Urteaga Farms: Recent Episodes
Charini Urteaga
In this episode we talk about how we got started with the farm.
We are trying to improve our podcasts. so please be patient with us as we get new equipment, ideas.
As always, Thank You for listening in!
Welcome to episode 2 at Urteaga farms. Today we're talking about how to raise chicks. For moral support, I decided the bring some of the easter egger chicks I bought today into the studio. You should be able to hear them in the background. These particular chicks have cute little beards, and hopefully lay some blue or green eggs when they grow up. First of all, raising chicks is something that requires a proper method and a little bit of your time every day. I assure you, it is a lot of fun. You can start off with day old chicks. Usually, your local tractor supply store or farmer's coop will carry chicks anywhere from February to August. It is important to decide what breeds you need depending on the en viroment you are providing them. Day old-to week old chicks usually go for about 3- 5 dollars each. When you're buying chicks, remember that chickens are very social birds, and they will easily get bored without company. 1 or two chicks is definitely not a good idea. I would go with a minimum of 4. Also, make sure you check with your city for laws regarding chicken keeping. Some cities and neighborhoods don't allow chickens. If you're thinking egg numbers, remember that they don't lay every day. Depending on breed, they can lay anywhere from 3-6 eggs a week. If this is your first time raising chickens, I would start with started pullets. You can jump on craigslist or even read the newspaper adds and look for 4-5 month old chickens. Best time to start chickens like that would be Spring. Then they will start laying soon, and you won't have to wait too long. It usually takes them around 6 months to start laying eggs. Chickens do have a day-light requirement to keep laying. They usually need around 12-14 hours of daylight. So they will stop in the winter if you don't provide additional light. Rule of thumb is, you let them rest in the winter. Its definitely healthier for them. But most people just give additional light so they keep laying. These are just some of the things that you would have to think about before starting off with chicks or chickens. We usually order chicks from an online hatchery. Well, we also buy from local stores. Our first order this year was 27 chicks from Mcmurray hatchery. We got 4 white leghorns, 9 buff orpingtons and 9 white rock pullets. We did put in one each of dark cornish, buff orpington and leghorn roosters. The hatchery gave us two extra roosters for free, a buff cochin and a white leghorn. Now we're upto 5 roosters in the brooder! The advantage of ordering from hatcheries is, you can ask them to vaccinate your chicks. I had ours vaccinated for marek's disease and coccidiosis. Coccidiosis is a pretty bad disease that 3-8 week old chicks can get. It will kill off entire flocks. Same with Marek's disease. We will talk about these diseases later. Local stores usually don't vaccinate chicks because some people want to raise chicks organically. I don't really mind about vaccinating them, especially if that means I can save its life. Lets move on to your brooder. You need to make sure you give them appropriate heat. Chicks need 90 degrees farenheit for the first week, and reduce the temperature by 5 degrees every week until you reach 70 degrees farenheit. This is very important. I've had chicks die because they didn't have enough heat. You need a thermometer to regulate the temperature. And make sure its accurate. You can use a heat lamp for this purpose. Its good if you can get an infra-red lamp instead of the usual white ones, because for one thing, they give more heat, and it will reduce the stress inside the brooder. This is because you will have to leave the white light on at night, and they can't sleep well with the light on. They're just like us, they turn into monsters when they don't get enough sleep and it'll soon turn into a bloody mess, literally. Now, to regulate the temperature, you don't NEED a thermometer. Its quite easy to tell if they are cold or too hot. If they're cold, they will all huddle together really tight and sleep. This will usually be under their heat lamp if you have provided any, or on the warmest spot. Somehow chicks know how to find the warm spots and to stay away from the cold spots. Some say its good to give a variation of temperature inside the brooder. Like I would keep the water and food on the one end the brooder and the heat lamp on the other. What happens then, is they get accustomed to cold and they will actually be hardier little chickens. So, to reduce stress, another important thing is to give them enough space. I would give them around .5 to 1 square foot per chick. THat way they can stay in the brooder for 2-3 weeks. You will have to give them more space as they grow up. We designed our brooder so they can stay in there for at least 5 weeks. We have a wire mesh floor for them, so I don't use bedding. While we're on the topic, I'm gonna mention this real quick, you should not use pine shavings for the first couple days. Newspaper is a better idea. Also you will need to change the bedding when it gets dirty and that means at least once every 2 days. Wire mesh floor in our brooder definitely saves us a lot of money that we would have otherwise spent on bedding. Their poop