Last week, Prisca, Alaina, and I met with John Wilson to interrogate him about his chicken operation. We learned an INCREDIBLE amount including the fact that raising chickens is incredibly involved. I have enough raw information in the recording of our interview to write a much longer blog post than any of you would like to read, but I just want to point out some highlights and take aways that I particularly found interesting/helpful.

1. We do not need a rooster! Chickens will lay eggs even if they’re not fertilized. If we plan on hatching chickens, we would need a rooster, but if we’re just going to keep buying baby chicks or chickens that are a few months old, this isn’t a concern.
2. We will most definitely need more paid positions. The amount of daily labor that chickens require is definitely more than what can be done by just Sarah or Sarah and a few volunteers. Successfully raising chickens would require multiple part-time student employees or one full time employee. This would require us to get more funding – likely from grants.
3. Chickens need raw protein and some sort of calcium in their feed. The protein is because chickens are omnivorous and need the protein as a foundation for their eggs. They need the calcium so the shells that they lay can be strong. Prof. Wilson grinds his own feed out of corn, raw animal fat, and oyster shells. We would likely be purchasing feed, but now we know we have to look for this!
4. There are different breeds of birds that are bred to produce eggs or meat – not usually both. We want to look for laying chickens rather than meat chickens. An implication of this is that if we have to kill our flock for some reason (potential for disease, age, etc.) we would have to find a use for the dead bird that wasn’t direct consumption. Perhaps we could add this to compost once that gets back up and running.
5. Know your customer – if we want to sell these eggs, we have to have a really good sense of how much Gilbert’s, students, faculty, or a farmers market shopper would pay for eggs from LaFarm.
6. Chickens can be trained! We would actually have to train them to go back into their coop after roaming around LaFarm for fertilization purposes and to lay eggs. Hopefully, we our coop will have attractive enough roosts where our chickens will want to go there to lay their eggs. Otherwise, we could unexpectedly come upon eggs throughout LaFarm!