Chicken
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.
Goat
Graces
After reading and worrying about the hormones and antibiotics and health issues associated with homogenized cow’s milk, and not being really big milk drinkers, I thought owning a milk goat would provide our family with enough pure healthy milk I set out to find myself a goat. Lo and behold, we had neighbors wanting to downsize their milk goat herd, and off I went. Everyone (but me) knows a goat can get lonely, so I was talked into two, goats who were already in milk. Tabby and Milk came into our lives and they were the perfect goats to get a couple of greenhorns started into milking. I’ll never forget that cold February morning, it’s 20 degrees outside, and I’ve got to get these goats milked before their udders burst. I’d milked a cow many years before, but geez, this was not the idyllic scene I’d imagined. This was work, and it was cold and it wasn’t easy. My arms were killing me, and I feared I was going to run out of sweet feed before we got that first milking done! Jud and I managed to get the two of them milked enough to release the pressure, but it took an hour for us to get a quart of milk from the pair. Boy! were our hands and arms sore the next day! I can’t imagine how those two goats must have felt. Patiently, they allowed us to perfect our milking technique and Jud, my 12 year old son, can out-milk anyone! Milking time has become the ‘dinner table’ time for us. When the weather’s mild, and we’re all three in the barn milking, or tending to our animals it’s one of the most pleasant times we can have as a family. We catch up on all those little things we missed. We love sharing milking time with our farm visitors, in the hopes that they can take a farm memory of their own home with them. Tabby and Milk are as patient with strangers, as they were that first time with us! They regularly give us a gallon of milk at each milking and from the fresh milk, came yummy cheese and yogurt, butter and cottage cheese. We ended up feeding excess milk to chickens, dogs, and hated to see it ‘wasted’, so we began offering it to others. We have several customers who come regularly during the milking season, and rarely do I throw milk down the sink anymore.
Rabbit Reasoning
From the goats, we had
rabbits….let me explain. In the
country, you meet folks, they have ‘things’, and soon you have ‘things’
too. That’s how we started in rabbits. When
we bought the goats, those folks had rabbits, so we ended up with rabbits too.
Mark built a nice setup for the rabbits, increased his brood, and started
his bunny business. With the
intentions of raising live rabbits to sell to commercial processors, we found
ourselves at first with more rabbits than we could eat ourselves, but not enough
to make a profit at the hatcheries. So
we froze the excess. Living in a
multi-cultural community near
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