangly phase.
Mandelyn Royal:Oh, it gets worse from here. Oh,
John Gunterman:yeah, I know. I know. But I love this, when they're just starting that molt and getting ready to get their hard feathers in.
Mandelyn Royal:And if there's a male, you ought to start seeing little pink combs sprouting up any day now.
John Gunterman:That's what I'm looking at, what we have, trying to figure out who they are.
Mandelyn Royal:They'll tell you quicker than the Chantecleres do.
John Gunterman:Months quicker.
Rip Stalvey:I'm very envious. I'm sitting here, I'm listening to Mandy talk about all the Bresse she's raising. I'm listening to John talk about what he's up to. And I'm sitting down here and Florida, and I learned a long time ago that it's best not to hatch my reds in the spring of the year because you hatch them in February, March, April, they come out of the brooder and they're sitting out there in the hot weather and they just sit there, they don't eat much, they don't grow much so by hatching in October I can take advantage of the cool weather, and by the time we start to get hot temperatures, they're pretty much mature at that part, but it, I'll be honest with you, I've got my females are laying and it's paining me greatly not to be putting those eggs in the incubator.
Mandelyn Royal:Oh, you could sneak a couple in.
John Gunterman:Rip, do you think there, here's an interesting experiment just popped into my head, here's a squirrel hole A batch raised in the spring versus a batch raised in the fall, how would they express differently based on the, just the climate that they're being raised in? The difference between a summer brood and a winter brood, so to speak. And we've talked about, comb differences but just overall, I have noticed birds raised in heat and humidity, they just don't put on weight as fast, they're very lethargic and slow. No,
Rip Stalvey:They don't.
John Gunterman:Now, could that over a period of several generations be mitigated by local adaptation?
Rip Stalvey:I haven't seen it happen yet, John. Okay. At least here in the southeast, and I know. Quite a few Red breeders, and we all get together and we mumble and gripe about the hot weather and what it does to our birds. And, we take the necessary steps to get the air moving, plenty of shade, cool water, the whole nine yards, but it, they just, and honestly, I wondered if it's not something to do with their dark coloration
John Gunterman:They're going to absorb a lot more heat from the sun, but see, to me, this highlights the importance of having local knowledge to share with people who have been doing this for a while. You just said in your area, everybody mumbles and grumbles about it and you have to hatch in the fall. For a new poultry keeper who's online going, yeah, spring is the time to hatch, they may be setting themselves up. Maybe not. Get in touch with the local people and find out what does well in your area and when it does well in your area. The right bird in the right place at the right time.
Mandelyn Royal:What's the rate of lay, and if they're laying well now, how many of them are still laying well once you get to October, September, that time frame, because I filter my hens again, if they're not still laying in the fall, I cycle them back out, so You might actually be looking at finding your better producing females by waiting until that time of year for the ones who are still in active lay at that time.
Rip Stalvey:I'm Mandelyn, I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to monitor their production and if I see it starting to taper off, July, August, whatever I may go ahead and put them through a molt so they'll be coming back into production when I want the eggs.
Mandelyn Royal:Oh, so you can schedule it, okay.
John Gunterman:And you're coming up on just the right age, too. Yeah. Where you want to pull your breeders from.
Rip Stalvey:They will be a little over a year old. Just coming out of their first
John Gunterman:molt?
Rip Stalvey:They'll be older than that. They'll probably be 15, 16 months old, something like that.
John Gunterman:Perfect. So they've been around the calendar once, they've shown you what they've got.
Rip Stalvey:On the other side of that coin is that, that's pretty good timing and works well for showing birds because you get them through the summer and they molt, they do their thing. Most of our shows down here are in the fall and winter. And if you're hatching them January, February, March, it's hard to have them and keep them in show condition for our fall shows. But by delaying the hatching, that that helps me overcome that a little bit. Not that I'm able to get out and show much anymore, but it's old habits, are still hard for me to break.