falls through the mesh into newspaper that I've laid underneath. This definitely reduces disease spreading as well. I will post pictures to our facebook page, so you can checkout the design of our brooders. Some people use plastic storage bins for brooders and that works too. Moving on to feed requirements, its pretty straightforward. You can buy any commercial starter feed. BUT, if you bought your chicks from a hatchery and they vaccinated the chicks for coccidiosis, you should NOT feed them medicated feed. For other chicks you can feed medicated feed and that should prevent diseases like coccidiosis. For the first couple days, I would recommend crushing the feed a little bit so the crumbles are smaller... I had to grind mine and I kept doing it for about a week and then decided to just give them the regular feed. You don't have to do this, but it would be easier on them. Especially if you have any bantam chicks. oh bantams are half the size of normal chicks, i mean TINY. So, About water. Make sure you have clean water available for them at all times. For the first couple days, you can put marbles or rocks in the water so they don't drown themselves, which they will sometimes. I honestly have not had that happen to me, but its something that everyone on the forums recommend. You can also get little electrolyte packs that you can get from the feed store and give it to chicks, that way they can recover from any difficulties that come with travel and so forth. I gave my chicks electrolytes for about a week and a half. You have to mix it in a gallon of water, and you can keep giving them that water for 2-3 days. If you don't want to give electrolytes you can give them sugar water, that would be around 12 tablespoons of sugar per gallon. I have not tried this, because I kind of trust the electrolytes. I even give electrolytes to my adult chickens. Moving on I promised I would talk about the diseases that chicks can get. Coccidiosis is one of my biggest fears to be honest. I had a few chicks die from it and some survived and now I have to keep them separate from the big flock. The sign that told me that they had coccidiosis was blood in their poop. This is why you need to spend some time with your chicks. You got to watch them, see if they are acting lethargic, or check for blood in their poop and stuff like that. I was new to raising chicks when my little ones got coccidiosis, so I didn't know what I needed to do. I got the medicated feed , and that is kind of what saved the two chicks I have right now, but I was kind of too late. The best thing to do is to get Corrid, you can usually find this drug in the feed store. Also, this is normally on the cattle section. I have a bottle of liquid corrid on the shelf at all times, just because I'm worried about my chicks, I don't want them dying on me. Corrid will definitely help if you see blood in their poop. If you want to avoid coccidiosis, you can just get the medicated feed and call it good. But again, don't feed them medicated feed if they are already vaccinated, because then it will reduce the strength of the vaccine. So that was one disease that I came across, the other one is pasty butt. This is not quite a disease. Sometimes their poop can stick to the fluff in their fluffy butts. If you see this, then you have to clean it out, or the chick can die from it. The poop can dry up and they won't be able to pass. So in that case, you can get some warm water and a paper towel or a cotton ball, soak it in the warm water and rub their butts until all the poop is gone. I had to do this several times a day with my 27 chicks. This will go away after a few days, but the first few days are critical. Once you clean them, you can place them right under the heat lamp with the wet butt and keep an eye on it. They should dry out in about 15 minutes. Next topic is Marek's disease. I personally have not seen Marek's, but I know that Mareks can kill entire flocks over night. It only applies to chicks, well until approximately 8 weks, but some dangerous cases can affect chickens upto 40 weeks old. There is no medication for this, but the vaccine can prevent it. There are so many diseases that chicks can get, but I'm telling you, you can easily prevent most diseases in chickens by giving them space. Stress is a big factor in chickens, because they are very social birds. So, if you reduce stress that means you reduce the possibility of disease hitting your chicks. Next, we're gonna talk about treats! You will realize that they will most likely be terrified of this alien looking hand coming to get them every time. The best way to brfriend them is treats. I give mine oats. But treats should start when they're at least 2 weeks old. If they look really bored and are pecking on each other, you can give them some grass to pick on. They will play with anything. My little ones love oats. You can also give them meal worms, but not too many. To reduce stress, I put a small branch in the incubator. They love playing on it. So these are some of the things that you can do, to entertain them. Just don't leave treats available for them all the time. I gave up feeding them directly on my hand, because they peck so hard it hurts. So I wear a glove when I give them treats, that is once a day. Ok, so at around 2 weeks, you need to give them some grit. Makesure to buy chick grit and mix it in with the food. This will help them digest their food better. Their little gizzards