The Transition

I always love fall. I love the actual season and weather change (give me the hearty comfort foods, the football and the cool mornings!). This time of the year we’re starting to take stock of what hay we have stockpiled from the summer months, preparing for our last graze or two around the farm and starting to clean things up around the farm. Usually, the beginning of fall is when we can actually get to all the projects we over-ambitiously thought we’d complete this summer ah.

I also love the fall for another reason… it signals the end of our poultry raising season! Raising poultry is a marathon for us that starts in April and finally winds down in October. This year we raised over 14,000 chickens on pasture, which we feel really great about. That’s our most chickens raised ever here at Alden Hills. It’s a little hard to explain how much work it is to raise poultry on pasture, especially in larger quantities with a shorter Midwest growing season.

In peak season, we’ll have as many as 3 batches of 1,900 chickens each on farm at a time.

Daily chores on that many birds usually takes two guys 3-4 hours a day alone. Since we move our chicken pasture coops to fresh pasture every day, the daily labor is constant. In peak season we can be feeding out as much as 2,000 lbs of feed every single day. That 3-4 hour mark to get chores done usually assumes that everything goes well and we don’t have to make any fixes or repairs on the fly. With that many pasture coops and infrastructure involved there’s always some tweaks to be made every day.

The other physically exhausting part of raising poultry is processing and storing the end product. Every batch means 3 separate 4AM mornings of catching, crating, loading, and then unloading 650 chickens. Once that happens we also bring the frozen product back and put it in our freezer by hand… we do this every 3 weeks throughout the summer on top of everything else we still have.
So, autumn can feel like a shock to our systems as we move down to our last batch of chickens right now and we can get chores done in a mere hour with 2 guys! It’s a welcome shift though, one of the gifts of the farm is that it gives seasonality and rhythm to our lives. The land and animals put us in touch with that seasonality, there’s a season and time for everything. A time to work very hard and a time to rest and recover. We aren’t quite at the “rest” part of the season but we can feel the transition coming and it feels great.