Cut Your Chicken Catch Time In Half!

Over the last 8 years we have systematically implemented a variety of changes to our chicken catch protocol. Taken together they have dramatically reduced the unpleasantness of the job, the amount of extremely difficult physical labor and the total man hours involved (.48 minutes per bird to .21 minutes per bird). 

I took a quick video to show how what it looks like. Check it out and see if you can cut your man hours to catch birds in half as well!

The changes can be broken down into a few key principles of our refined chicken catch program. 

First - Never Lift a full chicken crate. - Yes as impossible as that seems. Here me out.  

We created special steel pallets that hold 12 chicken crates (two stacks of six) and can be moved with skid/tractor forks. The pallet has a special groove for attaching a heavy duty ratchet strap so the crates (empty or full) do not tip off and a raised edge so they do not slide off. This eliminated moving the chicken crates by hand. 

We use a skid/tractor to set the steel pallet of crates right next to the birds we will be catching (more on that in a second) and then slide off the empty crates in stacks leaving only the bottom one on the pallet. We open those crates and then leg catch 5 birds at a time and place them in the empty crate (on the pallet) after two trips the crate is full and a new empty one is placed on top. 

Second - Catch in the open air.

A game changer for us was when we started moving the chicken houses off of the birds prior to catch. Its rather easy we simply pull them with someone inside keeping the birds from following. We surround the birds on three sides with portable migration fencing so they can't run away and then start setting the crate stacks right next to the birds on the open side of the fencing. 

Now there are no feedlines or water lines in the way, no doorway posts to step over (or wait for other team members to get through. It is also way less dusty and much cooler. Oh and the distance we have to walk from picking up the birds to the empty crate pallet is only a few feet instead of half the length of a chicken coop. 

Today a 5 man crew (one man is my 7&8 year old sons and another is a homeschool teen) catch 2100 birds from start to finish (including the tractor/skid loading on the trailer and strapping down. In an hour and a half. 

Bird loading used to be dreaded - now its a quick streamlined part of farm operations.