Chicken Farming Update
Whew, what a whirlwind! We’re sorry we have been so quiet here recently. A lot has happened in a short amount of time, but we are back and wanted to provide an update on our first batch of chickens and our research.
In case you missed it, here’s our first blog announcing our chicken research and plans for the year!
We have grant funding to do research on supplementing our pastured chicken with our typical non-GMO corn and soy based feed versus supplementing with organic non corn and non soy feed. The research not only covers the production side to help other farmers interested in raising corn and soy free pastured chickens, but also the nutritional differences in the meat between the two types of chickens.
We are excited to continue doing research and to send a test batch of chickens from this first batch in for nutritional testing. However, while raising the first batch of chickens, we ran into some difficulties.
We initially had issues when the chicks arrived on our farm at one day old. We purchase chicks from a local, family-owned hatchery in Iowa and unfortunately had poor quality eggs and hatching issues, which wasn’t their fault either. Sadly, we lost a larger number of chicks, even though we cared for them properly. Thankfully, the rest of the chickens remained healthy and we were able to get them out to pasture at three weeks old after we finished building our new pastured chicken hoop house!
We sure feel spoiled with our new and improved hoop house, equipped with automatic waterers, hanging feeders and four sections to separate the four groups of chickens for our research. The hoop house allows us to move them to new pasture daily. We pull it with our truck early in the morning when it’s cool while another person walks inside with the chickens to make sure they continue moving along. The hoop house allows the chickens to have shade from the hot summer sun, while having access to grass and bugs each day.
As we watched the chickens grow, it became quite obvious the chickens supplemented with non corn and non soy feed were growing much slower than the chickens supplemented with non-GMO corn and soy feed. We realized we would need to change their butcher date so the chickens were large enough to provide high quality meat for your family and ours. Finding butcher dates is already difficult because there is such high demand and so few butchers, but it was especially tough on short notice. Thankfully, we were able to get butcher dates at our butcher AA Poultry Processing a few weeks after when the chickens had more time to grow.
We are so happy to say we have a large quantity of chickens (whole chickens, chicken breasts, chicken legs, chicken wings, chicken liver, etc.) and they will be listed on the website in just a few days on July 18 at 1 PM! More chicks from our hatchery arrived on the farm yesterday and are healthy and growing already! As you can see by the smiles on our faces, we love getting to care for our livestock and land in the best way we know with family by our side.