Diversify your Farm (4)...

As with many of our ventures on the farm, we kind of stumble into things. We stumbled into the Alpaca business which led to the yarn business, etc. When our son lost his colt he expressed interest in Nigerian goats after seeing them at the Southwick Zoo. Amy did some research and purchased our first Nigerian goat. A baby female that we had to bottle feed. Her name was Delilah. Delilah led to a few more Nigerians including a few bucks. We still have about a dozen goats and still sell the baby's when we have them, but our newest farm animal is not really that new to our farm.

When we first moved to the farm I had always wanted to have chickens pecking around the yard. Nothing said farm like a few chickens. I borrowed a Styrofoam incubator from a friend and he gave be a bunch of fertile eggs. I knew very little about raising chickens from eggs, but I did it. I built a brooder box and a medium sized cage. Once the chicks were born, I kept them in the brooder box until they had their feathers and then moved them to the bigger cage. Once I felt they were big enough, I let them free range on the farm. So, we have had chickens on the farm for quite a while.

This past year, Amy decided that she wanted to focus on the chickens and start raising some to sell. We borrowed a bigger incubator and started filling it. It kind of became an obsession. We no longer would eat the eggs, we would immediately put them in the incubator. Amy was always excited to have baby chicks hatching almost every day. We would advertise on Craigslist and we would sell out of our chicks. This encouraged us to raise more and more. Amy started looking for more interesting breeds and became more serious about hatching specific breeds. The chick business took off for Amy. She was able to supplement her income nicely. We would have people calling and stopping at the farm almost daily looking for chicks.

We even tried our hand at Meat Birds. We raised 40 meat chicks and processed them ourselves once they were big enough. It took a little getting used to, but we ended up selling quite a few and the rest filled our freezer. Knowing that the chicken we were eating were cared for and live normal lives is piece of mind. Plus the meat was delicious!

Amy started sourcing her birds from other farms in order for her to keep up with the demand. We connected with a farm in Brooklyn CT. Recognizing that there was a market for quality chickens of specific breeds, we formed a "Micro Hatchery". After some hemming and hawing, we all sat down and conjured up The Hatching House. We decided that our hatchery would be better than the large hatcheries in the sense that we would focus more on quality and not quantity. We would only produce so many of our chicks per month and then close the month out. We also did not like the practice by most hatcheries to grind up the male chicks. We discussed different ways to utilize our male chicks in order to not waste a life.

We also offer our rooster chicks at 15 for $25. These are chicks you can raise for meat for about $1.60 each. Once our business grows and we start getting higher numbers of roosters, we plan on donating the processed chicken to local food banks and food kitchens. We will have several outlets for our male chicks in order not to waste a life.

Our stock birds are well taken care of. They are provided generous outside pens and fed Non-GMO feed that is locally sourced. We will make sure that our micro hatchery will develop to meet the needs of our customers. Check out our website www.TheHatchingHouse.com.

My next blog I will talk about how we transitioned our horse/alpaca/goat farm into a chicken breeding farm!

-WF