I occasionally get into conversations with folks who are either just moving to an acreage or planning to in the foreseeable future. 

The topic usually comes up about what livestock to get. 

While pork bacon and beef steaks are delicious and pigs and steers make for impressive Facebook posts, I always advise chickens.

They are fluffy and soft, even a small child can pick them up to move them, and they won’t kill you if they want to go a different direction than you want them to go. 😉

We started out with chickens 18 years ago (can it be??) and with small children over the years, it’s definitely a good thing.

(These two are 13 and 14 years old now! They are helping feed chickens at Grandma’s.)

Collecting eggs is always fun! (Our now 14 year old)

Chicken hugs! (Our now 17 year old!)

New baby chicks.

Some of you may remember the old “Truck ‘o Chickens” blog I put a few things on! We still have the truck, but the paint has significantly changed…and it could use a little fixing up…but chickens still live in it!

We still have a toddler in the house and, like all the other kids before her, chickens are a great way to learn sorting (we practice separating the white and brown ones just for color recognition) being careful (although the dogs enjoy the occasional broken egg) feeding and watering and many other general animal care lesson.

And who doesn’t like baby chicks every spring?

Different kids over the years have been in charge of collecting eggs. And along with that, sorting, cleaning and preparing for selling. They get half of the sales to fund other farm enterprises. Here is our most current egg collector, writing the laying date on each egg. 🙂

She’ll be the official egg collector before we know it!

Hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane. 🙂