My plans (subject to change if there is a better way) is to house 4 to 6 Australorps for eggs and meat. in a 6 x 10 foot chicken tractor. In a separate tractor we plan to raise Peking ducks for meat.
We are closing on our homestead tomorrow or Friday. We live our lives using cash. We are purchasing the homestead with cash only. There is no barn on the property and will be about 4 months before we can build using cash only. We want to get our chickens and ducks started because it will take a while for them to mature and begin to lay. There are also a lot of coyotes and other predators in the area. A chicken tractor and a separate duck tractor we enable us to begin our quest with a minimum outlay of cash for the present.
Hopefully in 4 months when the barn is built, the birds will be able to free range and just be locked-up safely in the barn at night or during bad weather. At that point we will use the tractors to grow out rabbits and maybe quail.
Blessings,
Ronna - finally in Central Texas
--- In CHICKENS-101@yahoogroups.com, Georgia Wood <nanonooks@...> wrote:
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> How large will this be? How many of each breed of fowl? Do you now have the ducks in a tractor? Each chicken needs a minimum of 4 square feet of space. Silkies are ground sleeping chickens. Australorps will want to roost. Housed together you need to make sure the roosters are not OVER the sitters.
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> Personally, I would not combine the larger chickens with vision impaired Silkies, nor put any of the chickens with ducks. I do have Silkies with Bantam Polish together and it works out ok. And I have 1 large Dorking hen with a pen of Silkies, so it's really all in the personality of the various individual chickens.
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> What brought you to the conclusion of using a tractor system of housing?
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> Georgia in Lower Alabama
CHICKENS-101@yahoogroups.com
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