will need grit to grind their food. The last thing I want to talk about today is incubating eggs. I have about 14 eggs in my incubator right now, and this would be my second time incubating. The first time, it didn't work out. The conditions need to be exact at all times, and you need to check the temperatures every day. Its a lot of work, but I'm definitely looking forward to when I can get a successful hatch. I will keep you posted about the eggs in my incubator. Right now, they are on their 3rd day, and looking good so far. If you are looking into incubating, you want fertile eggs from a flock with a rooster, and you got to make sure the eggs are not washed. The fertility rate drops if you wash the bloom out of the eggs. The other thing is, if you have a full time job, you will need an egg turner. You have to turn the eggs at least 3 times a day on equal intervals. This is mainly why I couldn't get my first batch to work. I purchased an egg turner recently so now I can make sure that's out the way. The normal period of incubation for chicken eggs is 21 days, but at 18 you have to stop turning the eggs, increase humidity and put the eggs on lock down. WELL, I will let you know how my second batch goes, and will do a full episode on incubation later. So, all this sounds like a LOT of work, I know, but really its not. I'm sure you will enjoy it a lot. Watching little chicks with their big personalities are very entertaining to me. So, this week's episode has been about raising chicks, and what you need to know to take care of them. We will be doing more episodes on chicks later, but this episode should give you enough information to care for them in the first 3-4 weeks. Our next episode will be about our experience with homesteading in the first 6 months.
A very brief introduction about the animals at the farm and the projects going on. The recording is not perfect since this is our first. We will improve as we go, so please bear with us as we fine tune our broadcasting techniques. Enjoy!
Transcript: Hello and welcome to Urteaga Farms podcasts. My name is Charini Urteaga and my husband is Michael Urteaga. Mike won't be joining today's episode, but he will be doing future episodes together with me. This will be our very first time doing a podcast and we're looking forward to sharing our experiences with you. We are a small scale farm, I would say its more of a homestead. We garden and we have chickens along with dogs and cats. Recently we purchased a few ducklings, so that will be a new experience for us as well. Our property is 3 acres, and we are planning on putting out a garden on most of it and the rest will be chickens. The only draw back is that there's a highway that runs through the property and we don't have it all fenced out. So we can't let our dogs just walk around cz you know, they love chasing cars! Our neighbor's dog, it was a blue heeler named kitty, died trying to chase a truck with a trailer. It was really sad. We do NOT want our dogs to die horrible deaths like that so we have them fenced off in approximately 600 squarefeet area with access to the back area of the house. So they have shelter, quite a bit area, and they can run around and play. Currently we have 2 dogs, and they have warned us about quite a few predators even from inside their run. One of the dogs is a pyraneese, border collie and alaskan malamute mix. He's not even an year old, and he's got the other one pregnant, and she had a litter of 7 puppies three weeks ago. All but one survived, and he is as adorable as they can get. With all that milk he can get, imagine a fat puppy with a CUTE face with a belly that's about to pop. He's a fatty. In today's episode, we will go over our projects, just to give you an idea of what we have going on in the farm and our future plans.Before starting on the projects, I want to introduce myself. So you already know my name, its Charini, and you probably already guessed that I'm not from around here. I was born and raised in a little island called Sri Lanka. My husband Mike grew up in Kansas city, Kansas. We met in college, Pittsburg State University, and have been married for a year now. WE've known each other for 5 years now. We bought the house 6 months ago. We were living in an apartment before that and kind of grew tired of the grind and the noise and we both love nature and enjoy peace and quiet, so we thought we'll buy a house away from the city. We live in fayetteville arkansas, but honestly we live about half hour from fayetteville that is passing two or more little towns. I think we have a Fayetteville zip code, but that's just it. Just as a warning for our listeners, we both have ADD, or attention deficit disorder, so if you notice us jumping from topic to topic without proper organization please excuse us. If it really bothers you, let us know, and we will see what we can do better. Your suggestions and ideas are always welcome. We have to say this, but this is the way we live our lives and most of what we say and do are our own opinions. So, you always have a choise and before you take any advise or information from us, make sure to think twice and act on your own.We already talked about the dogs, but we will have a full episode talking about dogs in the future, basically what dogs bring to the farm in terms of protection. So, I mentioned earlier that we have chickens. well, we have a lot of chickens! We have 3 coops, they are called coop 1, coop 2 and coop 