The first time my husband brought up the idea of raising meat chickens, I thought he was weird. I’ll be honest.
He wanted to raise 18 of these smelly birds first in our basement, gross, and then in our backyard where they just sat and got fat and pooped.
Then he mentioned that we would also be butchering them in our yard too. Sorry, what?
I said have fun! And then refused to use them out of the freezer.
Listen, we all have to start somewhere right? Lol. I was just slow going. Because the next year, ugh, he wanted to raise them again. I said why? We still have all 18 birds in the freezer! 😂
But after our first son was born, and I had to start feeding and providing for another human life that I created, I felt the nudge to look at food differently. I started caring about where it came from and what ingredients were involved in the process. Was this processed? Is it real food? Do chickens really come from other places besides the grocery? Lol again.
Slowly, after raising 15-18 meat chickens per year, I started to come around and realize what kind of control we held. After we moved back to Ohio, just a couple years after those first few birds grew up in my basement, we graduated to raising 22 meat birds. Whoa. We had to find space to store 22 whole birds! I didn’t even know how to cook a whole chicken, but I felt secure knowing they were in my freezer.
Fast forward a few years, we now raise 100% of our meat right here on our homestead. (If I could find a way to raise wild caught salmon, I’d do that too).
See I didn’t start out in this homestead journey knowing, or even approving of each new thing we ventured on.
Did I also mention when we first married my husband had the audacity to put raw milk in our house fridge? (nose is stuck up here).
HA! Now I’m the one with a milk cow, and he’s the one refusing to milk her. ;)
My whole point to this post is that sometimes we build a homestead because it looks dreamy. Sometimes it’s because we grew up doing that, so we continue the skills in our future families. But sometimes it’s because we desire to provide the best of the best for our kids & family, even though it looks or seems gross, hard, intimidating or impossible.
I’m here as proof, it’s possible. It’s possible to completely shift your mindset from “you’ll never catch me doing that” to “that needs to become apart of our lives”.
If you find yourself in the same boat, check out the resources on our website, and consider coming to one of our homestead events. We teach lots of classes on all homesteading topics and are here to help you! It’s a passion of ours to see more small scale farms popping up across the area. So if we can help in any way, we’d love to!
This summer we will be offering chicken butchering classes. Small, 10:1 classes where you’ll get to butcher alongside us and practice for yourself. We will teach you everything you need to know about raising and butchering chickens. Including the best (and cheapest) place to buy chicks, how long it takes, how much to budget for feed, which breeds are best for you, how to butcher, what equipment is needed, how to package, and how you can get your meat paid for.
I haven’t offered this to the public yet so if you’ve read this far, consider yourself an insider. Lol.
And if you’re wanting to be an early bird ;) go ahead and sign up for the class now! It’s open, just not announced yet.
Each class comes with everything I listed above, as well as lunch, handouts, and everyone will go home with one chicken that they butchered and packaged.
CLICK here to learn more.
