Chicken Herder

The point of this series is to let you get some level of familiarity with the people who have made the FarmerSam experience a pleasurable reality.  I begin this series with Dave because I cannot imagine how I would have pulled this first year off if Dave had not been on board.

 Life is a triage.  That is one of Dave’s favorite sayings.  Well, I guess I don’t know if it is or not, but I’ve heard him say it several times, and it has stuck with me.  Triage is the part of the medical process where the cases are sorted according to urgency or survival odds, with the most urgent or promising cases being dealt with first.  It implies chaos and, to me, conjures up a battle-field setting.  Dave is very busy, and has a lot of important relationships that require his attention, but from my very first day here at the church, it has been clear that our family ranks high on whatever evaluative tool he has to determine where to invest his time.  I have often felt guilty for all that Dave does for me…but I know that’s not what he would want.

Dave is a master carpenter (at least that’s what I think of him as…you should see the kitchen cabinets he made for the parsonage).  As such, he is highly skilled with his hands and with the tools & supplies of his trade, and is generous with the use of all of them.  He made my killing cones, dropped off several piles of wood and fasteners, has been attempting to innovate a new tool for pulling my pens around, has spent serious hours keeping his tractors (and their various implements) in working order, taught me to use the bush hog, has talked through numerous design issues I’ve had, helped me solve my “I have my hens, but no hen house, and it’s getting cold” problem, and figured out how to use the tractor to dig the ditch for the electric cable which will power palace.  Dave has saved me so much time and money, it really is incalculable (by my means at least).  More importantly, Dave has supported me.  He has taken me and my endeavor seriously, and has spent a lot of himself on me.  He’s an amazing example of selflessness, and FarmerSam would definitely not be where he is without him.

Life is a triage, and more often than not, Dave is the medic.

Today I found a record dozen eggs in the palace.  It is definitely taking longer for them to hit their stride than I thought it would (ie. this is a learning process).  Even so, we should soon start averaging a dozen per day, which means the selling can commence!

Today I collected eight eggs, bringing my grand total to 30 so far. Each day more and more hens are reaching maturity, meaning that we are now outstripping our family’s ability to consume them. I am going to be e-mailing those who have requested eggs in the order they have contacted me. If you want eggs, but haven’t reserved your share, now’s the time.

I’m the sort of person who always assumes the best, but is painfully aware of the possibility of the worst.  For the last couple months I’ve had this niggling voice saying things like, “Your hens probably won’t lay any eggs.”  Once the eggs starting coming it changed to, “They probably won’t use the nesting boxes.”  I know, it’s a stupid voice, but it’s mine.  Anyway, I am glad to let you know that every egg that my lovely hens have brought into the world since the boxes went up has been laid in said boxes.  Today I had three more, two of which (a brown and a blue) were together in the same bay (#2).  It’s nice to see them sharing so nicely.

This Sunday evening, one week ahead of schedule, I found three eggs lying on the palace floor.  There they were, one blue and two brown, in danger every minute from the sharp talons of the swarming chickens.  (Do the chickens have sharp talons?  Let’s play name that movie.)  I picked them up, and yes, two were already cracked.  As nice as the chicken palace is, its floor is no place to lay eggs.  I built nesting boxes before Christmas, but had not yet installed them.  From what I’ve read, the hens would not show due reverence for the boxes until they started laying eggs, and would likely have thought of them as convenient little bathrooms.  Anyway, the coming of the eggs meant it was time to get the boxes in, so yesterday afternoon I hung a vast bank of nesting boxes along one wall of the palace.  Tonight I found the first nesting-box egg in bay 15.  Tomorrow I plan to get lights in the palace to encourage the hens to lay more frequently (like more than one a day per 75 chickens, please… after the unexpected bounty of that first day, production has dropped to one egg a day).  Assuming that the exciting new lights and boxes will work their magic, I should have eggs to sell within two or three weeks.

