​Cluckin and pluckin

Hi there, poultry connoisseur.  We should have told you long ago, but BOTL Farm has chickens.  A lot of chickens.  We've had them for so long that they wander both the pasture and the freezer.  You may ask yourself, why have we been keeping this information from you?  We have no excuse.  All we can offer you is apologies, and the story that follows... a story of the birds and the bees.  Just kidding, the bees all died last fall.  Let's talk about the birds.

Once upon a time, BOTL Farm received a delivery of young chicken-lets.  If you've ever been a steward to such a flock of tiny dinosaurs, you know they will occasionally plug up their poopers and die, and that you have to wipe off the pastie butt like five times a day.  We did that.  We kept their bottoms as clean as the morning is early.  When the chickens were old enough to leave the cast iron bathtub and head out into the brooder, we built a square brooder.  Chicken books tell you to avoid square corners, because the chicken-lets will pile up in the corners until they crush each other, but who could build round corners without a sawmill that can cut quarter inch bendy boards?  We did not have such a thing.  Yet.  We cared for each chicken, but nature must take it's toll like a pile of tiny chickens in the corner of a foam insulation box on top of one poor tiny chicken.

We tried to get the chickens to lay eggs in January.  They normally don't lay as many eggs in January since it's dark and cold.  Like Sweden.  We tried light therapy, giving them wooden eggs to sit on, reading them poetry, showing them anatomically accurate Youtube videos of chickens producing salable sized eggs with minimal shell defects, and gently massaging the chickens over top of the egg laying boxes.

We stand firmly behind economists that subsidies will encourage specific behavior, which may have unintended side effects.  So we decided to raise our chickens on a diet that is free of corn and soy.  Our chicken feed is 100% organic all natural corn free, soy free, GMO free, bits of delicious chicken dinner.  They love it.  And they look good eating it too.

Further, chickens, like DJs, like to scratch.  Both records and piles of wood chips.  We faced the challenge of putting our chickens out to pasture in a way that allows them to dig around and be happy chickens, and also allows us farmers to periodically move them to new pasture land.  We needed something that was a large chicken coop on wheels... something like... a $200 RV from Craigslist.  That's right.  That looks like a chicken coop to us.

After a year of herding birds and collecting eggs, we decided that what we needed was even more chickens.  So we collected our top 200 eggs and put them in an incubator.  The incubator was a plastic tote we had to rotate 6 times a day.  After just the right number of days, out of the eggs popped... tiny dino-errr.. chickens!  And such it was that we turned 200 eggs into 130 chickens!  Magic!

As math and genetics would have it, that was a lot of roosters, so we went ahead and transferred about 61 rooster from the pasture to the freezer by way of the ole plucker.  Not too many feathers left on those roosters.  We hope.

So BOTL Farm now sells eggs and chicken!  Stop by today for an infinite supply of eggs, sold for $6 in a lovingly made carton of 10 or whole chicken for $5 a lb.  Corn free, soy free, GMO free, good for your conscious and good for the world!  Spread the world and eat the bird products !