On today’s podcast I give a homestead update and address a few listener questions. We have been super busy here on the permafarm! Many opportunities presented themselves and we jumped at the chance. We went from seven animals to more than 50 in two weeks. Insanity? Yes, but we are loving every minute of it.
Listening to your podcast I wondered if you have thought about running a heat lamp for your chickens? I was getting 2-5 eggs a day with 13 layers during the winter. After discussing with some local farmers I ran a heat lamp to the coop. Almost instantly doubled my egg production, now getting 6-9 eggs a day. To keep the electricity low you could run it on solar power and a timer if you wanted to get that intense.
Are you purchasing food for your rabbits? I’m considering starting rabbits and wondered if I needed to factor in food price as well. Thanks
Tim,
Yes, we have thought about increasing the amount of light/heat and kind of tricking the birds into thinking the days are longer and there is nothing wrong with that approach but we have decided to take as natural an approach as possible. I think the birds slow down in the wintertime because they need to. It’s kind of like hibernating I guess and if the birds live in a cold climate maybe they need that rest more so than other climates. I don’t mind the winter slowdown, I think in the long run they will be more resilient for it, we’ll see. I would love to get 4 years out of my birds as productive layers as opposed to the industry standard of 2.
As for rabbits we do feed them pellets…we are trying to move to a more sustainable system by developing breeds that do very well on grass. Right now we supplement their pellet feed with fodder (sprouted wheat or barley) and hay. We put our grow outs on grass for their last 4-6 weeks…to include our future breeding stock. This is all part of the plan to move them to a grass based system. We are also looking to move to a colony system sometime soon.
Thanks for your questions/comments!