As to the eggs themselves, they are small, as are all eggs from newly laying chickens, but will increase in size as the chickens grow older.  They have very hard shells and wonderful dark yellow yolks.  I am now feeding the hens an organic ration, but legally cannot call them organic eggs.  My plan is to charge $4 per dozen.  This is less than the average going price for store-bought organic eggs, which, while much better than non-organic eggs, pale in comparison to these.

I enlisted the help of my daughter and her friend to move the hens into their winter residence, the Chicken Palace.  The hope was that the pens would fit through the palace doors.  If they would, I could just roll each one in, open the lid, let the chickens come out at their own pace, and then roll the pen back out.  The hope was not the reality.  The reality was that the pens were about 9 inches too wide.  Plan B was to roll the pen up to the door, prop it open and herd the chickens through the open doors.  Plan B didn’t work much better than Plan A.  The chickens really didn’t want to leave their summer homes.  This meant that I got to crawl into the pens and pull them out four at a time and manually toss them through the palace doors.

The first pen went in fairly easily, all things considering.  The second one was quite leaky, leaving a trail of hens as we went.  As mentioned earlier, the hens don’t like leaving the safety of their pen, but once they are out, they really don’t like to be caught.  This gave me some quality time chasing them back and forth around Dave’s tractors.

In the end, we finally got them all in the palace and bedded down for the winter.  In a future post I will give details on the palace and my plans for improving it.

Here is their chicken house…

and here is mine…

Notice all the space around my birds and the green stuff underneath them.  This is a big part of what separates mine from theirs…

This was the first Labor Day I ever recall working. I was on my own for most of it, but with only 13 turkeys to process, it wasn’t a big deal. John, a buddy from church, hung out for a while, just chatting, but then decided to plunge in for processing fun. He has been a game hunter in the past, so this was no stretch for him (though it may have seemed a bit unsportsmanlike). With his help, and a couple tips from Will and Sue (some farmer friends/mentors), the day actually ended earlier than I had projected…a FarmerSam first.

We still have one or two turkeys left. Most people don’t have access to as many refrigerators and freezers as we do, and so don’t have the option of storing a frozen turkey for two and a half months. If you want one, it’s not too late! Next year I will schedule the turkeys to reach processing weight the week before Thanksgiving, and will probably take orders in the spring, so stay tuned.

We didn’t do many turkeys this year (although 30 sounded like a ton when I was ordering them!).  At the time I post this, all but four are spoken for.  These are pasture-raised, all natural turkeys.  The cost is $3 per pound.  According to the books, I should have a range of weights from 15-25 pounds.  If you want a turkey, please fill out the order form.  Most of the turkeys are spoken for, so get your request in quickly.  I will honor requests in the order they come in on my website.

Important Note: I am going to be processing the turkeys on Labor Day (the 7^th, this coming Monday), and I will need to you pick-up that day in the afternoon.  I will begin processing around 7:00 am, so I am hoping to be finished with them no later than 2:00 pm.  When you order, please let me know what time you will be coming by to pick up your turkey.  The earlier you pick up, the more likely you are to get the size you want!

In all the craziness of processing week, we failed to report that our egg flock is here.  One hundred cheeping chicks arrived in their slatted cardboard travel boxes on Friday, August 21^st at the Lake Villa Post Office (we’ve been quite the hit at the post office this summer). 

These chickens are beautiful…tan ones, yellow ones, reddish ones, black ones with white on their heads,  beaver-stripy ones, owly-looking ones, and a grey one.  We ordered 75 chicks that will eventually lay brown eggs, and 25 that will lay blue.  Here are some pictures of them when they came.  Very soft and fluffy. 

Here are some pictures of them now, two weeks later.  As you can see, they are getting their big girl feathers and Farmer Sam had to put a net over the top of their brooder because they were clearing the walls with their little hop-flights.  They’re going outside tomorrow or Friday.

Obviously they are months away from actually laying any eggs.  Maybe January.  We are really excited about these chickens and providing our community with fabulous eggs.  And for now, they are providing some great entertainment value.