| Bad luck Good luck glad to know i wasn't the only one who was short on cash and started raising chickens. i started when i unexpectedly lost my job. things were tight before and now they were really tight. we had some chickens that would come and visit once a day and pick through the compost pile. after checking with the niebors making sure they didn't belong to any one i trapped them. being jobless i had no money to spend on them, i did however have a smell dog pin that wasn't being used. i covered the top of this with an old tarp and put the chickens in. they soon tamed down and started to lay eggs ( free food ). after finding a job as a road mechanic and visiting several companies i went to this one place that received their metal on pallets made of 4x4's and 1x6's. i thought these would make great pins so i asked what they did with them and was told they throw them away. i asked if i could have any and they were more than happy to give them away. i spent the next few trips there ( after work ) tearing the pallets apart. i found a few other places that let me have there pallets also. i then paid a trip to the local auction barn and got some 1" chicken wire, 150' roll for $30.00 what a bargain. i spent the next several weeks building pins covering the top of them with tarps ( they were cheaper than a sheet of ply wood for each). now i had all these pins and no chickens so once again i paid a visit to the auction barn where i bought 2 trio's of bb reds bantams. after finding that i was raising chickens my dad decided to raise a few. he built several pins and started buying chickens from breeders always buying an extra or two for me. well it didn't take long to fill my pins. now i wanted to raise some chicks and sell them to help pay for the feed, i already had my egg producers which i shared with the niebors to help compensate them for the noise. i bought a small hav a bator egg turner and forced air fan set it up in my shop and lost the first batch due to the tempature fluctuation in the shop. after talking my wife into letting me set it inside i finally got a hatch off. sold all of them with in a few weeks and tried to hatch another batch in my shop ( the wife said no more chickens inside)this failed again. i decided to build an incubator that would handle great temperature changes. after doing a lot of studying of other designs i designed mine scraped the money needed together and built it. works great. i now hatch my own and a few for other people charging 1.00 per egg regardless of weather it hatches or not. i have a hatch rate of 83% so few people have complained. the chickens are paying for themselves and i make a few extra dollars also. i have 6- 4x8 pins divided in two and 3- 10x4 grow out pins and one 16x5 that houses my layers. it all cost me about 150.00 and another 50.00 for the incubator i built. and to think such a great hobby started because i lost my job and figured a few free eggs would be nice. kurt |
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| written by : Kurt |