Foxhollow Poultry Farm

With a week's worth of elbow grease and 12 hour days we have finally created a space clean enough to call our hatchery. The walls are white, floor is epoxy painted, vented heater, lots of lights, incubators, hatcher,new work counter and eggs!    The space began as a dirty dusty, cob webby, collect all storage space that hadn't been used or cleaned in several years. The difference now is nothing short of amazing.                                  

This weekend we will move in a desk, books, and file cabinet to be able to keep records of all of our hatches. This new room will finally supply a great place to do paperwork for our poultry business as well.

 We set over 100 heritage turkey eggs and 300 chicken eggs for a sample run. It is so difficult to wait for the 3 weeks (chickens) and 4 weeks (turkeys) to go by. I feel like a kid at Christmas...waiting. Waiting for the eggs to hatch. I've been told I am worse than a mother hen. Okay, I can live with that...probably pretty close to the truth anyway.

Our hatchery has a capacity of up to 1200 eggs total in a full batch, depending on what type and size of eggs are set. Needless to say we will have chicks and poults for sale to local area customers this year. All of our poultry will be born and raised right here. We will no longer have to drive hours and endless miles to pick them up. We should have no bad surprises opening the boxes upon our return home. No need to order in chicks and create stress for them. They will go directly from the hatcher into the brooder with food and water available immediately. From the brooder they will go onto grass and hoop houses. Less stress for everyone...myself included. As my friend Ken said "Time to get cracking!"

Just about over our last push to get our poultry schedule wound up for the year and then a break.........oh, no that's right we have to start planning for an increased schedule for next year.  We are adding another 20 acres for birds next year. This season has proven even better than I thought it might with the addition of  more restaurants to our customer base and our regular customers ordering more frequently. Heck of a good year.

The turkeys are going to market next Sunday and that will be our final meat birds for the season. We have made 2 trips to the processors already.  Can't wait for this to be over as it is a LOT of work moving the turkeys until they reach their final destination. Each turkey gets moved about 6 to 7 times from the field to the grocers shelf or customer's arms. I think I have lifted at least 7 tons this year already.That's a lot of turkey.

We are now Animal Welfare Certified for our meat chickens as well as our turkeys!! It always makes me feel good to achieve that certification as it indicates that we are doing a good, humane and sustainable job of raising our birds.

Follow us on facebook (foxhollow farm) and twitter (foxhollows) as well. The posts are much more frequent on those social networking sites.

Will post more after Thanksgiving if our arms don't fall off first.