Brooder House

The need to raise chickens to replace culled hens required a substantial facility. As I noted in an earlier post, when my grandfather was operating the ranch his foreman was a retired ships carpenter. It was he who was largely responsible for the construction of the brooder house.

The building was about twenty feet wide by two hundred and twenty feet long. It was built on a gradual slope so that the upper one hundred feet was about three feet higher than the lower one hundred and twenty feet. The upper section was divided into five brooder rooms, each about twenty feet square. The first portion of the lower section was a twenty foot square feed room. About which, more later. The remainder of the lower section was divided in the same manner as the upper section.

There was an ingenious trolley, hung from an overhead rail in each of the upper and lower sections. Each trolley allowed one to load the car with chicken feed and roll it the full length of the building, thus saving a great deal of physical effort. When not engaged in chores, Jerry and I would ride on the trolleys, just for fun.

Each of the twenty brooder rooms contained a gas-fired brooder stove and roosts for the chicks when they became old enough to roost. The roosts were hinged against the back wall and could be lowered when it came time to teach the chicks to roost. When the chicks were old enough to roost the brooder stove was turned off and could be raised via ropes and pulleys to allow easy access throughout the room. The floors were covered with wood shavings. The rooms were divided by swinging doors to allow easy passage for the trolleys.

It was necessary to teach the chicks to roost. Initially at night when it came time for the chicks to roost they had to be herded onto the roosts. Otherwise they would pile up in a corner and some would smother. Jerry and I found out about this possibility the hard way. One night we were late and we lost a couple of dozen chicks. That resulted in a sound belting.

Each of the brooder rooms had access to a small, fenced yard where the chicks were allowed to scratch; starting about the time they were taught to roost.

The feed room contained one-hundred pound sacks of various components of feed for the chicks. The proportions of each component changed as the chicks aged. The feed was mixed in a wooden box that was about four feet wide by six feet long. The box was about two feet off the floor to minimize stooping.

The mixed feed was loaded onto the trolleys in special containers. The containers were made from square five-gallon cans with the tops removed and a 2x2 wooden handle attached to the inside of a top edge. The form factor made it easy to scoop the feed from the mixing box and allowed compact loading onto the trolleys.

Another element of the feed room was a half-barrel. One of the by-products of our small dairy operation (more about that in a later post) was several gallons of skim milk every day. The skim milk was mixed with rolled oats in the half-barrel and allowed to ferment for a couple of days. It was then mixed with the chick feed.

Life on a Chicken Ranch

(My grandmother would never think of living on a chicken farm, it had to be a chicken ranch. It was just like she lived on Magnolia Heights, not Magnolia Avenue.)

There are a number of activities associated with life on a chicken ranch. Daily activities included feeding the chickens, gathering eggs (twice a day), cleaning and sorting eggs, and routine repairs and maintenance. Weekly chores included cleaning out the chicken manure under the roosts where the chickens slept (every Saturday) and scrubbing out the watering troughs.

Infrequent activities included replacing nest linings with wood shavings or rice hulls, driving the 1935 GMC flatbed with sideboards to the local lumber yard to pick up a load of shavings. (Today, about every five years, I request competitive quotations for auto insurance on the web. None of the insurance sites will allow an age of first license less than sixteen. In fact, I got my first license when I was fourteen. That allowed me to drive to town to pick up shavings as well as chickenfeed.) Occasionally there was a load of oyster shells to be dumped in the chicken yards. I do not recall the source of the oyster shells.

Chicken are not productive layers for more than about two or three years. So periodically the flock was culled and marginally productive hens were shipped off to slaughter. This required the regular replacement by raising chickens from day-old chicks. One of the steps in raising laying hens is vaccination. I do not recall what diseases the vaccinations were addressing, but there were two.

As I recall noting in an earlier posting, my grandfather was from Denmark. Therefore we did not vaccinate the chickens, we “waxinatted” them. My father, my brother, and I set some sort of record, vaccinating more than twice the number of chickens in one day than did a professional veterinarian crew of five.

As a sideline activity to egg production my brother and I raised five thousand broilers from day-old chicks. When they were ready for market we butchered them and sold them from the ranch for twenty-nine cents a pound. That was during WWII so at today’s dollar that was equivalent to about twenty-nine dollars a pound. We did not require ration stamps. I still know how to dismember a bird in short order.