Sugar Creek Farm

A couple of rather contemplative chickens

I truly do enjoy raising broiler chickens. My favorite time of day right now is first thing in the morning, out in the pasture feeding my birds. It’s so peaceful…the cool morning air, the sun rising, watching the birds eat their breakfast and run around in the grass.

Right now mine are 7 weeks old, fat little things. (And they’re all named “Fred”.) The fatter they get, the more they waddle like a duck. But still they try to propel themselves faster by flapping their wings and waddling as hard as they can. If I fill the feeders and then run around the pen with feeders in hand, the birds run after me in a big wave making me feel like the Pied Piper. Or something. (Wonder what my neighbors think of me out there frolicking in the pasture with chickens.) One of these days I’m going to have to figure out how to put a video of their antics on YouTube.

I also like the challenge of raising them, i.e. keeping them alive. They do require quite a bit of hand claw foot holding. They’ll die over anything, it seems.

This afternoon we had quite a rainstorm and I didn’t get to feed them at the usual time. Finally about 8:00 tonight the rain slowed down a bit and I ran out to get them fed. There were only a handful inside the shed. The rest were all huddled under the eaves of the shed outside, squeezed in as tight as they could be. Sure enough, one was dead. He either had a heart attack from the stress of raindrops falling from the sky, or perhaps had been smothered underneath a pile of other chickens.

So at this point, with a week left until butchering, I have 122 on pasture and orders for 112. But I’ve learned never to count my chickens before they’re in the freezer.

As promised, pictures of Matt hand feeding Mr. Bull

A little scratch on the head

Can you believe that people actually climb on their backs and ride them? I can’t imagine. Matt said one day, “I think I could put a halter on him and lead him around. But I won’t.”

Week 1

Me: Olivia, let me see you lope that horse.

Olivia: Noooooooo!

Week 2

Olivia: loping fool

Week 3

I’m down the road getting ready to feed chickens in the pasture. Olivia is loping Star down the road towards me. And then Star is running. And Olivia is bouncing a foot out of the saddle. And Olivia is trying to pull on the reins. And Olivia will not grab hold of that saddle horn because that is for wimps. And Olivia falls off her rather tall horse onto the gravel road.

She catches herself on the ground with her left arm, and screams that her arm is broken. It’s sore for a few days, but actually no serious damage done.

(This will later come to be known as the first ER visit averted that week.)

Olivia is not scared, she is pissed off at her horse.

Week 4

After several days of the silent treatment, Olivia kisses and makes up with Star. They ride for over 2 hours Sunday, and the first thing she does is lope 🙂

Mr. Bull has been layed off from work for a month or so now. He hangs around in his pen, gazing at his honey’s out grazing in the pasture, longing to give out a rose or 9. Around the 4th of July we’ll return him to his duties.

This is what a bull does when he’s bored:

He broke the fence post off below ground and bent up the wire panel. (And yes, that little chain wrapped around from gate to post is what’s holding him in.

Matt feels sorry for him and feeds him corn out of his hand. Yes, I have a heart attack just typing that. And yes, there will be pictures.

With no sheep on this farm to herd, Ava takes work wherever she can find it.

I had a marketing meeting this morning. Me and 125 broiler chickens. Members of the board. Bouncing “jingle” ideas off each other. Well, I probably did most of the bouncing. They ate breakfast. But they seemed generally supportive of my ideas.

I wasn’t really looking for a jingle. What got me going on it was poop. You see I had just finished filling the waters and was wrapping the hose back up. And when a hose has been drug through the wet grass of a chicken pen, you can imagine it ends up covered in chicken poo. Which ends up on my hands as I wrap up the hose. And then onto my sweatshirt, because what else am I going to wipe my hands on out in the pasture?

And that made me think of the people I know that I could completely gross out with that. Hee hee.

And that made me think of the growing number of people interested in farm-fresh foods, raised the old-fashioned way. But most of them don’t really want to have to get chicken poop on their hands (or sweatshirts) in order to have it.

