Chadwick Grass Farms

How to Find Local Food

Sourcing your food locally is a fantastic way to ensure your food is fresh and high-quality. It’s also the main way to support hard-working farmers! However, buying local isn’t as easy as a one-stop shopping trip to Wal-Mart or Kroger. It takes a little research and dedication. The work pays off, though, and soon you’ll be finding real joy and in your routine of picking up milk from a farm and glancing over to see the cows who gave it to you. Soon you’ll be forming a friendship with your chicken farmers you see every week at the farmer’s market. Or learning to eat in season because you joined a vegetable CSA.

Here are some resources to help you find local food in your area!

Online Databases.
- Eatwild has a state-by-state (and Canada) directory for pasture-based farms, including meat, eggs, and dairy.
- Realmilk.com is my top choice for finding raw milk in your area.
Ask Your Farmer. Once you know one local farmer, you’re golden! They will be thrilled to direct you to their other farmer friends in your area. Relationships and word-of-mouth are great for finding specific things you’re looking for (like grass-finished beef or the best garlic in the county, for example!)
Good Old Google. Many farms have websites that will pop up on Google, so don’t forget to give this a shot!

Some foods truly aren’t available from local farmers. So my new favorite source for those things (like oats, rice, spices, and raw cheese in our case) is Azure Standard. They have bulk organic items for good prices! You place an order online and meet the delivery truck at a drop location (with lots of other local health-conscious people to meet!) to pick up your food! It’s pretty fun.

How have you sourced your local food? Share in the comments if you have other ideas!

10 Fun Facts about Your Farmers

I thought I would give you a peek into who exactly your chicken farmers are! Here are 5 fun facts about Judah and 5 about me (Ariel).

Judah works at the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky! He does construction and site work. He and his crew built most of the outbuildings, shelter houses, and the zoo.
Judah has lived in Michigan, Israel, Texas, and Kentucky. People often have trouble pinpointing his accent, and that’s probably why…
Judah built our tiny house 4 years ago when we got married. It’s 448 square feet and houses four of us currently. We are hoping to add on to it soon!
Judah loves a good dog and wants a few in the near future! A few working dogs on the farm, and a loveable family dog too.
Judah is always prepared. With ratchet straps, first aid and trauma kits, headlamps, water, you name it – Judah probably has it with him!

Ariel used to be a horseback trail guide and spent hours a day riding in her teens.
Ariel loves making sourdough bread and has kept her starter alive for over a year now! Maybe she will pass it on to our children – who knows?
Ariel enjoys sourcing as much of our food from small farms as she can! We currently get all our meat, eggs, and milk straight from awesome farmers. (Including our chicken 😉 )
Ariel is pretty shy at heart and has to work hard to be chatty and get to know our customers. It’s worth it, though!
Ariel stays home during the day with our two kiddos! Recently she helped our 23-month-old, Ruth, learn to hang clothes on a clothesline. Ruth thinks it’s the most fun ever.

There you have it! We’d love to get to know you too, so feel free to share some fun facts about you in the comments below!

How do You Want to Connect with Us?

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Hello friends! This year we will be raising pastured chicken to sell at the Boone County Farmer’s Market and will also be taking orders from people who we meet but who don’t come to the market. Lord willing, our first batch of chicken will be ready for market/pickup on May 11, 2019.

Feel free to reach out with any questions here, check out our price list here, and inquire about placing an order here!

Here’s an important update if you want to stay connected with farm happenings… We are transitioning to sending out weekly email updates instead of putting updates on this blog. This website will be just for pricing, contact info, and basics of who we are! Click here to sign up for our email updates.

In future, there will be three different ways to stay connected with farm happenings (in addition to seeing us in person, of course!). Feel free to follow the ones that suit your needs!

Email updates (replacing these blog updates) – weekly emails containing:
- Product updates (i.e. “This week we have drumsticks back in stock!”)
- Relevant recipes
- Fun farm news and facts
Instagram
- Farm pictures and in-the-moment updates via Instagram stories
Facebook
- Some farm pictures
- Product updates

Thank you for supporting us in our farming journey. We look forward to getting to serve you in any way we can!

