Ready For Pasture

Today the chickens left the brooder and entered their outdoor shelter. Before transporting them out, my wife and I did one last weigh in - 1.143kg is a good result for 28 days old.

I put them into their transport crates and brought them out into the paddock.  I could have fit them all into three crates, but it is important not to stress these little guys, so I wanted to give them as much room as possible.  Think about it, their entire world has just changed, up until now all they have known is the brooder.

As I put them inside one by one, they were very quiet and cautious about their new environment.  But within ten minutes, they began to express their natural instincts of scratching in the earth, eating the fresh pasture and looking for bugs to eat.  Some even used the internal support beams within the shelter as a roost.  I filled the homemade chicken feeder and placed it inside, although they were too busy doing their own thing to eat their feed mix - this is a wonderful sign of content animals.

I also needed to get the water sorted.  These shelters have a 20 liter bucket reservoir that sits on top.  This gravity feeds water to the drinker inside the shelter through a small pipe.

It took them a little while to figure out that this big red bell was actually a drinker, but once a couple of them figured it out, the rest picked it up.

While the shelter protects the chickens from predators, foxes can still be a problem as they like to dig their way inside.  As an extra precaution, I setup an electric fence to reduce the risk of night attacks.

The wonderful thing with this technology is I can walk out with a quarter acre worth of fencing under my arm and control the grazing pressure of hundreds of animals.

The last thing to do is test that the fence is working properly with my fence tester.  4.6 kv is plenty of strength to deter any animal intent on making the chickens a midnight snack.

An electric fence tester is a must have tool if you are using electric fences.  Some are so advanced they can even direct you to where there are faults in your fence line.  Mine tells me how strong the current is and most importantly that the fence is working ... getting zapped is rather unpleasant.

And there we have it.  The chickens are outside and on pasture and as far as I can tell, happy with their new home.