Where Does Your Chicken Come From?

Most people buy their chicken in the grocery store in nice neat little packages, but how does it get there.

Well, mostly it comes from a broiler farm, like my families.

Recently, farmers in general have gotten a bad reputation, for their treatment of animals. Yes our chickens are raised in houses, but we do treat them ethically. I saw where someone posted recently on Facebook – “Treating your animals humanly doesn’t mean that you treat them like humans.”

We could get into a discussion about why God created chickens, pigs, cows, or other animals, but that is a whole other post.

Back to the chicken houses.

We have 12 chicken houses – 8 400 by 40 foot houses, about a 20,000 bird capacity and 4 500 by 45 foot houses that hold more….I can never remember…..so the long and the short of it is we have over 240,000 birds on this farm approximately every 8 to 10 weeks. This is called a batch or a flock. We raise between 5 and 6 batches or flocks a year. OK, so that is a lot of chickens.

Our chicken houses are pretty automated. There is a controller in each house that monitors the temperature, the amount of water the chickens drink, when the feeders run to long.  When something isn’t right, the controller communicates with an alarm that will call me. We all have different names for the alarm, the hubby calls it “Oh S—t,” my Father in Law call is “D-mn You.” (Sorry for the Language) I try not to call it anything profane. I usually have the kids around when it calls, except at 3 am, when the alarm calls at 3 am there is a lot of profane language.

The birds are kept in a very comfortable environment, with complete access to feed and water.

We get the birds when they are a day old and keep them for 49 to 52 days.  Over the next several weeks I will take you through a batch of chickens with us!

Right now the houses are empty. The hubby has been cleaning them out, and the gentleman that works for us is washing the equipment inside.

So, part two of “Where Does Your Chicken Come From?” will be “Cleaning the Chicken House”