Moving chicks from the brooder to your pasture can be a huge hassle!
We used to spend back breaking hours in the brooder catching three week old birds, then placing them in our catch crates (which involved moving heavy crates of birds around by hand- a huge no no for efficiency) and then moving them to our field shelters.
Of course, once we got there, we had to down stack the heavy crates, walk them into the houses and then bend over to pull the birds back out of the crates.
Inevitably birds were injured, a few legs were broken and everyone generally dreaded chick catch and move day (myself included).
The losses hurt the bottom line of the farm and I hate stressing the birds. While some accidents and some losses are inevitable I couldn’t stand how we were moving them out to pasture but I also was just struggling to break my paradigm of how birds had to be moved from brooder to pasture.
And so unfortunately we continued this archaic, stressful and back breaking method of moving birds to pasture for years double handling over 200,000 birds during that time.
Then after watching a video online we attempted to herd them onto a stock trailer but found that coaxing them on was more time consuming and stressful than just catching them. They had no interest in walking up a ramp onto the trailer and the change in environment from inside the brooder to outside totally scared them (especially the sunlight change and even the air temperature).
Also if it was hot at all outside (like 80 degrees which in Missouri is basically the min temp for most of Spring, Summer and Fall) the trailer would become an oven and the chicks would crowd (heat + chicken piles being an extraordinarily swift way to end any dreams of a profitable batch of broilers) and yea we only did that twice before we decided it was unworkable!
I was still intrigued by the idea though, as until they hit the ramp the chicks would herd easily with some large poly political campaign signs (the losers signs are normally free for the taking).
Our trailer experiment while a failure had done one important thing - it started to break my view of how broiler chicks had to be moved. Pondering on the problem, I started thinking outside the box and came up with a 4'x8' platform with 2' removable side walls and fork inserts on top instead of at the bottom like a normal pallet.
We put a plywood floor in it and then threw used wood chips on top so that it would not appear to be any different from the brooder floor.
With fork holes on top we could set it through our brooder door (over the retaining board) and also through the 4' wide doors of our PT1000 hoops.
The brooded birds could then be readily herded onto these platforms "chick movers" and then the chick mover could be set on a flat bed trailer to take multiple out to pasture at the same time.
We added a vented rollup shade cloth to the top so that we could move them even in the heat of the day which took a ton of pressure off of the chick moving mornings.
It worked! Now with six chick movers and a little practice 2-3 people can easily move 2200 chicks from the brooder to pasture in a few hours with minimal stress to chicks and helpers!
You can scan the QR code and see a video of how it works!
I hope it provides some inspiration for you and your operation.
-David
