Chicken producers talk about providing enriching environments for their birds, but none of the large producers ever provide trees for their chickens to climb. During the day, a growing sequoia is an enticing place to hang out, either underneath it or up in its branches.
I certainly don’t want to lump Mary’s Chicken with the likes of Foster Farms or Tyson, but even an outstanding farm like Mary’s Chicken which takes chicken welfare seriously can not provide the rich environment like a man and his hoe®.
Every chicken at a man and his hoe® has a story. Lucky had an unfortunate accident as a chick. Somehow she scraped the back of her head and for several weeks had to be separated from her siblings and mother while her wound healed. We kept her in a wire cage next to her siblings so she wouldn’t feel isolated. Even so, it was not an easy time for her as she so wanted to be running around with them. Unfortunately, chicks can’t help but peck when they see blood, and if we had let her run with her siblings, she would have met with an unfortunate demise.
Once her wound healed, we were able to set her free. Now she cuts an imposing figure, and has a habit of laying her egg in one of the dog houses. If we don’t fetch her egg quickly enough, the dogs get a tasty snack. We just have to keep our ears attuned to her “I’ve hatched an egg” cackle between seven and eight in the morning to fetch the eggs before the dogs get it.
The chicks which hatched December 19, 2013, are four months old now, nearly a month old. They are getting quite independent and running ahead of their mother. She’s the one trying to keep up with them now.
Some mothers stop their child rearing around now. Others continue for another month or two. We’ll see how long she keeps on the job.
Each chicken is unique. Each egg is unique. The variety of colors and patterns of chickens is endless. With each new chicken you can see evolution at work, trying new colors, patterns and personalities. The differences can be very subtle, but look closely and you’ll see them. And each chicken lays a slightly different egg every time. Over the life of a chicken it amounts to an incredible variety of eggs just from one bird. Life is always trying to better itself, trying this color, that shape, testing to see what will endure.
Buying eggs in a supermarket is downright depressing. The industrialists who supply the market with billions of eggs do their best to stamp out this riot of egg variety. By devoting all their energy on keeping costs down, they are depriving consumers of the joy beautiful eggs can bring. One amazing aspect of my chickens’ eggs is the sound they make when you tap them together. Close your eyes and gently tap these eggs together and you hear the distinctive clinking of bone china. You’ll never hear that from commercial eggs.
The variety of meat chicken can provide is truly remarkable. Below is the leg and thigh meat of a roasted, fully grown rooster. The flavor and texture is very similar to a mild goat roast. If you closed your eyes and ate this rich meat, you would have no idea it was chicken.
Gina Bisco in her article Rediscovering Traditional Meats from Historic Chicken Breeds, describes the traditional chicken meat classes, broiler, fryer, roaster and fowl, which were used until the 1940s to describe the various types of chicken meat.
This is chicken?
Up until the 1940s, the age at which a chicken was butchered determined its meat class. These classes are no longer used as modern chicken farming has dramatically speeded up the rate at which commercial chickens grow. Most now grow only six to eight weeks before they are processed. They eat voraciously, exercise little, and become fat birds in the blink of an eye. If humans grew at the speed modern chickens do, we would weigh over 300 pounds by the time we were two years old. At that speed, the traditional meat classes become meaningless as there is no difference between a six week old chicken and an eight week old chicken.
Don’t click this link if you are the least bit squeamish, but you get a good idea what modern chicken farming is about in the video: 45 Days: The Life and Death of a Broiler Chicken. Don’t worry, you’ll never find such chicken at A Man and His Hoe. Chickens here are hatched from eggs incubated by loving mothers, and raised with the care only mother hens can provide.
Trussed rooster
A fully grown rooster is quite impressive when it is trussed and ready to be roasted. Like all chickens which forage for food and walk long distances every day, most of the meat is on the legs and thighs. The redness of the legs and thighs shows through the firm skin.
A roasted rooster
And roasted, the deep color of the leg and thigh meat is even more evident.
A rooster like this is slow food at its best. Not only do you have to let a rooster grow nearly an entire year, once butchered, you need to let it age in the refrigerator for at least a week before you roast it or pressure cook it, another great way to prepare fully grown rooster.
Rooster breast meat
If you would like to try one of these magnificent birds, call or text me at 360-202-0386, or send an email to theman@amanandhishoe.com. Be advised, that these fully grown roosts are not available all the time, however you are always welcome to get your name on the waiting list for them.
Where would you prefer to get your chicken? From a plant like this Foster Farms processing plant which was recently closed due to cockroach infestation? At a plant like this, up to 140 chickens move through the processing line a minute. That is more than two chickens a second. And the chicken processing companies want to speed these processing lines up to 175 chickens per minute.
Butchering Cabin
Or would you rather get your chickens from a quiet cabin in the woods where chickens are butchered just one at a time, and only five or so chickens are ever butchered in a single day, with each one being handled with great care?
Chickens at a man and his hoe never leave their home. They are never transported in crowded containers to processing plants miles from home. Instead, they are carefully caught, and once caught, their heads are covered with soft towels to keep them calm. They never see what is happening to them, and the other chickens never see another chicken being butchered.
This is a seven and a half month old Golden Buff rooster, butchered at 224 days, and let to rest for four days in the refrigerator. Three to four days is a good time to let a chicken rest before roasting, especially these chickens which exercise so much every day.
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These are not birds which sit around all day, doing nothing but eating and growing fat. They aren’t crowded together cheek by jowl. What they do provide is a big story and a big taste. A chicken does a lot of living in seven months. As chickens go, it’s seen the world, traveled far from it’s roost every day, had the chance to experience romance and live a full life. At times they go so deep into the woods they can’t see another chicken. You’ll never find chicken like this in your supermarket.
At 17 days of age, these chicks are spending most of the day outdoors. Their mother takes them outside at the crack of dawn in search of good things to eat. In a matter of hours, they will travel further than broiler chickens travel their entire lives. When you see how far chickens like to go in search of food, you understand how intolerable it is to raise them in densities of one chicken per square foot. With a mother, chicks enjoy a very rich life.
You’ll never find liver like this in the store. Liver from chickens which exercise much of the day, get plenty of fresh air and sunshine, is plump and dry.
When chickens are out walking all day, rummaging for food, playing, and having a good time, they are pumping copious amounts of oxygenated blood through their bodies, much like people who exercise. Chickens raised in cramp quarters and butchered at a very young age, never attain the level of health of chickens raised outdoors. And this shows in the quality of their livers.
Cooked Liver
Fried in butter, chicken fat, or olive oil for several minutes on each side, it has so much flavor that no salt is needed. In fact, you should first taste it before adding any salt. Often salt, instead of enhancing the flavor of foods, just makes foods taste like salt.
Dish of Liver
Liver is best eaten within a few hours of processing a chicken. Are there any stores which sell chicken liver from chickens butchered that day? Let me know if you find one. The next time you buy chicken liver in a store, ask the grocer when the liver was taken. If they don’t know, what does that say about their concern for the quality of the food they sell to you?
Collecting eggs is always an adventure. An old trick I use to get hens to lay in certain nests is to keep some wooden eggs in the nest. Many hens prefer to lay eggs where other hens have.
With eggs coming in so many different shades and sizes, why do large egg producers insist on packaging identical eggs in the same carton? Wouldn’t it be more exciting if every carton looked different inside? When I mentioned once to a clerk that I had chickens and that they laid eggs of various colors, she said that she once received a variety of eggs from a friend. She was thrilled at the various colors of the eggs, but her children refused to eat any of them. They would only eat perfectly white supermarket eggs. In a way it’s sad that most children have no idea how varied chicken eggs can be.
