With the maple syrup and the bees and the big honkin’ garden, you’d think we have enough agricultural pursuits to keep us busy. But then we thought, how about some animals? Other than the sneaky squirrels that have been stealing all the birdseed from the bird feeders, that is. We kind of think of chickens as “beginner livestock” – a nice way to ease into raising animals. Several families we know raise chickens for eggs, but we don’t make a lot of omelets in our house. However, we do eat a fair amount of chicken, so we thought it would be fun to raise some fryers (aka “meat birds”) to fill the freezer for winter.
But our growing to-do list has been vastly outstripping our available hours lately, and we finally had to admit that we weren’t going to get a chicken coop built in time to buy and raise chicks this season. We’d need to find business partner. Thus was born our chicken joint venture with L&L Poultry Producers – our friends Lou & Larissa. They’ve been raising layers for a couple of years now, and have all the infrastructure in place. They even have a coop on wheels that they can move around the yard to give the chickens a little change of scenery (and keep from killing the grass)! So they’ve agreed to raise our chicks for us until we’re ready to go out on our own. 
Our baby chicks were born a week ago Friday, arrived at the airport on Saturday, and we got to visit them on Sunday. Two-day-old chicks are just as cute and fuzzy as kids’ picture books would lead you to believe! Twenty six fuzzy little puffballs were happily hanging out in their new home, called a breeder. They’ll stay in the breeder for the first few weeks, munching on specially-formulated “starter feed,” with a heat lamp to keep them toasty warm, like Mama Hen would. Which ironically, is quite similar the heat lamp at your friendly neighborhood fried chicken joint.
