DAY 108-112: I. Hate. Chickens.

Monday began our first week as chicken farmers!

Ute took us around for our first day to show us the ropes. Their farm has 600 chickens on it, but only 400 of them are egg laying. 100 of them will lay eggs next year and the other 100 Hans and Ute are raising to tell to another farmer for next year as well. So although we do not have to collect eggs from these houses, we do need to feed, water, and clean them every day. So Ute took us around to every house to show us where to climb over the small electric fence used to keep the chickens in. Then we would open each chicken hatch to let the screaming little beasts out. For every house, we had about a gallon of organic barley seed as well as any leftovers from our meals the day before. The chickens would go wild and run around their designated lawns to eat everything before it was gone. In addition to this feed, there was other organic feeders inside each house that needed to be filled every week.

Once we entered the house, we wet about getting the eggs. Now this part is a bit difficult to explain, especially because I forgot to take a picture of it. But the egg nests was this large shelving unit built into the wall. There were about 30 boxes- 5 boxes high,  6 boxes across. There were little gates that the chicken would crawl through to get inside. Once sitting on the woven basket inside, their weight would activate a lever that disallowed any other chickens to enter while the first was laying her egg. In the woven basket floor, there was a hole. The hole was in the center and lowest point of the floor, thereby forcing the egg to roll down the sides of the floor down through the hole. Once through the hole, there was a large wire drawer that extended underneath all 6 boxes across. To collect the eggs, all you had to do was pull out the drawer and collect the eggs from all 6 boxes on that level. The shelf was 5 boxes high meaning there were 5 wire basket drawers of eggs to collect. Every house had a different number of chickens, so the amount of eggs from each house varied.

FUN FACT #70: Chickens will eat their own eggs if you do not remove them from their houses every day. HOW MESSED UP IS THAT?

After collecting the eggs from one house, we would continue to the next and repeat the process taking note of which houses looked like they needed fresh straw on the floor as well as new water.

Once we fed and let out all of the chickens and collected the eggs, we would return the eggs and their baskets to the egg counting house. Lizzy and I would then crank up the radio and set about our task of cleaning every single egg and removing eggs that were warped or cracked. We then would count how many eggs were collected from each house and put them in large egg crates.

Our next job was to separate the eggs. I would load the eggs onto a conveyor belt. The eggs would then be weighed individually by a machine and sorted into extra large, large, medium, small, and extra small. Ute would put the eggs according to weight into individual 12 egg crates. Lizzy would then stamp each egg with a stamper that signified what section of Ireland they came from as well as stamping the box with their expiration date. It was quite the little factory set up!


When this job was finished, Lizzy and I would refill any water dispensers or spread straw throughout the houses. Once or twice a week we had to wheelbarrow 30 pound bags of chicken food to load into the feeder. These jobs could take between 1-3 hours, depending on how much needed to be done. Once these jobs were finished, it was usually around 1:00pm at which point we would go inside and eat lunch and rest until 2:30 and continue working.

Once our work with the chickens was finished for the day, we went out to the two large polytunnels (or greenhouses) on Hans and Ute's property. We did more weeding (which we weren't too excited about, but hey, comes with the territory) which fortunately was not not nearly as bad as at Oliver's. These gardens had actually been maintained in the past 5 years, so there wasn't too much to dig up.

When the sun began to set around 4:30pm, we would round up the chickens. Typically, they would already be inside their houses ready for bed. Occasionally I had to chase a few inside, but that was very rare. We would shut their little chicken hole doors and the main front doors to lock them in for the night to keep them safe from foxes and such. Then our day was over!