Chickeness

[This editorial was originally posted in the May/June 2011 newsletter of the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association. I’m the editor of the APPPA Grit]

My chickeness is on full display in the neighborhood and my meatheads (that’s what I call my Cornish Cross broilers) have proven to be quite the attraction. This spring I de-
cided I was going to move to a day range model; so, I built a cattle panel hoop house. And I covered it with a recycled billboard tarp, and enclosed it in poultry netting. There’s nothing out of order so far, at least as far as APPPA members are concerned.

I placed my first batch of 100 broilers in the front yard right next to the road. Not only would that grass benefit from some concentrated chicken fertilizer, but I wanted to advertise a little bit. I hoped to generate some business.

I’m getting attention, alright. Cars practically come to a stop as they idle past.  I wave. Sometimes the gawkers wave back. There are almost always some chickens out in the yard, so it’s not like people have to look very hard to figure out what’s going on. But my wife hatched a good theory on why our chickens are getting so much attention.

Most of the people in my immediate area raise crops—corn, oats, soybeans. When they see real live animals outside, especially chickens, it’s a novelty because everyone knows chickens grow inside a coop.

In fact, a neighbor stopped because my three week old meatheads looked the same as his chickens did three months ago, and he said they were now big and had a hard time walking. One of the farm stores sold him a ―dual purpose bird, but he quickly realized he wasn’t going to get any eggs.

So we talked chicken for a while, and I offered to process his chickens; he wasn’t interested in eating them. So I ended up buying his fat broilers because I needed a small batch of chickens to break in the mobile processing unit that my wife and I bought.

The very next night, another neighbor stopped to ask if I was the guy that was going to be processing rabbits and chickens. He heard I was putting in a processing facility. So I pointed across the street to my MPU, and said there’s my facility. And of course, I said that I’d do his rabbits.

As I had hoped, putting the meatheads on display increased my visibility, but not with potential customers. Instead, what I’m doing is sparking interest and drawing questions from other growers. The exposure gives me a chance to talk about pastured poultry, APPPA, and local food. So, I’ll take it.
One of my goals with the MPU is to make it easier for people to raise small backyard flocks by mitigating the chicken processing problem by providing an accessible processing option. If I can get those people using a pastured production model, that’s all the better.