For me the chicken came before the egg.

Trying to get back to my roots, I decided to start a semi-organic, pseudo-free range chicken farm.

Living in a quiet little nook in Wilson, I’m surrounded by dogs, horses, and a few
goats. Why not add some chickens to round out the mix, I thought? So, I did it. I got chickens.

What do you need to begin an endeavor like this?

About 50 bucks in materials, a little bit of time and imagination and some understanding housemates.

It started with the kind of research usually involved with writing a thesis paper. I researched what chickens eat, what kind of shelter they need and other important facts, like how you even use 40 eggs a week. But, let’s not count our eggs until we get some chickens. …

It seems, and this was all news to me, that you can get chicks from any pet or
feed store. You can even get them mailed to you from numerous locations around the country, almost guaranteed to make it to your house alive.

But chicks don’t lay eggs. So, finding hens already laying eggs proved to be a
daunting task. It took around half a dozen phone calls and wild chicken chases (sorry!) along with committed determination to decipher the rantings of a back woods Idaho mill operator to finally find four mature chickens.

Of course, once I finally found my chickens, I had to figure how to get them. … They were about two hours away. Not to waste the opportunity for a road trip, my girlfriend and I decided to add a climbing stop to our journey. We set off for rattlesnake-infested Massacre Rocks State Park near American Falls, Idaho.

The climbing there is really fun, mostly basalt and ancient, hardened mud flows. It’s a great mixture of slippery steep slab, crimpy face holds and sharp crack climbing. It also happens to be bolted with an assortment of metal objects found at your local hardware store.

After avoiding rattle snakes and negotiating the mean streets of hillbilly Idaho, we found the shop that would sell us the birds.

The store looked as disserted as the old set of train tracks running next to it. At one time, it loaded harvested crops onto train cars for distribution in far away cities. Now they sell chickens to hippies from Wyoming.

After a walk into the back to retrieve our new feathered friends (pets? yard companions?), we had four Black Sextant laying hens, called “the lady birds.”

It worked out well and the chickens started laying right away, on average three eggs a day. Eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! It’s amazing how creative (or desperate) you can get with ways to cook eggs.

We created an unofficial food co-op where we traded to friends for fresh veggies from their gardens. People saved kitchen scraps to help feed the ladies, their favorite food, peaches!

After the initial set up, running a chicken farm such as this is pretty easy. A 50 pound
bag of feed costs about $12 dollars and lasts a couple of months. Feed them, water them, talk to them lovingly and collect fresh eggs.

The hardest part about raising chickens is keeping your dogs from killing them. I think
the ladies have it pretty good. They spend their days running around the yard and their nights safely tucked away in their cozy little coop.

But, now that winter is fast approaching what’s in store for the lady birds? Two are
going to a friend’s coop to keep on cluckin’. In the future, if my living situations allow, I’ll definitely have hens again.

In the meantime, the remaining two lady birds are to be guests of honor at the first annual “Hairy Porter Chicken Fry” this week.