Henry Smith- Pastured Poultry Production Manager, Market Lead & Resident Jokester

Greetings CSA community! My name’s Henry and I work on the pastured poultry side of things on Fifth Crow Farm. I’m writing on behalf of the all-stars of the pastured poultry operation, the hens and Henri the guard dog, because they can’t type. Here on the farm we have about 500 heritage breed chickens. We’ve got California Leghorns, Welsummers, BlackAustralorps, Rhode Island Reds, and Americaunas pictured left). Heritage breed chickens are self-sufficient breeds of chickens that were bred before the modern industrialized agriculture era, they are the kind of chickens that would’ve been on your grandparents farm -assuming if your grandparents farmed, if they didn’t.. well you get the point. Heritage Breed = Good.

So back to the chickens, our chickens are pastured so they get moved to new plots of grass weekly. I hook up the coops to a tractor and voila! Mobile coop. Our coops have two doors, one to the nesting room and another to the roosting area, so our coops are coupe coops. Being pastured, our chickens can poke around the grass, scratch the dirt, and express their chicken-ness to their hearts content. These birds are very satisfied with their egg-sistence. There are two mobile coops, one coop with under 1 year old hens and another coop with over 1 year old hens. Much of the older flock is molting at the moment, molting commonly occurs naturally around 18 months, therefore many of the older hens look ridiculous.

All yolks aside, things have been quite busy on the management part of the pastured poultry operation. We’ve been working on creating new labels for the egg cartons. We also are in the process of getting our flocks Animal Welfare Approved by A Greener World! Some more exciting news is that we just ordered new chicks that will arrive the first week of October! Along with the daily grinds of maintenance working with chickens is a challenging yet rewarding job. Things are going well over here, and the year seems to be flying by. Isn’t it hard to believe that it’s already August!? Well that is all that I have to say, thank you for reading this and thank you for all of your support!

All the very best,

Hens, Henri, and Henry