John Gunterman:Did your area have a big Future Farmers of America
Rip Stalvey:or 4 H program? We do, but they have not been very active in poultry. I have tried to cultivate that for a number of years. Yes,
John Gunterman:I found a couple of youngsters here that are interested and have seeded them with some of my Chanticleer every year for the past couple of years.
Rip Stalvey:I think it has as much to do with the ag teacher as anything else. Most of our ag teachers down here are either into row crops, citrus production, or beef cattle. Is what it is. I know there's, you get out in the Midwest, there's a lot of FFA and 4 H kids into poultry out there and Mandy up in your area, a tremendous FFA program out there.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, we have a lot of little poultry groups, and I've set up a couple of 4 H kids, and that's been neat, because when the judges get their hands on the birds, they're like, oh, wow, there's meat on this bird.
Rip Stalvey:That's exactly right.
Mandelyn Royal:So we'll see how that goes. I'd love to see a sustainable poultry category when they get together for their little shows and stuff, because right now it's more of your show type birds. Or showmanship, or the commercial hybrids.
John Gunterman:I was thinking, maybe a crazy but a heritage poultry or dual purpose poultry show where you actually have to submit your egg production and meat production records along with the birds that you're showing. Say, this is what I kept. This is the rest of their cohort. This is, this is their feed conversion ratio. This is their rate of lay. These birds produced are not just pretty.
Rip Stalvey:John, back when standard bred poultry was the commercial birds they used to do that. There were egg shows, there were carcass shows, of course, the live bird shows there were even shows for baby chicks. So they used to do a lot of that. It's with the advent of the commercial poultry industry, some of that kind of got shot in the foot, I agree with it. It'd be cool. It'd be fun.
John Gunterman:In some level of engagement, I'm always thinking when I'm able to get back to farmer's market bringing one of those little pack and play portable cribs. And, putting a hen and a couple of, two or three week old chicks in that pack and play next to my trailer, just to have some, nice interaction, people walking by, families walking by, it's cuteness, it's cool, it's nature, it draws customers into my booth, I'll take that.
Mandelyn Royal:I wonder what the participation could actually be, because one thing I've realized by doing this feed trial is doing the data collection. You have to set that as a priority and you can't skip a day it's a special kind of tedium that I'm enjoying, but I don't know that it's for everyone.
Rip Stalvey:You're probably right, it takes a huge amount of commitment. Oh, for what you're doing, yes. For even a Even modest numbers, for my own use, would take a whole lot of commitment, as it would for anybody else. And what you're doing, is you're comparing a couple of different lines of Bresse, and a couple of different types of feed, and all that. It takes a lot of dedication to pull one of those off.
Mandelyn Royal:I split it up the best I could, and my next round is going to be crumble feed versus the Kraut Creek milled feed on the same genetic pool.
John Gunterman:Splitting a hatch in half. I got goosebumps when I heard you mentioned that on your YouTube video. It's like that, that right there. Yes.
Mandelyn Royal:I'm pretty excited about round two.
Rip Stalvey:I would be interested to see what that reveals.
John Gunterman:Side by side. That's beautiful. Yeah, great stuff. But if people don't know, within two or three bags of feed per year, It costs to keep their chickens. It's something you should look into.
Rip Stalvey:It's very revealing. And I know Mandy hadn't been into her feed trials probably enough to know, but when I switched from over the counter feeds at the big box stores custom milled feed, I'd have to go back and look it up, okay? But my feed consumption dropped 20 to 25 percent from what it was over the big box feeds.
Mandelyn Royal:I believe that. Based on my initial data, that's probably going to prove to be true in my second round of trials.
Rip Stalvey:Yeah, probably is.
John Gunterman:I started doing two things at the same time. I started using the Fertrell Breeder's Supplement and NutriBalancer, as well as constant access to grit, as well as calcium, but grit is the most important part, and between those two things, I can't attribute it to any one thing. I'm looking at a 20 percent savings overall. I know grit can be anywhere between 5 and 10 percent increase on its own just by adding that to commercial feed.
