News from the Hen House!

Hi all! Locavore Lady here with a story on life on a small farm and how small farmers strive to provide safe and healthy local food. Not only am I passionate about sourcing local food, I love to grow it! I have a large garden that is just coming into its own and my kids and I raise chickens for eggs and meat. The kids also take some of their birds to local fairs as one of their 4H projects. Out of all the different species I have raised over the years, chickens are THE most enjoyable! The kids love them too and it shows in their superior care our chickens get and the championships our kids have been consistently bringing home over the years, for their unique and purebred varieties, crossbred layers and meat chickens.

Our laying hens are never turned into stewing birds, for a few reasons. First of all, they give us big, beautiful, brown eggs for 3-4 years so I feel the least I can give them in return, is a safe and warm place for them to live out their natural lives, which is about 5 years. Second reason we don’t turn them into stew or soup, is that there isn’t much left of the bird after producing and laying eggs non-stop for several years. We keep our birds under lights all winter so they continue to lay. That means their systems never take a break. A typical, healthy laying hen produces 1 egg every 26 hours or so. The older the bird, the longer time it takes to lay an egg and the bigger the egg. My third reason for not turning them into stew or soup is that I love listening to them in the backyard and the fact that when we start new young birds, they are the wise elders that show the young ones how to find food out in the pasture and where to lay their eggs. Not to mention, knowing where to go when it gets dark and you don’t want to get eaten by a coyote, fox, badger, skunk, raccoon, owl, hawk, wild cats or dogs and weasels.

Life on a small farm for most animals is very pleasant due the reduced number of animals and thus less work for the farmer. Most of our friends that also have small farms, allow their animals to be outside as much as possible in order to increase the quality of life for the animals but also to reduce the amount of maintenance and cleanup needed. Animals kept in a barn all the time, or in a cage all the time, need a lot of care in order to maintain their health. My family is active in 3-5 other sports at any given time, involved in school activities and 4H projects so “keeping it natural” is our best fit option.


That being said, one of the things we do every year in order to maintain the safety of our eggs and meat, is to test all adult chickens for Salmonella Pullorum. The test is a simple blood test with a serum that detects the presence of antigens in their system to the S. Pullorum bacterium. I am a Wisconsin State Certified Pullorum tester and thus was crazy-busy this past weekend testing many local 4H kids’ flocks. (Our local fairs start this week.) It is really quite simple, in theory, to do. You catch the bird. You prick a vein under their wing for a drop of blood to appear. Catch the blood droplet with a special tool and mix with a drop of serum.

If the bird was a carrier or actively fighting Pullorum, the blood would immediately start to clump up into little purple dots. That would be very bad as all the birds would then have to be destroyed in order to minimize the contagious nature of this for other flocks in the area. It has not been seen in Wisconsin in a very long time, several decades, due to the aggressive testing of flocks around the state and nation.

Like I was saying, it sounds like it would be simple, right? Wrong. First you have to corral the chickens, then catch them one by one, band them with identifying leg bands, and then immobilize them in a way that doesn’t hurt them but allows for the blood test. Lucky for me, my daughter is a GREAT chicken wrangler and was able to assist at all the farms we went to over the weekend. We also enlisted the help of some friends Saturday night for our own chickens. We have roughly 50 chickens of eight different breeds, some being easier to catch than others. Some of them are quite big and some are small with some being noisier than the others in their protest of being pulled off their perches for the evening. We had one Sumatra rooster truly sound like he was saying “help” before I even approached him with the needle!

3 hours later, all our birds were done and settled back into their coop for the night, with their feathers a bit ruffled but no worse for the wear. We also maintain a USDA certification for meat and egg production and sales. Some small farmers do this and some don’t. Some small farmers are organic with some just using organic practices but held off getting the certification due to the high cost in obtaining that certification. We are one of those farms. We are organic as possible in our practices but the cost of becoming certified has been cost prohibitive.

Cornish/Rock cross Champion Meat Chicken on R&B Acres LLC farm, Oregon, Wis.Get to know your local farmer by going to www.localdirt.com and finding one near you. Read their biography and order their products. Know your farm, trust your food and bring fun back to the dinner table!

Thanks and enjoy the day – Renee, aka Locavore