Welcome to the Farm Fan Club “Critter of the Month” Story Page!

Here you’ll find the story behind the sticker. Written for children, but informative enough for grown-ups, too!

October 2020 – Red Laying Hen

Eggs are a food that most people hardly think twice about. But everyone expects to see chickens when they visit a farm! Children are particularly drawn to chickens. They are so interesting to watch! Always busy, always hunting for something tasty to nibble on.

One Sunday afternoon, Farmer Matt took our family down to check out our newest flock of laying hens… and our brand new Super-Coop!

What in the world is a Super-Coop? Well. Farmer Matt is really an engineer disguised as a farmer. And he likes to come up with ideas for making the job of raising food easier and healthier for the animals… and the farmers!

It’s really important that our farm animals (like these chickens)…

…get to live outside as much as possible. Here in Texas, we have a mild enough climate that they can live outdoors year-round. But even in a mild climate, chickens need shelter from the sun when it’s hot and from the rain when it’s wet and from the wind and snow when it’s cold. But it’s also really important that our farm animals get to move to new pastures very often so that their house stays clean.

So Farmer Matt builds special movable houses for the chickens, like these.

They don’t look very movable to most folks, but they are as long as you have a good tractor! And Shevi and Axl, our two oldest sons, help move the coops every single day. Of course, the boys get plenty of play-time when they aren’t doing farm chores. Here they are swinging on the rachet-strap swings their dad made for them.

How do they stay up there? Shevi says, “Look, Mom! No hands!”

Tevka is our little girl, and she figured out how to swing, too!

Farmer Matt built the Super Coop to help make chicken moving easier, safer, and to allow us to eventually automate the moving of feed, instead of having to carry every single bag of feed into the coops every day. When you raise 900+ chickens… that makes for a lot of lifting!

Here’s Farmer Matt working the controls of the Super Coop. It doesn’t need a tractor–it can drive itself!

Once the coop is all done moving, it’s time to explore!

Danny enjoyed following the chickens around. He couldn’t quite catch one, though. They are pretty fast!

Sure enough, there were just a couple of eggs! Here’s Matthew with the Catch of the Day.

Danny can only hold eggs for a few seconds because he likes to bang them together. That doesn’t work so well for fresh eggs! Soon these hens will be making over 600 eggs a day! How many of them will you get to eat?