Mandelyn Royal:Their grit increased when I changed the feed type. They
John Gunterman:will need more grit to grind the whole grains. If a bird has a gizzard, it needs grit. It's essential to proper gizzard action and to get all the nutrients that you've already paid to put down the bird's beak, extracted before it comes out the back end.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, that's true. And I've noticed almost a 50 percent increase in their grit consumption by switching to a milled feed. It was significant.
Rip Stalvey:Now, describe what you mean by a milled feed, if you would, Mandy.
Mandelyn Royal:You can still see the ingredients that make it up because it's been ground down. And that grind varies by the age of the bird. So the chick starter was pretty powdery and they weren't sorting through it. They were clearing out that feeder as if they knew it was good stuff. And it took me a couple of weeks to figure out exactly how much to give them every day to make sure they had 10 percent left at the end of the day. And there were a couple of times when they had it down to, there wasn't even left and I'm like, Oh, they would have eaten more. Oh, goodness. So that's why I'm going to do a couple more trials and get those numbers right to figure out what they actually want to have every day.
John Gunterman:That uniform mash size is really important cause, the chickens they're greedy buggers and they're going to take the biggest piece first, no matter what it is. Second priority is always corn, and then anything else. So if they can't really sort, if everything's the same size, they're just going to, hopefully go to town. Got some corn candy here and there to make them happy.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, I was a little surprised because it wasn't the first time I've used a milled feed. I tried the house blend of our local mill. And I ended up seeing some vitamin deficiencies. The eggs weren't as good as they were. And there was a clumping issue in the feeders I had. And I don't think I kept them on it for longer than five weeks before. I was like, I gotta go back to what I was doing, but this time. It's just a much better quality behind it. It smells better. It smells different. Just, even though the style of feed was the same, the ingredient quality is different.
John Gunterman:And you have a better nutritional profile because you actually have a poultry nutritionist sent them the formula and said, Make this.
Mandelyn Royal:I'm excited for when we have Jeff on to talk about this stuff. Cause he's far more of an expert than I am. He's just my helper and nutritionist for this season. And he's telling me everything I do wrong or right. And having his insight during the process has been really invaluable. So I can't wait till we have him on the show.
Rip Stalvey:So that's one thing I really like about Jeff. He'll be honest with you. He doesn't pull any punches. If you're doing something right. He'll let you know, and if you can improve something, he'll let you know about that, too.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, he sure does, and he doesn't waste words on it, either. He'll tell you in as few words as possible.
John Gunterman:And he's been really helpful. He's spotted things in pictures. He's hey, I know we're not talking about this, but what's going on in this, back corner with this thing over here. And I'm like, Oh, that's this I, you need to fix that. I'm like, okay.
Mandelyn Royal:Yeah, exactly. Somebody who's
John Gunterman:been on site to so many commercial as well as backyard flocks, his knowledge just as a consultant is amazing.
Mandelyn Royal:And you want to be open to receiving that kind of criticism too. Like you don't ever want to feel defensive over it. You want to go into it with an open mind because that's when you're going to learn a lot more and the experience of others is really going to become actionable into your program.
John Gunterman:I've always been about process improvement and, making things better for me and my birds and easier to manage, and especially now at these health challenges, that's become more and more important. So all these little incremental improvements that we make over the years, eventually. I looked back and said, how did I end up where I am now in my husbandry practices? And it's just been this learning evolution over the past eight years now. A lot of it's based on, commercial level pastured poultry production. Pushing, up to a thousand birds through a field every year and now scaled back to home residential size. All these things, it's a cumulative process. And if you look at where you are now. Hopefully it's not where you were several years ago, and hopefully you're going to keep refining the process and making it easier and better for you and your birds.
