Preparations Day

It’s the first of May, and even though Mother Nature can’t decide if it’s raining or snowing outside, preparations are underway for the creation of a nice, warm, snug place for this year’s arrival of the first round of baby chicks.

The coop that we use as our brooder house doubled as the overwintering duck coop this year. Earlier in the week, Kara had hooked up the summertime duck house to the farm’s ATV and drug it from behind the spruces that line our lane and into the barnyard for our quacking friends. Their thick feather coats means that the adult ducks don’t mind this wet, windy weather at all, quacking raucously as they all want to stand facing the wind and rain, soaking it in.

Inside their vacated coop, the deep bedding pack all has to go. It’s a mucky job as ducks are quite talented at making everything wet and soupy, and the coop needs time to dry and the barn lime to work its magic.

This small coop on our farm has a unique story, as it started its life as a shower house at a local resort. It had been drug out to a hunting shack back in the woods behind the farm and used as a shelter for a generator. In 1998, as we were preparing to try a summer living up at the farm and having a few chickens, it was a major family project to jack up the generator house, load it onto skids, and drag it back down the logging paths to the barnyard. Members of the Fullington family (first owners of our farm) helped us pour a fresh foundation for the soon-to-be-coop and set the building in place.

In 1999, our first summer of having chickens, we shivered and shook and ran space heaters along with our heat lamps to keep those first 27 chicks warm in the surprisingly chilly June nights. Soon after that, we were insulating the 12×8 foot coop, repurposing Masonite board to keep the little peepers from eating the fiberglass.

As our homesteading practices expanded, our birds soon outgrew this tiny coop, but we’ve kept the raggle-taggle hand-me-down building going, partly as a nod to its interesting history and partly because it continues to make a good coop for broodering. The insulation and small size mean we can keep it much warmer than our bigger coop next door.

The first round of chicks arrives either tomorrow or Wednesday, so today is time to trick out the coop and have everything warmed and ready. Last night, we added an oil-filled space heater to help take off the damp chill and have a head start on warming the building and concrete floor.

The first order of business will be to start shredding paper. I have two paper shredders that I keep around just for making chick bedding. While the first layer of bedding for the little fuzzies will be wood shavings, day-old chicks can sometimes confuse this with their food and eat the bedding, which does not digest well and offers no nutrition for them. Not a good combo! So, above the wood shavings, I spread a layer of shredded newspapers to create a soft, fluffy, easy to walk over layer that they aren’t as interested in eating.

Then we’ll hang the heat lamps and the heated coop cozy panel that sits up on short legs. We added this to our baby chick supplies a couple of years ago, and they love it! The little ones scoot underneath like it’s a momma hen and have warmth right there at their backs. It also helps them to feel safe, like they have a comforting, darkened place to go. It’s adorable to watch them enjoy their heated sanctuary!

Then it’s time to lay out all the feeders and waters, filling the feeders with the custom-made mash we source from local grain growers. I’ll wait to fill the waterers at the last moment, as I’ll want to use warm water along with sugar and electrolytes. The little ones arrive through the post office very thirsty, and if they tank up on cold water, they become quite chilled. Warm water is a much better start for their introduction to their new home.

All this attention to detail for the preparation of their environment means our chicks have an amazing start infused with love, care, and intention. 25 years of baby chick experience means we’ve honed the process to an art form—rounding corners with cardboard to avoid them squishing each other if they become spooked, making looped cords from the ceiling so the heat lamps can easily be adjusted higher or lower as temperatures change.

Care at this level happens when our agricultural models are at a scale that still allows for personal care of small to medium sized groups of livestock. As we unpack the boxes of chicks into their new brooder home, I dip each beak in the warm sugar water, helping the chicks learn how and where to drink. This is our lived ethic of how we believe animals should be raised, just like how we care for our sheep during lambing, as shared last week. The choices we make as growers—and the choices we make as food purchasers, where we vote with our dollar for the type of farming practices we wish to see carry forward—matters. It matters in the coop or barn, in the pasture, and on the plate.

This week, take time to learn the story of how your food is tended. Let’s all be a part of making the right choices in practices for the animals in our care. See you down on the farm sometime.