End of the Flock

The chickens are gone! Oh joy and wonder, I thought the day would never come. Unless you work on a chicken farm that raises broilers for nine weeks, you have no idea how challenging it can get. I am always amazed at the end of a flock how difficult and painful this job is. I think that people stay in this business because of something similar to birth amnesia. You go through a period of severe pain and swear you will never do it again, but as soon as that pain is over and you are having a good time, you forget how bad it was and just remember the good stuff. Please don't think I compare the pain from some hard work to that of labor. I'm simply stating that I get the amnesia part after the flock is over. Once the new flock is settled in, and the work gets easy, I am all about how much I love chicken farming.

In the beginning of a flock, it is a little difficult for about a week and a half. Not nealy as bad as the end of the flock. There is just a lot to do for that first week with the baby chicks. After that there are about five and a half weeks that it is fairly easy. The chicks are small, and have plenty of room to run around. They stay out of your way as you walk through the house looking for the ones who passed away over night. I can walk though the houses in a few hours and get everything done. It is still a seven day a week job, but during that time it is a great job. That is when I love being a chicken farmer. I have lots of time for my family and time to get some repairs done on the farm and may even be able to spend the four days it takes to mow the lawn. You may hear me say,"I love chicken farming." at this time of the flock.

Then along comes the seventh, eighth and ninth weeks. Can you hear the depressing music come up in the back gound? Sense the lights dimming as I begin my explanation of the dreaded time of the flock? The chickens are getting bigger, and heavier each week. The number of deceased gets larger as they get bigger and carrying them out gets more difficult. The larger chickens take up more space, so the houses which were easy to walk through earlier with the lighter load, now get to the point where walking through the house is more like dancing with a toddler. You know how they stand on your feet and you dance them around the room? Well, it is fun for a dance or two, try to do that for about five hours straight while carrying up to fifty pounds in each arm and trying to waive a stick to help get the other dancers to move away from you so you can keep going. The chickens constantly run across your feet as you walk. They weigh up to 10 pounds and are terrible dance partners. By the time I am done with the houses for the day I am exhausted. For the last week I hire at least one other person to help me and it is still a five or more hour job with two people. I have had it so bad that it took over six hours with five people working. That would be a bad flock. This flock was not too bad. The chickens got fairly big considering it is a summer flock in Georgia. Plus, with L working I am doing baby duty on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That made this flock much easier for me physically. It gave my body a little rest during the week to help me have energy on the days I was working.

The final day, when they are going to pick up the chickens, is typically very long. This flock it went like this: On Wednesday night at 11:00 PM I go down and shut off the food on the first house. That took about an hour to get the last of the food into the house and shut off the feed lines. I go back to the house, shower and then can sleep until 2 a.m. At that time I get ready and go down to the first house to take out their food bins, and raise up the feed lines so that can not eat any more food. They still can have water, so the water lines stay down. This took forty-five minutes. I go back up to my house again and wash up, and then rest for a while. At 5 a.m. it is back down again to start raising up the drinking lines and preparing the house for the catching crew to come in. Everything gets raised up and out of the way for the fork lifts and workers. The workers come at 7 a.m. and start to pick up the chickens for this first house. It takes about two hours for them to clear a house with 20,000 chickens if they use two crews of guys and two fork lifts. One house done.

I do this set up and preparation all day Thursday for the rest of the houses and by 3 a.m. on Friday morning the crews are done and and I can go up and close the doors and turn off the lights on the final house. This time it was about 28 hours from start to finish with a few breaks here and there for me to rest. I seldom get to actually sleep for more than an hour or two in a row. It makes me very sore, and definitely sleepy. I begin to catch up about two days later.

All that is left now is to wait for the news on how big the chickens were and to see what the check will be. Well, of course there is the matter of getting set up for next flock. I will need to blow the dust and dirt out of the houses, get the litter hauled out, spray disinfectant, spread insecticide to kill beetles, clean all the fans, grease all the fan bearings, grease the bearings on the bins, repair the curtain ropes that broke during the flock, then get pine shavings put in and start setting up the equipment for feed lines and drinkers... Here we go again.