Sunday Sept. 28th… What to do…What to do… SICK Chickens!!!!

Again, we have suffered another blow to the starting of the farm’s chicken flock. We now have chickens that sneeze and cough, are shaking their heads and have a gurgling noise when they breath. We noticed four yesterday, and quarantined them, but before the day was out, We found another one. Anyway, the five that we quarantined and treated with Terramycin powder, added to their drinking water, seemed to improve, but it said on the instructions that we should see results in 24 to 48 hours. That was only last evening, so it has only been about 19 hours now, so are we safe or will it get worse? Who knows!! Vicki is now cutting up garlic to add to their scratch feed, which is supposed to help with colds. They were all ok until they stayed out in the rain all day Friday. We have checked on the internet and it seems that other people have had the same problems and we have been doing what they recommend to treat them. All we can do is treat the entire flock of chickens, ducks and turkeys (one turkey is sick too) with the Terramycin and hope for the best. We cannot collect and sell the eggs during the time we are treating them with the antibiotic powder, so we will mark all these eggs and place them under the layers to hatch them and have little ones. By marking them, we will know which eggs are treated eggs and after two solid days of no chicken antibiotics, we can then start pulling eggs to sell again, leaving the marked eggs for them to hatch. Obviously, egg sales will cease as soon as the eggs in the refrigerator are gone and will not resume until two days after we quit treating birds. Boy oh boy……. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. We don’t need this kind of luck! It has been tough enough getting the farm established and going. Hoping for better news tomorrow. Stay tuned…

We might try to work in the dark, in the barn this evening after dinner. It’s not a bad thing to do, as it’s inside and we have temporary lights to work by. Who knows…… maybe we’ll just hang it up until tomorrow. This chicken problem has made us weary, trying to deal with it all day….watching birds, moving them to isolation and scouring the internet for information. We’ll see.

Bye, Bye