We Bought a Farm: Baby Chicks Arrive

It's always an exciting time when baby chicks arrive at the farm. While laying chickens are the most exciting because, let's face it, we don't eat them ... meat chickens are almost as exciting.

There is something completely marvelous about receiving these tiny little chicks and eight weeks later processing them ourselves and filling up our freezers with all the chicken we need for a year!

Here is a video of how we get the chicks out of their packaging and into the brooder as fast as possible. We want the temperature in the brooder to be close to 95 degrees. This was a cold day for June.

You will notice that we have to:

• Count the chickens.
• Dip each of the chickens in their water to "awaken" them to the fact that they need to start eating and drinking.
• Fun Fact: A baby chick has all the nutrients they need from the egg they emerged from to live 48-hours before they need to start eating and drinking other stuff. (Thus the reason you can ship them immediately after they are born.)
• Fun Fact #2: There are two little "layers" in the brooder that you hear Abigail talking about. These are not meat chickens. These are random other birds that the company asks for permission to send to you free of charge if they have a surplus they need to disperse.

It's especially exciting when the shipment arrives alive and thriving. When after 24-hours, the vast majority are doing great, and everything appears to be working correctly and well, we feel really good about our mad farming skills.

Of course, not to be a pessimist, but this is farming, and we always have to be prepared for something to not go completely as planned. Shortly after getting everyone settled, Jacob discovered that we had a chick acting very oddly.You can see it in this video below. (If you listen closely you will hear our wwoofers Jake and Jacob making a few funny jokes to the end to lighten the mood.)

Jacob and JB made the decision to put this chicken down as there is a contagious issue that it could have been. 

For now, we have had 310 out 314 chickens alive and pecking around the brooder! They will remain in the brooder to control their temperature for two weeks before we move them out to the pasture.

We Bought a Farm: The Highs (and Lows) of Raising Animals

I've heard it said that if you are going to raise animals, you have to be comfortable with those animals dying. 
It is true. I know that. Processing day is always bitter-sweet on our farm. 

But this year it was even more bitter than usual.

The night before we process our birds, we always bring the chickens out to a "holding area" near where we are going to process the birds. (Jacob and Tijmen named this area the "Thunder Dome" so that's what we call it now.) 

This time we made a poor decision. We moved the birds at 3:30 in the afternoon on a 99 degree day. (It is abnormally hot here for September this week, and this particular day just happened to be one of the hottest we've had all year.)

It's funny how you can look back at something and see the error of your decision but fail to see it ahead of time. (Thus the famous saying "Hindsight is 20/20.) At the time, the heat crossed all of our minds, but we had the Kotynski family with us so we thought, "Well we have a lot of people! It's a good time to do it, and we can do it fast!" So we went for it!

And a few hours later, when we went down to do a check on the birds, we found that we had lost TWENTY birds to heat/stress. We can't be sure what killed them, but we have to think that the combo of a very hot day and moving them across the farm in that heat in a hot truck contributed to their death. They had plenty of water and shade, but it wasn't enough.

I can't tell you how hard it is to lose animals. But it is especially hard to lose animals right when they have finished their job and you are getting ready to process them. Those birds would make us about $25 a bird. And then you factor in how much it cost to feed that bird for eight weeks and the cost of buying the bird. That's about $13. So all said and done, their death cost us about $38 x 20 birds. This means it was about a $760 error!

But money is only a small part of what you feel badly about ...

Not only that, but their death was probably not a nice one. That also makes us sad. We strive to give our animals only bad moment in their life. I hate losing animals unexpectedly and unfortunately. This seems odd when you consider that we are raising our animals for meat for us to eat. I can't really explain how it feels. Farming really changes your perspective on so many things. 

All that aside, processing day was a HUGE success. We processed right under 100 birds in 2 hours! We had them in the freezers before lunchtime. Considering that the first time we processed we had four people and it took us until about 1am to process 82 birds, this was incredible speed. We have really refined our process!

Here are a few videos from processing day: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3.