So, the kids are complaining because we have been out of "Mike's milk" for about a week and they say the store milk tastes bad.  We buy our raw organic milk from a local dairy farmer/friend.  So, over to Mike's farm we go to get milk today.   While there, Mike asked if I'd be interested in raising 25 broiler chickens for processing for him.  Oh my!  I wasn't ready for that but I'm excited about it just the same.  This is a goal of mine "to sell my processed farm raised birds" but I wasn't looking at it seriously until next year.  I guess I get to move it up the list to this year  !!  

Last year was my first year with chickens (layers) and my first year ever butchering.  Since I really didn't know what to get (or what I was getting myself into), I thought an assortment would be best for us to get our feet wet.  I had ordered a straight run of heavy dual purpose chickens.  Besides butchering our roosters and a few extra hens, I offered to butcher a bunch of Mike's older "stew" chickens for him in exchange for housing my chickens over the winter months.  We love to barter when we can.

Unfortunately today, Mike said that something has been slowly picking off the chickens so he wasn't sure how many of our chickens were left.  So I might need to order a few more birds, since our rooster, Benjamin (last year's flock sire), was at Mike's and without him... I can't build my layer flock.   Oh, well... that's farm life, I guess.

Ok... so we are on our way home and what do we see... a lone chicken running/hopping in the field/ditch.  So I make Rich stop the car and we catch ourselves a chicken.  She appears to be a White Crested Black Polish (Madison's favorite chicken).  I noticed, and so did Rich and Madison, that something was hanging from her leg.  When we got home, we fed and watered her.  She was very hungry.  Makes me wonder how long she has been fending for herself in our Minnesota weather.  She has only about half the feathers on top of her head.  We decided to call her Lucky.

After investigating a bit further, Lucky has a growth coming from her lower right breast area near her leg.  She wasn't hopping when we found her, she was limping.  She kept pecking at it, ripping it causing it to bleed.  We finally got the growth thingy to stop bleeding after over an hour of trying to figure out what exactly to do.  I finally wrapped the area and her leg.  That seemed to work.

She is very tame and we are assuming she was someone's pet and they dumped her.  How sad is that!?!  She is very sweet, loves to be held and carried around.  We'll see what tomorrow brings but for now Lucky has plenty of food, water and a warm home.

Carol