February 2025

I don’t come here to be the bearer of bad news; I come here to keep it real with my friends and family back in the city. Although, I quite literally am delivering bad news.

February hit us with some major curveballs. As you may know, we are chicken owners. We have one flock of eight that we got about a year ago and another flock of 30 that we got over the summer. After getting our original flock, we definitely believed we could go bigger with our next flock and start selling our eggs because raising our first flock felt like such a breeze.

Wrong.

This new flock was in a separate, new, very nice mobile chicken coop. All was well for a while—until around January, when we started to notice that a few of the chickens were cock-a-doodle-dooing. I looked at the receipt from the farm I had purchased from, and it turns out I had ordered a “run,” aka a mix of female and male chickens. This was a big accident on my part.

We now had some roosters on our hands. We also realized that we had lost a couple of chickens earlier and could only chalk it up to a pecking order issue. Chickens are ruthless, and when raised with roosters, maybe even more so. Once we removed the roosters, we thought all would be well, but it was very far from that. The pecking order got bad—chickens were pecking at each other until, well, death. We lost about six chickens to this. We tried letting them roam more during the day. I sprayed them every morning and night with a “no peck spray.” Nothing worked.

As this issue grew, another arose. Our new chicken coop started to get infiltrated at night. Two or three chickens were captured each night. Something—aka the fattest raccoon in Texas—was digging underneath the coop. No matter what barricades we put up at night, it found a way in.

Wait, how do I know it was a raccoon, you ask? I saw said raccoon in the middle of the day on the roof of the barn, looking thick.

Unfortunately, this could not be stopped, and by the time our new electric fence was ordered and arrived, all of our chickens were gone.

We still have our original coop, with five chickens left. The raccoon got a couple from this coop, but Wick and I were able to secure it.

We were warned about this, I will say, but we went a whole year without anything like this happening. So sad and humbling.

We will restructure and have already ordered new laying hens that will be here in March. We’re starting over with a little more experience under our belt. We want to have eggs by May and have a really fun avenue for how we want to sell them. That is to be announced.

Lessons keep being learned. We’re excited for our egg comeback story.

The reason I’m sharing this is that I hope no judgment is cast. Y’all know our background—we have no idea what we are doing. I'm hoping we can learn together and grow together.

I think March is going to be a comeback in itself. It’s been a long winter, and spring always warms the soul.

Until next time, farmers.