Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Starting Out

Our family has had chickens is some way, shape or form for at least 5 years.  After having a few chickens and hatching our own chicks we decided to move up in numbers.  A year or two ago we ordered around 60 chickens and started selling the eggs to some friends at church.  Soon the people at church spread the news of our great tasting eggs,  and their friends wanted to get a hold of some of our pasture-fed chicken eggs too!  After some thought we ordered some 100  more!  We separated the hens from the roosters once they were old enough.  The roosters were in a coop and fenced in area close to our house and we moved the hens to a pasture and coop across the valley from our house (A few of the chickens weren't old enough yet to tell if they were hens or not so we left them with the roosters close to our house).  And one day, after having been out of town for the day we returned to find that all but 4 of the 60 chickens (that were across the valley) were dead! As far as we know the huge amount of deaths were caused by the chicken farmers worst nightmare- the weasel.  This crafty little critter kills more than it needs and uses the feathers for it's nest.  We suppose that it was a family of weasels that wreaked havoc on our farm.  The worst part was, that we get our chickens young- little chicks.  And so, this batch was a week away from laying when they were killed.  That meant that all of our money on feed and buying these chickens was wasted!  We never got any eggs from them! :-(  There was nothing else we could do now.  We processed the remainder of the chickens (the ones that were in the coop near our house) saving only 2 roosters and all of the hens.  After awhile we decided to order some more and pick up business again.  That batch of 100 should arrive tomorrow!  Hopefully we will have some pictures up soon!

So there's a little bit of Solid Rock Ranch Egg Factory history for ya!

God Bless!

Caleb & Seth Wassenberg
Co-Owners of SRR Egg Factory

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