Vicky

Mom sets up her chicken operation in the Wilderniss forest.

Broiler Project

Moveable pen set up. Chicks in. 2 weeks old, Just out of brooder.

Building the Frame for the Hothouse

 It is built of old packing cases from Port Elizabeth's motor industry.

Broiler Pilot Project No 2

Our home broiler project went quite well.

There are a number of steps in the process and I know that the best way to learn is to go through it in practice.

Its the second pilot that we have done. The first started with 30 day old chicks. This on started with 200.

Other than the scale what did we do differently this time.

1. We got the day olds from a proper supplier, not the pet shop in Korsten
2. We used better waterer's and feeders,
3. We made food available constantly and not three times a day as we did in the first pilot.
4. We had the chickens processed by a small abattoir - Christo Els near Uitehage. - He did a great Job.
5. We fed the chickens a lot of greens - especially - Duckweed, which I scooped from pond alongside.

6. We sold (or ate) 125 chickens for R35.00 per kg. (higher than before)
7. We were able to pasture the birds a little with mobile pens.

I am happy about the following:

• The quality of the birds was very good. I enjoyed them and we received a lot of compliments
• The price was respectable. - about the same as a (cheaper) Woolworths chicken

We had some problems that I would like to fix next time:

• The number of chicks we lost in the brooder stage - (bad housing)
• We could not get un-medicated feed
• We could not pasture the birds as much as we would like

I am busy think about the next step. But I quite enjoyed learning from this one.

New Calves

The new calves we Gerrie has weaned for us arrived on Saturday. We put them in the bull camp at Tsitsikama. It was bit of a problem, because they did not want to stay in, they wanted to go home, they knew they were not where they were the previous nioght. they kep walking through the fences that had quite effectively kept the other calves in for months.

Calves in Tsitsikama

The calves are looking good this weekend in Tsitsikama this weekend.

New Tilapia tank system installed.

The way I first came to be interested in Tilapia is when I built a duck Pond I figured, lets have ducks on the surface and Tilapia under the surface. Great in theory, exept the ducks made the water very dirty and I was concerned that the few Tilapia I had chucked in would either die from the toxic water or from being eaten by the ducks.

Old tanks: reclaimed industrial waste.

So I thought lets try tanks rather. This arrangement worked much better for me. I could see the fish and not just hope that they were under the surface somewhere. I used two 1 KL tanks, with a 200 l tank filled with sand as a filtration system. I pumped the water our from one of the tanks with a 100 watt pump I bought from the aquarium shop. I linked the tanks together with a syphon system made of swimming pool vacuum hose. It seemed to work OK, the water stayed clear and there was enough oxygen in the water (I could tell because they were not gulping at the surface)

see also:

 cheap, diy, solar, pumping for aquaponics