Mandelyn Royal:Oh, speaking of which, I'm always looking at ways to increase our growing space, because it's become really apparent over the years that You don't need that many breeding birds, but you want as much grow space as you can possibly get built. So we recently sold our pigs and that frees up almost two acres that they very effectively destroyed. We're going to reseed it and level all that ground and prep it for running a fleet of tractors back there.
Rip Stalvey:What are you going to reseed it with, Mandelyn?
Mandelyn Royal:I haven't decided yet, but I want it poultry friendly for sure. I want to incorporate some comfrey and some native grasses and really amp up the nutritional profile of that forage.
Rip Stalvey:That's what I'm so envious of you guys. You live up where you can grow things that we can't grow down here. Just doesn't work. Like clover. I would die to be able to grow clover down here. We can grow perennial peanuts, but we can't grow the forage radishes or anything like that down here.
Mandelyn Royal:We had an area of ground that we called the grocery store, and it's where we threw all of our seeds that we didn't use. For our own garden starts, and it was just everything we had, we just chucked it over the fence, and what took, and it was a really neat example of chaos gardening, and we didn't harvest anything out of it for ourselves, but what took, and then later in the summer, we turned the pigs loose into it. And they would eat absolutely everything. Cause it wasn't a very large area, maybe 30 foot by 50 foot. Everything from corn, zucchini, squash, tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe. Sunflowers. The pigs like to do their own gardening and whatever seed comes out of their backside was also mixed in there from the prior year.
John Gunterman:And well fertilized, yes.
Mandelyn Royal:That's a pretty good.
Rip Stalvey:That's like diversity. in forage is really important. And that's one thing we can't get down here. Not, we can, but it's not the diversity that I would prefer my chickens to have.
Mandelyn Royal:And you want, you would almost have to import soil, right? Because of how much sand you have down there.
Rip Stalvey:Oh yeah, I did. Somebody asked me one time about what it was like gardening in Florida. I said it's like trying to grow vegetables in a, Tray of marbles because there is no organic matter.
Mandelyn Royal:We have a pretty good top layer of soil and then it immediately switches over to red clay. And then fieldstone below that, which we found out every time we wanted to put a fence post in. And underneath that is the gray clay, and then it goes back to red clay and some more rock.
John Gunterman:I got nothing. We've got 28 feet of what's called glacial tillage. It's just rubble straight down to the bedrock. And I've got about a 32nd of an inch of topsoil. So thus, all the, my rows started out as hugelcultures and have broken down over the years, and the chickens are there to put fertility, into the soil. When I shovel out the coop, that all goes into the compost and gets broken down and becomes another planting row or compost for an existing row. We do have a lot of fertility coming out the back ends of our birds, let's capture that. Safely and responsibly. You don't want to get chikinosis.
Mandelyn Royal:We're uphill from the river on a flat plateau, and so the water, which we've been getting so much rain over the last several years, it just sits on top and drains off however it can. So when we first moved to this property, we had a little bit of a slope to a creek, but we had slushy spots where the ground just almost never dried out, and your feet would sink four or five inches into the ground. So we installed a lot of drainage. But I did recently add ducks to take care of the last sinkhole, so somebody could have fun with it.
John Gunterman:Utilize your resources.
Mandelyn Royal:Those Muscovy ducks have been a trip. They already are acting like I didn't expect the intelligence that they're showing, actually, because when they go to put them to bed, if I take a bucket of feed, they follow me. I don't have to herd them, I don't have to fight with them. They're getting friendlier by the day. I've yet to eat one though. I'm excited to eat our first one. That was the whole reason of getting them.
Rip Stalvey:I've heard, it's pretty much like goose.
Mandelyn Royal:That's what I'm hoping for.
Rip Stalvey:We do appreciate all our listeners here on the Poultry Keepers Podcast. You keep us on our toes and hopefully we're able to share information with you that you can apply to your situation. Just keep listening. We'll keep talking to chickens. So until next week, you guys enjoy your birds and we will talk to you later.