ABOUT US:
Mark, Jud and I would like to welcome you to our mini-farm. We have both lived in Hardin County for most of our lives, and when Mark’s retirement from the Air Force was looming close, we decided to build our ‘forever’ home on the eleven acres of ground we owned.

Our farm consisted of three horses, eleven acres of land, and a beat up Ford tractor when we started. I had been raised in the country and Mark had no experience of living on a farm, just a love of the outdoors.
 
His inexperience didn’t keep him from putting his heart into the work it took for us to make a farm out of a parcel of land. He learned to run fences, ride a horse, drive a tractor, build a barn, plant a garden, put rabbits and chickens in the freezer, milk goats, trim hooves, and all the while keeping the patience to learn whatever was just around the corner.
 
Thank God and Google! If we didn’t know how to do something, we learned. Now when we look out over our place and see every tree, every fence post and every board, we can say, we put that there!
 

Chickens and Chuckles
Our venture into our farm products started with my unspoken desire to sit down at my own table and serve my family a meal that had been prepared from products raised by our own hands.  Partly because it was the wholesome goodness I craved, and the satisfaction of knowing we provided for ourselves.

We were already getting eggs from a few chicken, and since we’d ordered some new chicks to keep the eggs supply going, we decided to order some birds just for the meat. I hated the taste and spongy feel of the chicken we were buying at the local grocery, and longed for the taste I’d grown up with.

Mark was so excited when he said he’d found a good price on some birds, and he’d ordered them ‘straight run’….hoping to get half pullets for eggs and half roosters for meat.  Or so we hoped. About eight weeks later, our 50 new birds tallied up to 1 hen and 49 roosters…what a nightmare!
 
Mark had dressed out wild turkey before, so we were up to the task of dressing out these roosters.  RIGHT!  But after the butchering job we managed on bird number one, we knew we’d have to take the other 48 somewhere to be processed.  That’s when we found [SS Enterprises] a USDA processing plant….and they were within an hour’s drive.
 
Until the birds weighed 4 or 5 pounds, we had to keep them separated from the regular flock because the few laying hens we had were becoming way too popular.  The roosters were rounded up, provided free choice food and water, and stayed cooped up until they reached processing weight, and off to slaughter [they went in the back of our two-horse trailer.]

Visions of a plump home grown chicken basting in the rotisserie were replaced with the reality of [our birds lined up in the processing room] with scrawny bony breasts bared for all to see, and the plump juicy birds we’d envisioned were being packaged up and readied for the customer ahead of us…”Hey! What kinda birds are those?”… ”That’s what we want!
 
Our next flock of meat birds would be the Cornish Rock Cross. And so it was. The first flock of our CRC were raised without a hitch.  Our mortality rate was minimal, the feed conversion was good, and we averaged a 6 pound bird at 10 weeks.  Little bit on the heavy side, we decided to only grow to 8 weeks with the next batch of birds.
 
We hurriedly ordered a second batch of 50 birds, reared those chicks up to 8 weeks, and right at week 7, I walked into the chicken yard to find only 8 CRC birds.  No feathers, no dead birds lying around, just 8 birds, and the littlest ones we had at that. Where’d all the fat ones go?
 
My first reaction was they’d escaped, but they were too fat to go anywhere, but we looked anyway and while we walked the fields we ended up finding 33 piles of feathers, where coyotes had helped themselves to the birds.  How’d they know the only night the gate would be left open? 
 
They didn’t.  Apparently they’d be stalking the perimeter for a while.  While we were disappointed, and sick at heart, we were NEVER discouraged.  Our next step was to find ourselves a guard dog, [Molly] and if we ordered quick, we may have just enough time to get another flock under way before the cold weather came upon us.
 
This batch of 50 birds was a total loss.  It was entirely too late in the season, and with the construction of the kennel going on, we lost most birds because extension cords were unplugged and heat lamps turned off, and we ended up with 13 birds from 75 total.  Not hardly worth the trip to the processor, but we remembered the ‘butcher job’ and loaded them up in a dog kennel in the back of the pickup. (I had to talk Mark out of taking the birds down in the back of his little Honda CRX that gets 55 mpg.  Can you imagine the smell?)
 
Still not discouraged, our next flock of birds will be raised outdoor on grass, under protected, movable chicken yards, and they will be fed on a twice a day feeding schedule instead of free choice.  Many birds we lost were due to heart attacks from the birds having free choice feed 24/7 and they got too fat too fast. It will take longer to produce a 4-5 pound bird, but it’ll be healthier, and the living environment will be cleaner, resulting in a happier bird, and a better product for the consumer.