We Won’t be Farming This Year, and Here’s Why

We have some news about our farm! I made a short video to bring y’all up to speed on what will be happening in the next year.

Thank you so much for your support, friends, and we are excited to be back at it in 2019! If you want to stay connected to what’s happening, subscribe to my YouTube channel.

What does “Pastured” Mean?

You’ve seen it all: grass-fed, cage-free, free-range, grass-finished, grain-finished, pastured, organic… do these all have different meanings? Which one is the best? We raise pastured chicken and we want you to understand what that means so you know just how good the meat on your plate is!

Pastured meat is when the animal was raised on a grassy piece of land – a pasture. In some cases, this means the animals are confined by a fence. In others, like ours, it means they are in moveable, bottom-less shelters on pasture. These shelters are moved every day to fresh pasture.

Grass-fed means the animal must have continuous access to grass during the growing season, and it must be their sole source of food after weaning. This term is typically used to describe beef since chickens (except for some heritage breeds) and pigs need to eat a fair amount of grain to get enough calories to survive.

Cage-free means that the animal (typically chicken) was not raised in a cage. This often means the chicken still lived in crowded, dirty, stuffy chicken barns – just packed in with other chickens, not in a cage.

Free-range means that the animal must have access to the outdoors. That is the USDA regulation for the term. Often, this means that a “free-range chicken” is raised in a huge chicken barn with thousands of other chickens – but they do have a little run outside where they are allowed to venture out. This does not mean they ever go outside, however.

Grass-finished is a term that applies to beef. Some beef is grass-fed up until the last 90 days of its life, when it is switched to grain-fed to fatten it up quickly (this is still classified as “grass-fed,” however). Grass-finished beef, however, is on pasture its whole life and is not finished on grain.

Grain-finished is the opposite of grass-finished. It means that the beef is fed grain during the final period of time before processing, whether or not it was on pasture previously.

Organic is a term that is highly regulated by the USDA. Organic food is raised without the use of man-made fertilizers, pesticides, feed additives, or GMOs. While this sounds like a good thing, much of the organic produce and meats for sale today were raised in similar fashion to conventional food – for example, an organic chicken confinement house can look exactly the same as a conventional one. Those chickens simply get organic feed and are not fed artificial antibiotics. Our chicken is not certified organic. We call it “beyond organic” because we go above and beyond the regulations and truly care about how our animals are raised.

Building Hoop Coops

After using a Salatin-style chicken shelter last year and having problems with low ventilation, we decided to use a different model and utilize cattle panels and tarps for the roof.

We built three shelters – two 8 ft. x 10 ft. and one 12 ft. x 10 ft, and both about 5 ft. 6 in. at the peak. Here’s how we did it!

First Judah built the bottom frames. The smaller shelters (pictured here), were 8 ft. x 10 ft. and the larger one was 12 ft. x 10 ft. Judah used cross braces in the corners, notching them to make them very strong.

The top and sides of the shelter are formed by two 16 ft. x 50 in. cattle panels (we used three for the larger shelter). Using a Sawzall, Judah cut the cattle panel so it would fit over the frame and brace, like so.

He tacked it in place with a few staples and then bent the panel into a hoop, held together by the frame. We did the same with the second panel and secured them with more staples.

We used wire to attach the two panels together along the middle seam. Then Judah built the door frames. Here is what the top and bottom of the door frames look like.

Next came the back of the shelter! We used part of a cattle panel for this, even though it didn’t come all the way to the top. We used wire to keep it in place and then Judah cut the panel to the shape of the shelter. Then Judah made a brace up the middle for extra support.

I attached 1/2 in. hardware cloth all around the outside, going 2 ft. up the sides. I used zip ties, but wire would work too! The hardware cloth stops predators from reaching inside and grabbing chickens, which they can do through regular chicken wire.

Next I put chicken wire on the remaining parts of the front and back walls using zip ties, overlapping a few inches of the hardware cloth.

Meanwhile, Judah made doors. The wire running diagonally across the door is to keep it square as time goes on.

I ended up putting hardware cloth on the entire door (instead of hardware cloth on the bottom and chicken wire on the top) because it was just the right width to run vertically up the doors.

