2022 Meat Chicken Season Recap!

Phew! We finally wound up our 2022 meat chicken season and butchered the last 130 chickens on Monday. Now, we just have the last of the large chickens to cut into pieces and then we will retire the processing facility until next year (and also give it some fun updates!). It has been both a great and a challenging season for a number of reasons and we are already making plans for 2023 based on lots of things that happened this season. We wanted to share about our season and our plans with you to give you a better glimpse into exactly how all of this happens.

We’ll start this blog off with a big win: as many of our probably already know, in 2022 we received our Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) certification for our meat chickens! Certified Animal Welfare Approved is an independent, nonprofit farm certification program and is the only label that guarantees animals are raised outdoors on pasture for their entire lives on an independent farm using truly sustainable, high-welfare farming practices. It is also the only label in the United States to require audited, high-welfare production, transport, and slaughter practices. Their standards were developed in collaboration with scientists, veterinarians, researchers, and farmers across the world to maximize practical, high-welfare farm management. In July, an auditor traveled to the farm from Maryland and spent an entire day observing our operation and our slaughter practices. The standards for meat chickens are very strict, and as a result, there are only a very few farms Certified Animal Welfare Approved for meat chickens in the country. The certification has standards and requirements for every single aspect of the process: where we get our chicks, how long they are in transport, how we raise them in the brooder, how we transport them to pasture, how we shelter, raise, protect, feed, and water them on pasture, the number of chickens per square foot of shelter and pasture space, how we catch them to slaughter, and how we slaughter them. They analyze our feed, our mortality rates, our shelters, and all of our farm records. Besides some (ok, a lot) of paperwork, we did not have to change any of our practices to gain our certification, and starting in August, the AWA label began appearing on all of our chicken products. We are really proud to have gained this certification, and feel it is a great way to communicate with our customers about how our chickens are raised. If you’d like to learn more about the AWA certification, and even read through the standards, information is available on their website by clicking here.

Now, we’ll move on to the challenges we faced this season. Since 2017, our chicks have been shipped to the Livingston Post Office via USPS when they are 1 day old from a hatchery in Pennsylvania. As soon as they arrive, we make the 10 minute drive to town, pick them up, and bring them back to the farm. The journey from Pennsylvania takes approximately 40 hours and the chicks are carefully packed into special ventilated chick boxes where they keep each other warm. However, shipping can be stressful on chicks and there are a lot of variables that determine how they do. Sometimes the weather on the east coast might be really hot or really cold, and the weather here in Montana might be the opposite. That makes it hard for the hatchery to pack the ideal number of chicks into each box; depending on the weather, they put more or fewer chicks per box to help regulate the temperature. Additionally, sometimes other things can happen, and chicks can end up in hot vehicles, sitting in the holding area of a plane, or handled roughly. Until this year, we have had very, very little shipping mortality with our chicks. In 2021 we received batches of 400 chicks every 2 weeks, and there would often be 0 dead on arrival, and sometimes one or two. However, this year, we received 1,000 chicks once per month, and we had multiple shipments where we had a LOT (sometimes hundreds) of chicks arrive dead. It was both heartbreaking and frustrating to see, and it complicated our season as we then had to wait for replacements, which disrupted our already tight schedule for raising and slaughtering this many chickens in just a few months. After talking with the hatchery, we assume the chicks were getting too hot during shipment, and after talking with other meat chicken farmers around the country, we have determined that this is an increasingly common problem as the USPS is stressed, understaffed, and overextended. While we are refunded for the cost of any chicks that arrive dead, another consequence of heat stress is that the surviving chicks can grow slower and not do as well, leading to increased mortality in the early weeks, lower weights, and/or taking longer to reach butcher weight, all of which is costly in one way or another. Our meat chicken season is so short because of our climate that we don’t have much time to make up for these losses, and if we have a group that doesn’t do well or grows slower, there really isn’t anything we can do about it.

