The only problem I see with this solution is what about the
glutton chicken? That is, chickens that love to eat and get
greedy at the feeding station? As these chickens likely are
getting more then their fair share, they will be heavier then
most. And as they are getting more turns at the feeding station,
then this will slant your sample size to be the larger bird.

Any type of sampling system needs to be random and have
enough samples that local clusters cannot influnce the result.

-Jeff


Ryan Pogge wrote:

> that seems one of the best ideas so far,
> Ill let my dad look over it,
> I will actualy be posting more info tommorow night as so many
> people replied, more "details"... look for it.
> thanks a bunch I will keep you posted.
> Ryan
>
> > A suggestion on how to weigh "chickens on the fly".
> >
> > Design a simple feeding station that will allow
> > only one bird to feed at each port at a time.
> > Place a simple scale at each port and log the
> > time of day to the millisecond and weight each
> > time a chicken feeds.
> >
> > For a sample of 100 chickens it would require
> > twenty feeding stations with five ports each.
> >
> > The stations would be placed in the barn separated
> > by a large enough distance so that one bird could not
> > feed at more than one port in a few seconds.
> >
> > Leave the stations in place to 20 to 30 minutes then
> > collect the data. 100 samples with time stamps in the
> > same 500 millisecond will be found and the average
> > will reflect the population.
> >
> > Charles.