Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The Chicks Are Here!

So I hope you were expecting photos of my chicken experiments. If you've been following CircusK9 for any time at all, you should have assumed, rightly so, that I would be taking photos and blogging about it.

Today we mixed the "starter" diets. Commercially raised broiler chickens are fed diets that change with time; this is done in an attempt to address the changing metabolic activity of the birds as they age. But very few research feeding trials do this. So one of the variables that my thesis experiments will attempt to reproduce is realistic commercial-type diets that change with the age of the birds. The chickens will get the starter diet from day 5 to day 21, then a "grower" or maintenance diet for day 22 to 42. A broiler chicken will eat on average 0.1 lbs of feed per day (that's a very gross average but you get the idea). So we mixed up 100 lbs each of our three experiment diets (control, flax, and flax plus enzyme).

The facilities for mixing up the diets were pretty crude but we made everything work.

Mixing 100 pounds of grain and related bits can't be done by hand. We used a small electric cement mixer! All the pouring and weighing was rather dusty work.

Once that was done, we inspected the pens and installed the newly hatched chicks in two pens with some commercial "chick crumble" designed for them. They will eat that for four days while they adjust to their new surroundings (temperature, light, etc.). Their guts also need to mature a bit before we give them the diets with the flax seed.

I'm putting half of the chicks on the trays of crumbles. The thing hanging in the upper left corner of this photo and the middle of the photo below is a propane heater. The room was really warm, around 80F. The chicks are too small to use the standard metal feeder to my left; their necks aren't long enough yet. They will start using it in another couple of days.

For the first four days, all the chicks will be in the same room. They have free access to food and water.

The chicks hadn't yet been exposed to solid food so we had to place them by hand on trays containing the crumbles. Even though they were no more than 30 hours or so old, most either started to eat or went to one of the water stations; after that, they began to run around. There is actually a scientific word for this, precocial, which describes young animals which are capable of moving around and eating and drinking right after birth/hatch. Humans are not precocial.

Of course the chicks are relatively cute little yellowish fuzz balls at this stage. That will change.

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