A Crash Course on Chickens [By Jen]
We inherited our first chickens from a friend who lived on Main St. in Etna. They were her prized possession, but she couldn’t keep them anymore. So we went, under the cover of night, and collected each one by hand from their coop, transporting them into a dog kennel. Chickens are always easier to move at night because their deep sleep makes them motionless and calm. They were the most beautiful chickens we had ever seen – Cochins, Ameraucanas, and Brahmas, and they were delightfully plump and had feathers on their feet. They would become good friends with the lonely rooster named Chuckles, an old Indian Game Bird who had lost his crow from living alone and had taken up residence in an old shed on the ranch.
Chuckles was on cloud nine with his new friends, and he was joyfully restored to his antics as the busy protector of the flock. In those days we had to learn that the best way to collect eggs was not in your pocket. Overwhelmed by the thrill of finding an egg, we would inevitably pick it up and put it in the closest pocket so as to take it home and marvel at it. Any experienced chicken keeper will tell you that an egg not placed promptly in a safe place is an egg gone to waste. On our way to put the egg on the counter, one distraction after another would prolong the journey and all of a sudden, “CRACK!” Leaning over the truck bed to grab a shovel was the last straw and now you have egg yolk dripping from the chest pocket of your work shirt.
Learning to be a chicken keeper is what many promote as the best first step into homesteading. They are small animals that give a relatively fast return on your effort – plentiful eggs and an efficient meat source. In exchange, we just had to provide a safe place to roost. Chickens are a great first step into homesteading; they provide a crash course in all the realities of livestock rearing – death and life close together, vulnerability to predators, eating but failing to produce, and all the while, providing a fast protein source that is delicious and nourishing.
By our estimation, they remain an excellent first step into homesteading for our students at the ranch, because they also are approachable and require a lot of busywork. Like kindergartners writing their ABC's a thousand times as an introduction to the discipline of learning, a new farmer can practice the disciplines needed to be broadly successful by completing the mundane, and constant, chicken tasks.
After that first small flock, Craig came home with a wild idea. He had been reading a book about raising poultry on pasture, and he was alive with a vision for what our little farm could produce. He told me confidently that we needed to get one hundred laying hens and one thousand meat chickens. I looked at him like he was out of his mind, but I did not protest.
We ordered the birds, and we got to work. Over the course of the summer, shipments of around one hundred chicks arrived at the post office in cardboard boxes with air holes, peeping all the way home. Craig and I learned so much that first summer about how important all the small details are for successfully keeping a large group of chickens – building mobile coops, gathering and washing eggs, selecting the best breeds for our purposes, and for keeping the chickens off the highway (just kidding, we still haven’t figured this one out!).
Craig and I have only grown in our affection for keeping chickens over these years, even when it’s felt really hard. We’ve stuck with it through parasites and drought, through seasons of our large flock producing very few eggs, through owls taking up residence in our coops and helping themselves to the flock, and through so many more challenges and adventures.
We ourselves have been transformed into farmers by the chickens’ teachings, and we continue to recruit new farmers to the fold through students in the Rockside Student Program. There is nothing quite like unlikely farmers becoming unlikely friends – especially under the mentorship of a chicken.