Picking Up a General to Plow the Fields

Chapter 263: Chicken Coop

“Naturally!” Lian Fang Zhou said, “Otherwise, what will we do with such a large area? I just don’t know where to put them.”

Both of them were people of action.
Discussing it that night, they formed a plan and were ready to go the next morning.

Since they planned to raise chickens, a chicken coop would need to be built.

Before planting the cotton, Lian Fang Zhou set aside a large piece of flat land at the bottom of the mountain to build a coop and hired a few extra workers to get started.

The herringbone-shaped wooden sheds were built side by side, independent of each other, 13 meters long and 6 meters wide.
The high roofs were covered with cedar bark and about half a meter above the ground.
On the left and right, there were several wooden steps, one meter wide.

The floors were not sealed.
After the frame was built, wooden strips, each 2 fingers wide, were nailed along the open bottom, leaving a finger wide gap in-between each one.
During the night, the chicken poop would fall through the gaps and could be cleaned out from the bottom with a special shovel.
This also helped with ventilation and stopping the spread of disease.

Considering that it was not wise to mix chicks and adult chicken, two rooms were built inside the coops.

In addition to these small rooms, there was also a smaller room for the hens to incubate their eggs and raise the newly born chicks.

Newborn chicks only need to be cared for two weeks before they could be moved to the small rooms.

On the ground next to the chicken coops, there were a number of flat areas built out of smooth blue bricks for putting down food and water.
These were scattered around the area to prevent the chickens from feeling too crowded while eating.

Lian Fang Zhou intended to raise two thousand chickens this year.
It was enough to build two such chicken coops.

According to the original plan, she placed the two chicken coops on the north and south side of the mountain and surrounded them with fruit trees.

After the coops were built, she sprinkled herbs, such as mint and wormwood, all over the foot of the mountain to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes and give the chickens somewhere to peck.

After the coops were built, Lian Fang Zhou specially ordered a customized a two and half meter high barbed wire fence from the city to prevent weasels and wild predators.
A brick foundation of about ten centimeters was laid along the boundary and the barb wire was placed on top.

After this, Lian Fang Zhou went to the Lin Family Orchard and brought back the thorny roses to plant along the wire fence.
Not only did this improve the scenery, they also provided shade and blocked the outside view, solving several problems at once.

Once these tasks were arranged, Qin Feng organized some people to manage everything, so Lian Fang Zhou did not need to bother.

However, to fill a chicken coop, she needed chicks.

There were no modern hatcheries these days and it was obviously not reliable to buy them from rural households.

Most of those chickens were raised by themselves and the eggs which were not hatched were sold.
How could people be willing to sell them? And even if they did want to sell their chicks, how much could they have? It was not an easy task to buy two hundred chicks, let alone two thousand!

Lian Fang Zhou asked many people and eventually found that there was a family in Xiaowang Village on the eastern side of the county who sold brick-incubated chickens*.

Brick-incubating chickens was a special skill that very few people knew.
There was, at most, only one or two families in the county that could do this, often not even one.

The Wang family in the Xiaowang Village had done this for generations.

They had a special room built in their house and when they needed more chickens, they would put the eggs inside a brick-heated room, one by one, and incubate them at a high temperature with a charcoal fire.

There was no other trick, it all depended on experience.

In this era, with no thermometer or equipment to rely on, it was not easy to maintain the temperature suitable for incubating eggs and it could only be done by feel.

Without twenty or thirty years of experience, it would fail.

Chicks could not be hatched if the temperature was too low and if they did hatch, they would have poor constitution.
They were difficult to feed and lethargic.
If the temperature was too high, the eggs would be cooked and never hatch.

The head of the Wang family in Xiaowang village was fifty years old and today he was presiding over the incubation with his thirty-year-old son as a student.

Whenever it was time to incubate the eggs, Old Man Wang could stay beside the brick room all day, eating and drinking in the same spot and almost never leaving, in order to feel the temperature of the brick room at all times.
Sometimes, he would be there for almost 24 hours a day, sleeping in place.

When all the chicks hatched, Old Man Wang would have an unkept beard and dirty clothes, his eyes sunken, his face flushed and haggard, and so tired that he could sleep for three days without waking.

The hatched chickens would then be sold to people wanting to raise chickens in the spring, so the incubation was only done at this time.

One chicken cost eight to ten copper coins but when it was fully grown, three or four chickens could produce a lot of eggs.
When you looked at the money saved from buying eggs, you could see that it saved the household a lot of money.

When Lian Fang Zhou, Ah Jian, and Lian Ze arrived and Old Man Wang heard that she wanted two thousand chicks, he was a bit embarrassed.

At most, his family could only incubate 700 chicks at one time.
And once they had sold the chicks, they would still need to rest for ten or so days before they could continue.

Lian Fang Zhou’s order of two thousand was too much! Although he wanted the money, he was powerless.

Lian Fang Zhou smiled: “This is fine! You just need to sell me a batch three times.
Don’t worry, after the incubation, you will still have enough time to rest before the next one.”

Lian Fang Zhou knew that this type of meticulous work was controlled by experience and the worker’s mental state needed to be in the best condition.
If there was the slightest deviation, it would ruin everything.

Old Man Wang was very happy to hear this.
He nodded his head, laughing over and over: “This is great! No problem, I will be able to start the incubation in a few days.
When the batch is almost ready, I will ask someone to send you a letter and you can drive your cart over to get them.
I will prepare some bamboo baskets for you to take them home in.”

Lian Fang Zhou was naturally overjoyed and thanked him.
However, she couldn’t help but ask: “Since you can incubate chicks, I wonder if you can incubate ducks?”

Old Man Wang was taken aback.
Brick incubating chickens was an ancestral skill that had been passed from father to son for generations and yet they had never thought of leaping from chickens to ducks!

“This, I’m afraid…” Old Man Wang spread his hands and smiled, thinking in his heart ‘I’m so ashamed!’.
Wouldn’t it have been a great source of income if they had thought to incubate ducks!

But quickly, he did not feel so bad about it.
Though it would be a good if he could do it, it was not so easy to do.

TN: I have no idea what kang chickens (炕 鸡) are.
I googled it every which way I could think of but nothing was coming up except for some food dishes.
However, I did find that 炕 means a heated brick bed, which I think relates to how they were being incubated.
So, I decided to change it to ‘brick-incubated’ chickens.