And that’s okay that they don’t want to raise their own food. I don’t think total self-sufficiency should be the goal here. Even Ma Ingalls purchased her calico. Which of course works out well for us, because we don’t mind the poop and we enjoy providing the end product to people.

And because this is a small, local business, our customers are people that are providing products & services to us in return. Teachers, preachers, insurance agents (Hi, Scott!), mail carriers. Factory workers that make socks, which we then purchase from a local store. (Almost like Ma Ingalls and her calico! Can you tell she’s my idol?) The sense of community that is fostered and grown in all of these exchanges is amazing. It’s what makes me so enthusiastic and excited about the Local Food movement.

But back to the jingle. (Finally!)

Sugar Creek Farm.
Farm-fresh meats.
Old-fashioned taste.
No pitchfork required.
Who’s your farmer?

(Said in that “Who’s your daddy?” tone of voice.
That makes me laugh. I might be the only one, though.)

Sometimes there’s a cat curled up there with her

Ava’s use of the wicker loveseat has rendered it useless for human seating. To be fair, the chickens had already started the disintegration by pooping all over it in the girls’ corncrib “club house”. So I’m trying to convince my dad that his new hobby should be building me porch furniture. Dog-proof porch furniture.

Ava has really grown since this picture!

t’the L.I.C.I.O.U.S.

Our neighbor gifted us with this gorgeous bunch of morel mushrooms. Seems everbody’s got their own way of preparing them. I soaked them in salt water, rinsed and picked through them, cut them in half then coated them in flour. Then dipped into egg and finally Italian breadcrumbs. A quick fry in some oil and we were good to go.

T. t’the A. t’the S.T.E.Y ‘shroom you’re tastey

Okay, enough of the bad mushroom rap.

Chickens emerging at 6:30 this morning

Even though making mistakes, mistakes that result in a lot of dead chickens, is one of the downsides of farming, you can least have the satisfaction of taking what you learn from those mistakes and make changes that suit your particular farm.

I gave a sneak peak at our new broiler shed last week. So I guess this is the grand unveiling. This building is based on a design found in Free-Range Poultry Production & Marketing by Herman Beck-Chenoweth.

Our old setup had several problems. One, the building was not well ventilated. In hot weather we had to go out and kick all of the chickens out of the building, and shut them out for the day.

Two, the building had a small entry/exit door. Broilers are lazy birds. They walk in the door and plop down just as soon as possible. Pretty soon you’ve got a blockage at the door end, the opposite end of the building still empty, and a whole lot of birds stuck outside for the night.

Three, in order to provide shade we had to set up tarp with tent stakes. And as we’ve seen, that’s not a good situation.

The picture doesn’t really show it, but the birds’ range area is surrounded by electric poultry netting.

This 12′ x 16′ shed has entrances the width of the building at both ends. They flip down to provide a ramp up/down for the birds. Both ramps are covered with hardware “cloth”, and one ramp also has plywood inserts. These can be used if we need to cut wind or cold, or taken out in hot weather for additional airflow.

The sides are also covered with hardware cloth. They can also be covered with 8-foot steel panels to cut wind or cold. Matt covered just the back half of the building this time (because that’s all the panels he had on hand) and it worked well. It was cold, rainy and very windy when we moved the birds out to pasture Saturday. So for the first couple of days we fed and watered them right in the shed. Monday afternoon the weather straightened out and I let them out and started feeding them outside.

The eaves are extra long to provide shade under the overhang. And they should also be able to sit inside the shed, rather than us kicking them out, since it will have adequate airflow with the steel panels removed.

The whole thing sits on skids so it can be moved with the tractor as needed. We usually don’t have to move it until the second week, but after that we usually move it weekly.

Breakfast time

What little girl doesn’t dream of the day she gets a horse? Olivia got her wish on Saturday when Star came to live at Sugar Creek Farm. There’s been much currying and brushing and a daily ride since.