Spring Is Chick Ordering Time!!!

Spring  is normally the time when people order their chicks for the year. Here, we are hatching chicks all Winter and really don't need to order more chicks, but as a help to area residents who really don't have a lot of money to meet the minimums of 25 chicks, we offer to combine their orders with ours. It works out good for everyone.

We really wanted just some Mallard Ducks, Chinese  & Dewlap Toulouse Geese this year. However not so many people ordered chicks through us, so we ordered a few exotic chickens for "yard ornaments" in order to meet the minimums. So we will have a few Phoenix and Golden Laced Wyandottes strutting in our yard this Fall!

Years ago, before agribusiness changed well, EVERYTHING, folks would order chicks in the winter from a hatchery (unless they hatched their own) and raise them through the summer on bugs, grasses and young plants. Come Fall, the chicks would start laying and would lay for roughly a year before they went into their first molt. The chicks would molt in the Fall of the second year. Flock owners would then decide who lived through the Winter (and the 2-3 month molt). The lucky ones would start to lay again in the Spring, roughly and their eggs would be fewer, but larger eggs. They would get to live for several years before being culled.

The unlucky hens became "spent hens", or hens that were of no real use while in the molt AND on Winter feed of expensive grains. Some of the old girls would fall into this category as well, depending on many things. The spent hens became "stewing hens". If you are under 40, this means little to you unless you grew up on a farm, but when I was young and up to the mid-70's, stewing hens were in every grocery store! These were very large chickens and usually cost a bit more per pound than the fryers They were quite tough if you tried to fry them, so you stewed, fricasseed, or made soup out of them. Same by the way, with mature roosters. These birds were large, but tough. However, the flavor was like nothing you youngsters know as "chicken" today!

Well now, "spent hens" are sold to commercial soup makers, TV dinner makers, bouillon makers, MacNuggets and a host of other commercial "human chows". Stewing hens are rare!

But "in the olden days" Fall and early Winter meant chicken soups, fricassees, stews and an assortment of chicken dishes that called for low, slow cooking that would render the tough old birds, tender!

Come Spring, the new chicks arrived with the bugs and fresh grasses and the cycle continued! Here, we are trying to do exactly that again and use the cycle of new growth and bugs to lower our feed bill. However, as old, retired people now, we do love to watch the poultry in their yard, so I could not resist getting a couple of "yard ornament, eye candy" birds!

If you are serious about having an operational poultry, or just chicken operation, you need to learn this cycle and follow it in order to get the best return from your poultry expenditure. Culling is tough! Selecting birds to die, that you have interacted with for up to a year, or more, is hard. Harder still to kill them! But such is the farmer's cycle of life. These birds exist because YOU brought them to your farm. The way to feed yourself, is to honor their lives by being as humane as possible with them, particularly when it is time to kill them. Watching a couple videos of how commercial chickens are treated at slaughter, helps you to understand, and to follow through.

Since I mentioned the commercial processors...... yes, much of the time the animals are treated barbarically! Poultry, sheep, cows (steers), fish and hogs sometime suffer or are treated horrifically..... chickens and hogs particularly.

We have to remember though, that there are some 320,000,000 people in America alone that need to be fed. Through the 20th century, we allowed AND this was required to occur, in order to provide enough meat for us all. There is a better way. Provided enough of us undertake the task of animal husbandry AND provided that agribusiness does not buy your local politicians and "convince" them to pass MORE laws restricting our ability to provide our neighbors with quality animal products! 

For now, order your flock and start your cycle! No one can stop you from growing your own food.... yet!