In order to try to remedy this situation and mitigate the risks, we have decided to change hatcheries next year. We will be purchasing our chicks from a hatchery that buys their hatching eggs from the same hatchery we have been using in Pennsylvania, but the new hatchery is located in Oregon. Even more important, this hatchery ships chicks directly from their closest airport via air cargo to the Bozeman airport, where we will pick them up. This means transport time will be reduced from 40 hours to just a few hours, and there will be no time waiting in post offices or traveling in vehicles, and very few chances for them to get too hot or too cold. When I spoke to the Oregon hatchery, they said they began having so many issues with mortality that they no longer even offer shipping via USPS to Montana. We are hopeful that this new arrangement will greatly reduce shipping stress, leading to less mortality and more robust chicks. Fingers crossed.

This next challenge is more of a double-edged sword. In 2022, we had unprecedented demand for our meat chickens. At first glance, this may seem like a really great thing, and of course it is. However, it also means that we will not have chickens for sale for very much longer, and there will likely be a substantial (6 months or more) gap between when we sell out of chickens and when we have 2023 chickens available. Our goal has always been to raise enough chickens during our short, short season to have inventory to sell throughout as much of the year as possible. In years past we have run out of chickens sometime between February and April, before having the next season’s chickens available in June. However, this year, we have sold every single chicken we butchered every week since June, which means we haven’t stockpiled any for the off season. Currently, we have about 100 chickens left in the freezer, which is 1 large wholesale order or a few weeks of individual sales.

Every year since 2017 we have raised more chickens than the year prior. One big barrier to raising more chickens has been freezer space. In most areas of the country, farmers and food producers can rent commercial freezer space in a large freezer warehouse. However, there is one commercial freezer rental business in Bozeman and it has a long, long waitlist and very little space available. Freezing and storing chickens is a particular challenge: chickens need to be frozen upright on shelves, and once they’re frozen, they require a lot of space to store. If you throw them all into a big container, box, or a chest freezer to freeze, they will dent each other while they freeze. Also, because they are shrink wrapped, they need to be frozen upright to prevent leaking which would ruin the packaging. Once they’re frozen, they’re like trying to store bowling balls — unlike packages of sausage or pork chops, there is no great way to efficiently store them in boxes or on shelves. In order to try and solve this space issue in the long run, we sold our rental Tiny House to finance the construction of a huge walk-in freezer. Our current walk-in freezer is 8x8x8 feet and is barely big enough to store 1 week’s worth of chickens and our pork. Our new freezer is 13x35x8 feet and it is well on its way to being complete. We designed the new freezer to be big enough to allow us to store more chickens than we think we’ll ever raise. We are also planning to offer freezer rental space to other local food producers to ease the burden of the freezer bottleneck in our area.

So, what does all of this mean you can expect for next year? The new freezer means we can really expand the number of chickens we raise in 2023. This year, we purchased 4,000 chicks. Next year, we will purchase 8,000. Again, our goal is to have chicken available to our community for as much of the year as possible. In 2022, we sold a record number of Chicken CSAs — 60! While our CSA program is super important to us, as it helps to fund our early season costs before we have anything to sell, and has also been a great way to get to know our customers, it was a lot to manage this year. Next year, we will have fewer CSAs available and there will be some changes to the CSA program. Most notably, we will not be able to deliver CSA chickens to your home in any capacity next year — either by themselves or as an addition to an order. CSA chickens will be available for pick up on the farm or at any of the Bozeman farmers markets (there are over 30 during CSA season!). There will be more details about next year’s CSA in the new year, but, if you know you will want to purchase chickens in bulk or participate in our pick-up-at-your-convenience CSA program, plan to purchase your CSA when sign ups open in late winter. With fewer slots available, we expect they’ll sell out quickly.

Increased capacity and production hopefully also means we’ll have a more consistent stock of chicken pieces, and will be able to put some into storage for the winter, as well. We’ll be able to continue to supply a few amazing restaurants like Little Star Diner and Shred Monk with local, pasture raised chicken as close to year-round as possible. We are also hoping to be able to offer FRESH (never frozen), just butchered chickens intermittently throughout the season. We’d love to open up the farm for fresh chicken pick ups once a month or so. We have tons of ideas, first we just need the chickens.

If you purchased a CSA, whole chickens, or chicken cuts from us this year - THANK YOU! Your support gives us confidence to grow, and motivation to problem solve issues as they arise, which they inevitably do. If you want to have a few chickens in the freezer to get you through until July 2023 when chickens will next be available, you should buy them now. We are so grateful to get to raise your food.