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2006 Poultry Project For 2006 we have scaled back our plans. Our 3 geese are growing and we will only raise butcher geese if they lay eggs and hatch some goslings. We will be raising Red Broilers and Buff Rock butcher chickens and for the show chickens we will be trying Brown Rose Comb Leghorns, Gold Spangled Hamburg and Gold Penciled Hamburgs. Rose combs are better for our environment with an uninsulated barn. We ordered all females and hope we get some decent show birds from this batch. The chickens were so peaceful without a rooster in the pen that we decided not to even try to keep any males for a while. We had such bad luck with the hatching that we plan on buying our chicks from a hatchery for the forseeable future. Pilgrim Geese Pilgrim Geese and Goslings 17 May 2006 Our geese hatched out 7 goslings. They laid a total of 34 eggs. Of those 7 hatched live goslings. One hatched but the gosling died. 11 started development but died after a few days and the rest had no development at all. Only one of the geese was sitting on her nest properly. Hopefully it was just because they are young. All three adults are sharing in the care of the goslings and we hope for better results next year. As some folks know, coyotes killed one of our adult females and several goslings. Then in early February, we found out that we have completely lost our slaughter facility for geese for 2007. We cannot get them butchered anywhere so for this next year we are going to pull all eggs and keep our remaining breeding pair and exchange a female gosling for one from another breeder to maintain genetic diversity. We won't be letting them hatch any goslings until we solve the slaughter problem. Chickens Our broilers and Buff Rocks did fairly well. The hatchery didn't have enough Buff Rocks so we also had some Buff Orpingtons as well. However, the 2 heritage breeds were so much slower growing and that the cost to get them to slaughter weight was more than we or our customers can afford. For future we will stick with the broilers for meat birds. We ended up with 70 chickens butchered but we barely covered our direct expenses and didn't cover any labor costs. Our show chickens did not handle shipment well this year, the chicks got caught in a snowstorm and several did not make it but we do have some Brown Leghorns, one Gold Spangled Hamburg and 1 Gold Penciled Hamburg. We kept back 11 hens for eggs over winter. 1 Buff Orpington from 2004 2 Gold Campines from 2004 2 Buff Orpingtons from 2005 1 Buff Minorca from 2005 2 Buff Rocks from 2006 2 Rose Comb Leghorns from 2006 1 Sicilian Buttercup from 2006 Go To Top