Chicken first, then the egg

"What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Depends who you ask, but I know you won't have one without the other. A staple of the small family farm, a few laying hens and a feisty rooster seem to have their place in history well established. Before the days of refrigeration as we know it, fresh eggs were best collected today and used tomorrow. Every old farmhouse has at one time or another had a mother hen scratching in the dooryard with her chicks.

Some time after World War II many farmers in Maine built huge chicken houses and started their own flocks to supply the nation during it's "white meat" movement. Sweltering heat, dust in the air and a smell that would make the paint peel, are just a few of the conditions that confined birds must endure during their short life. Some of these old broiler houses still exist around the countryside today, but most now store motorcycles and classic cars and the smell of chicken manure is only a memory.

It seems that raising chickens is the gateway animal of choice for many new farm families. I've heard it said that this is partly because of the efficiency with which our laying hens can turn table scraps back into the main course, in just a matter of hours. Unlike most other small farm animals, chickens can eat and thrive on a wide range of feeds and in many different environments.

The recently fashionable poultry catch phrase is "free range". "Free range" is just letting the birds get all or part of their feed from the earth. Worms, bugs, grass and weeds are all fine food for the small flock, when the season is right. We let our hens have the run of the barnyard during the Spring, Summer and Fall, but only until they find our vegetable garden, then back into the yard until the garden is gone by. We've found that things like "free range dogs", "free range hawks" and "free range foxes" are a potential problem for our "free birds".

Here in Maine, the month of March is the time when we place our order for this year's chicks. We have usually raised about twelve to twenty meat birds (broilers)and we try to get about ten or a dozen new laying hen chicks as well. Fresh eggs and a plump chicken on the table, raised by our own labors is a great reward.