All About Chicken
Want to know how we raise the chickens that you eat? Many people ask. So here's the scoop:
Baby chickens are ordered from a small hatchery in Iowa. We've ordered from a few places in the past, but have decided the healthiest, happiest day old chicks come from Decorah Hatchery in Iowa. They are shipped on the day they are born and arrive at our local post office the next day. They usually pull in to the Monroe post office around 4:30am, at which point our phone rings and the guy or gal at the post asks us to come retrieve the peeping birds. We go get them. The peeps below are about 4 days old.
We raise Cornish Cross birds. They grow relatively fast, and produce a lot of white meat. We're going to try some ole fashioned black chickens this summer too.
So when they come home from the post office, they go into a brooder that keeps the environmental temperatures at about 95 degrees. They stay under the brooder for about a week without ever peeping out. After about a week, they get hot and hungry, and start coming out of the brooder. They can come out from the sides of the brooder any time they want. Our best brooder is in an old insulated horse barn. We have also converted our personal, two and a half car garage into a brooder for up to 1000 chickens.
The chickens spend weeks two & three peeping and rambling about their brooder and the space around it.
At about week three to week three and a half, they head outside to either a stationary house, or a moveable house. They sleep at night in their houses, and wander the pasture during the day. We put up fence that keeps raccoon, coyote, fox and the neighbor's hungry cats away. For every 100 chickens, they get about 1/4 acre of pasture. That's a lot for chickens. Sometimes, even more.
Here's their feeder below! I am pretty sure anyone driving our Gator could open a chicken fence and have a chicken parade, because they've become used to the sound of the Gator bringing food. In order to ensure that a majority of their food comes from pasture, we sprinkle their grain right into the grass.
As for the grain they receive, we special order a mix of feed. A non GMO mix. It makes up a good percentage of their diet when they are little, and much less when they are on pasture.
People often ask if our chicken is organic. We aren't certified. We don't really plan to be certified. Everything we do with our chicken, including the pasture on which they graze, is eligible for certification. But in order to get certified feed for our chickens, we'd have to have it trucked in from a town about 4 hours away. Your chicken would be about 5 dollars a pound at that point. So we can't do it.
Healthy, happy chickens raised here...
