Chicken safety

As responsible farmers, we protect our livestock from predators with fencing and housing. When they start doing their own thing, we don't like that - it puts them at risk of predation on a constant basis. The most common predators on the ground are racoons, coyotes, once in a while a fox and our farm dog, Stone.

In addition to ground predators, we have lots of ariel predators like owls, hawks and birds of prey and sometimes crows that love to pick off unsuspecting chickens. We have management plans in place to limit this type of predation but it's impossible to police 100% of the time. Anyone cracked the code on training a chicken?

Our free ranging chicken who escapes electric fence and finds herself ranging all over the place

We have friends of the farm with strong opinions that our meat chickens should be free ranging, and other ideas that we would love to have as well but can't allow for their own safety. It's always nice to have hundreds of birds completely free ranged on pasture and it's also a huge attraction factor for coyotes, racoons and the like.

We don't welcome hens in our house but once in a while, the free ranger makes her way in strategically

Meat chickens and laying hens seem to have completely different homing instincts. Because laying hens have eggs to return to, they seem to come home every night to hunker down. In contrast, meat chickens are just like kids; they don't know what their address is or what time they should be home at night, so they end up all huddling together in a random spot on the field, completely open to predation. They just don't have the same instincts.

As a result, we keep our meat chickens in portable huts on pasture, we call them 'chicken tractors', that have wired netting around them to keep ground predators out, a roof on top to keep ariel predators away and to provide much needed shade and covering from rain, wind and bad weather all around.

At the end of the day, the chickens will be end up as nutrition to us or the predators... it's one or the other out here. And let me tell you, there's nothing humane about a racoon ripping a chicken's head off and leaving the body behind. Once you've seen it once, you'll never forget the sight.

Falcon pictured from Hawkeye Falconry, a local experience that was a highlight of the summer season for us

We take chicken safety very seriously on the farm!

Watch for hawks,

The Farmer @ Livingstone Farm 1860