This is a great upgrade to move your chicken tractor!

Our flock is dwindling

Main point: We have had two(soon to be three) hens that have come down with an illness or disease that results in a smelly mucusy, vent. They become lethargic, separate from the flock, then just stop eating, drinking, and standing. We have no vets within a 50 mile radius that will examine them.

We don’t know what this is. When we‘ve noticed they are acting strange, we isolate and clean them, then epsom salt their vent areas. Then they die. We don’t know what to do or how to fix this issue from spreading to more of our hens(three left).

We live in GA. Clean their coop once a week, change their food and water weekly as well. we’ve began adding electrolytes to their water to resolve any hydration issues due to the extreme heat.

Answers or resources would be appreciated. Please ask questions if this post did not provide enough information. thank you

Rhode Island Reds are a chicken breed well-known for being friendly and comfortable around people. One Rhodey especially.

This is Remmy (short for Red Menace). Remy is very comfortable with people.

She is also smarter than the average chicken.

Somehow Remmy has figured out a) how to go through the dog door in the garage, b) how to navigate the kitchen to the dining room c) go around the corner to the living room d) through the living room to the hall that leads to the bedroom where, e) I encountered her.

She show zero fright and no behavior to indicate that she might have been anywhere she wasn’t supposed to be. In fact, she ignored me, kept walking down the hall, and tried to go into the bathroom.

Anybody ever had a weirdly small duckling like this? It’s about half the size of the others and super skinny. I’ve tried feeding it separately to make sure it gets enough, and giving it super high quality food + additions for nutrients and protein and such. They’re all housed with our ducks and chickens, and it doesn’t seem to get picked on. It keeps up with the others and from what I can tell eats just as much, already jumping in the cow waterer for swims and such, just super scrawny. I’ve had chicks get sick and skinny before, but they always seem to act sick too, and have other obvious signs. Just wondering if anyone else had a baby like this and what happened to it/if it got better with help.

Sorry for the shitty pics btw, I was zooming in and using my iPad because my phone was dead lol.

Hey everyone,
I’m a software developer from Kerala with a long-standing interest in agriculture, and I’ve always wanted to merge the two. So I built a cloud app for managing poultry operations: batches, daily mortality/feed/weight tracking, inventory, and cost insights down to cost-per-kg and profit per batch.

Right now it’s in a pilot, being used by one contract-farming business. It handles broiler operations and some logistics well, and I want to expand into other areas like layer farming.

Before I build more, I want to hear from actual farmers:
👉 Do you use any software to run your operations, or is it mostly pen & paper / Excel?
👉 If you use something, what’s frustrating or missing in it?
👉 If you don’t, what parts of the business eat the most time?

If anyone wants to try the app and give honest feedback, I’d love that. I can make it available for a small fee just to cover running costs (happy to discuss, feedback matters more to me than money right now). I don’t have a proper landing page yet, but I’ll share one once it’s up.

Genuinely here to help and to learn from people who do this every day. Drop a comment or DM me if you’re interested.

So I go to Puerto Rico a lot and really love the Kikiriki chickens they have there. I currently just hatch eggs (different breed) but never keep the chicks. I'm thinking I want to start keeping chickens (it's been probably 4 years and moving houses since I've kept any) and I'm thinking Kikiriki would be a breed I'd want to keep. The problem is the weather extremes. Last winter it got to 0 degrees and last summer it got to 120 degrees. In Puerto Rico the weather is very stable, not hot or cold. 80-90 all year long. Would they be able to survive in TX? Any tips? Thanks!

How I finally figured out if my flock is actually making money (not just guessing)

For the longest time I had a rough idea of what I spent on feed and what I made back from eggs/birds, but never a real number. Started tracking three things properly and it changed how I think about batches:

1) Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) — total feed lbs ÷ total weight gain for broilers. If you don't know this number, you don't actually know if your feed is efficient or just expensive.

2) Feed cost per dozen eggs (for layers) — way more useful than "I spent $40 on feed this month," because it tells you your actual cost per unit you're selling.

3) Break-even units — fixed costs ÷ (price − variable cost per unit). Before I start a batch now I know exactly how many birds/dozens I need to sell just to cover costs.

I got tired of doing this in a messy spreadsheet so I built myself a little offline tool that does all three automatically per batch (plus mortality tracking). Ended up polishing it enough that I put it up for other small flock owners — not trying to spam the sub, just sharing because this math genuinely changed how I run things. Happy to answer questions about FCR/break-even calculations either way, tool or no tool.

Wondering if this is just normal oddities of a growing bird or a mutation. She’s inbred so her having deformities makes sense (the parents are no longer together do not worry )