Want to raise your own chickens for meat? Here’s a FREE chapter on determining how many chicks to order from our new book “Dinner From Scratch: How To Raise Meat Chickens”

If you’ve ever wondered how satisfying it might be to raise your own meat, we’ve got a new book for you to check out.  It’s called “Dinner From Scratch: How to Raise Meat Chickens“.  And it has everything you need to know, from detailed materials lists, to step by step guidance for every phase, to checklists you can use daily to ensure everything is moving along smoothly.  Plus some personal reflection thrown in to keep us grounded.

FREE Download: Egg Cost Calculator and Hen Productivity Tracker

Have you ever wondered how much you’re spending on the eggs your hens lay?  Are you saving money by not buying from the store?  Here’s an easy to use, FREE calculator to figure out exactly how much you pay for a dozen of your own backyard eggs.   

Farm Fresh Chicken User Manual [updated]

I am always humbled by the experience raising our own chickens, watching the transformation that meat must undergo. It is a labor of love for us, and we are grateful to have the opportunity and land to support this highly engaged, satisfying work. And this satisfaction is multiplied when we share with friends and family. With so much going into this meat, we wanted to share our techniques for basic storage and preparation so the meat is at its best for the dinner table.

Farm letter: Welcome baby chicks

After much thought, calculation, and preparation, the broiler chicks have arrived. They are a feisty bunch,  with some being so bold that they charge and peck at our fingers.  This is what we want, though. Active birds.  Broilers have a reputation of being lazy and prone to health issues, so we do a lot to encourage activity in our birds.

Why Pastured Chicken is Better than Organic [updated]

All natural. Cage free. Hormone free. Free range. No antibiotics. Organic. All these terms and more clutter the labeling for “healthy” chicken and eggs throughout the stores and markets. But what do they really mean? I’ve discussed “organic” meat already (see post here), and discovered that just because something is organic doesn’t necessarily make it perfect. In the end it comes down to the farmers themselves and how they treat their animals. It turns out that some practices are more valuable than others, too.

Why is Raising Chickens Like Swimming in the Ocean?

When we decided we were farmers, something changed in my brain, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The first step was when we took control of a fraction of our food. Eggs. Suddenly there was one less item on the shopping list. I felt lighter, happier, just thinking of these eggs as they started appearing in our coop. Something we didn’t have to depend on others for. A drop in the bucket, maybe. But it felt like so much more. 

Wait… are people stealing our ideas on Instagram?

As you may have noticed, we’ve been more actively posting photos and videos to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.  We find this to be fun and it helps us to connect to other people who are as obsessed with chickens and good food as we are.  But lately it seems like when we post something, within a few days someone else posts something very similiar.  Are we really that influential?

Kale and Winter Squash Strata [recipe]

I am a huge fan of breakfast, I  wish we could have breakfast meals all day long!  It is one of the main reasons I wanted to get chickens, in order to have fresh eggs every day.

Differences Between Raising Heritage Chickens and Cornish Cross for Meat (Part 2 – Processing)

I don’t usually spend much time sharing the experience of processing chickens because usually people don’t think they want to hear it. But in the interest of sharing our observations, here goes!  This post will not contain any photos of actual processing.  

Differences between raising heritage chickens and cornish cross for meat (part 1)

Today we harvested our five biggest heritage cockerels and it was an eye-opening experience. We didn’t kill them because of the 4 am crowing, or the fact that one of them bit our daughter, or because we are in dire need of adding more chicken to our freezer.  We did it because this is why they are here, why we are raising them.  We are exploring the sustainability of heritage breeds, as well as taking note of our experience raising different breeds.  They are here to feed us, and we thank them for their role.  We took the opportunity to compare to a batch of cornish cross chickens we also raised for meat, and in this post I’ll go over some of the key differences in the actual raising of the birds.