3 in the order that they were built. Currently, we have 11 adult chickens in coop 1 and 2 chickens in coop 3. Coop 3 is the smallest, and it can only hold 2 bantam chickens. Bantams are smaller chickens, literally about half or a fourth of a normal chicken. We keep bantams because I personally love bantam eggs and they're the perfect size for me. Their eggs are about half the size of normal chicken eggs that you would purchase at the store. In the farm, we have 6 adult bantams of different breeds. The word bantam refers to a size, not a breed. So for example you can have a leghorn bantam or a rhode island red bantam and so forth. We will do an episode about bantams later with more information on their history and breeds. As far as chicks go, I have stopped counting. I just keep buying more chicks every week. Just can't get enough of them. =D I'm actively posting and reading up on forums like backyardchickens.com and in 6 months I know quite a lot about chickens than I ever imagined. Chickens have become my passion, and I'm actively pursuing it. My main goal is to get 2 flocks of chickens, one for brown eggs and the other for colored eggs, like blue and green ones. Also, my husband and I are wanting to raise meat chickens, but we don't want to buy broilers from hatcheries. We want to breed our own meat chickens crossing dual purpose breeds, that way the roosters will be used for meat and the hens for eggs. This way the bird gets to live at least 6-7 months before we process them. We believe its much better than processing them in just 2-3 months. Broilers are just, so unnatural. WE have processed a few in the farm, and it wasn't really a pleasant experience at all. They will get leg problems and all sorts of other health problems, and its really hard for me to see them suffer. When we process chickens, we always make sure that they don't suffer too much. I mean, I'm not saying they don't suffer, but we make make sure the technique we're using causes less pain and a fast death. We always, always thank them before we process any birds, and we're very grateful for their lives. Its amazing how many people don't really think about the life of the bird they eat. You buy chicken at the store, but at some point, that bird was alive in a factory farm somewhere and it couldn't even walk properly or probably never seen the outside world. At Urteaga farms, we have made it one of our rules not to sell or gift any meat that we process at the farm. We've seen these birds grow up and we've seen how much they suffered when they died, and if anyone can be grateful for their lives its us. Its just a little rule that we live by.Moving on, we have 3 cats, 2 inside and 1 outside. Inside cats are basically for pest control and the one outside, teemo, well, he came with the house. The previous owner left him here, and we could see why, i mean he goes on these long walks every day, same route. He's an orange tabby. He makes sure no other cat gets anywhere near the house and he's a pretty good hunting cat. He REFUSES to come inside even when there's an inch thick ice layer outside and he has ice crystals forming on his fir. I have forcefully taken him inside a couple times now because he would have ice on his back, but he freaks out inside the house. Just would not stop mewing. Well, enough about him, the two cats inside are doing their jobs quite well, sometimes too well. One of them is a white cat named pancha and we got her the other cat because she looked sooo bored after we moved in to this house. The second cat's name is Lili and she's only around 4 months old. Our next topic is gardening, and as I'm recording this, it is snowing outside. So excuse me if I don't sound too amused about working outside in the garden. =D Everything is completely covered in snow right now, but we still have some vegetables growing outside believe it or not. We have a few cabbage plants, broccoli and onions growing right now, but they're covered with plastic. Not sure how they will do with this kind of weather, because its been below freezing for more than a week now, and it will be that way for the next ten days or more. Up until now, they were doing great. The cabbage was actually forming the head, a little slower than usual, but it was doing it... For this year's garden though, we will have all different kinds of vegetables. We will only be doing a small space for the spring garden. It will most likely be a 10 by 10 with cold weather crops like beets, salad leaves, radishes, brocolli, cabbage and stuff like that. I will do one whole episode about the spring garden, when to start your seeds and when to plant it outside and stuff like that. We have decided that our main crops are going to be things that we eat all the time like beans, potatoes, onions and peppers, okra, cabbage, kale, beets and radishes. We eat a lot of rice and curries, so these vegetables are very important to us. The others will be side dishes. We will definitely sell the extra produce. We will be talking a lot more about gardening in future episodes, so stay tuned for updates. Episode 1 is just a brief introduction to our farm. Our next episode will be about raising chicks. Join us on our journey to a healthy lifestyle and self-sufficiency. Make sure to subscribe to our podcasts and enjoy a wealth of information on homesteading. You can join us on facebook and follow our blog at urteagafarms.blogspot.com.Until next timeBrought to you by Urteaga Farms.