We put a variety of different latches on the doors, experimenting and using what we had, but I didn’t take any pictures of them.

I was hoping to find 8 ft. x 14 ft. tarps, but we ended up using 12 ft. x 16 ft. tarps for both size shelters. As logic would have you think, the larger shelter that has less tarp coverage is favored by the birds in warmer weather because it has more ventilation. The smaller shelters with more tarp coverage are better for cold nights.

We didn’t quite perfect our technique for tying the tarps onto the shelters, but here is what we did. The tarps were too big to provide enough ventilation for the small shelters so we folded one edge under a few times to shorten the tarp. Then, since the grommets on the edge of the tarp were hidden, we used cap nails to attach that side to the frame. And a final note on tarps – these are light-duty tarps but they ended up with holes where wires and zip ties poked through, so next time we’d use medium to heavy-duty tarps.

I put chicken wire on the exposed piece of cattle panel after this picture was taken

Here you can see the difference in tarp coverage between the large shelter (on the left) and a small one

Then we drilled two large holes in the front and two in the back of the frame and tied a rope handle on. This is to lift the shelter in the back when you’re sliding a dolly under it (the dolly provides temporary wheels to make it easier to move) and in the front where you’ll be pulling it forward. It’s good to slide a piece of hose on top of the rope to protect your hands. We used pieces of semi-flexible pipe because we didn’t have an hose on hand.

You don’t actually pick the shelter up quite this much when you’re moving it with chickens inside – Judah was just moving fast 😉

Then we rigged up a watering spot. We have gravity-flow waterers that are fed from a 5-gallon bucket so we had to suspend the bucket above the waterers. This is what Judah rigged up, and it’s working well so far! One nice thing about this setup is that we can refill the 5-gallon bucket in the shelter from outside the shelter by pouring through the chicken wire.

So there you go! That’s how we made our sturdy and relatively inexpensive shelters.

The Brooder

Dry. 90-95ºF. Not drafty. Well-ventilated. Easily accessible for humans. Totally predator-proof.

These are words that get tossed around a lot when talking about chick brooders, and there’s a reason! Chicks are fragile and if even one of these areas is lacking, you will know because some of your chicks will be quiet, lethargic, and, possibly, dead. But the good news is that there are good brooder models out there. Judah used this model as his inspiration, changing a few things like adding a plywood floor and a metal roof that opens in two sections.

We needed space for 200 chicks, so about 100 square feet. We made it 8’x12′ and originally planned on putting it on concrete blocks or a trailer so it would be off the ground and harder for predators to get to. However, we ended up keeping it right where we built it and it turned out sturdy enough to keep predators out even though it’s just sitting on the ground.

Plywood is in for the floor and sides – now Judah is working on the fixed side of the roof.

Although we could have put the plywood sides on the outside of the studs to make it look nicer, we opted to put them inside to make for easier cleaning. And yes, we were working on the brooder late into the night. We were some very tired people…

20170412_235230 — These are the faces you make when you should have been asleep two hours ago but the chicks are coming tomorrow so you must finish building their brooder.

Half the roof is on! The box inside is the hover, which is what keeps the chicks warm. A post on that is coming soon!

It’s interesting to watch Judah build this brooder and also watch him build our house (on the left in this picture). Our mindset about the house is that we should build it as well as we possibly can, using quality materials and expecting it to last. Our mindset about building farm structures like this brooder (and later, chicken shelters) is that it doesn’t have to be pretty or expensive – it just has to be good enough to serve the purpose. So Judah didn’t spend an excessive amount of time trying to get the brooder perfectly square – it’s not square, in fact. But the chicks don’t mind because they’re still dry, whether the brooder is square or not and whether we used some fancy roofing or just screwed on roofing metal scraps. 🙂

The roof opens like so. And hey! There are the chicks!

The supports used to prop up the roof just lay on the ground when they’re not being used – they’re not attached. And note the handles on each side of the roof – those are super handy because the roof is heavy. We don’t have to tie the roof down or anything (to keep coons out or the wind from blowing it open) because of the heavy roof!

One thing I might change if we made a second brooder is to make it a little taller. I have to work with the bedding and occasionally step inside to do something, and it’s not too comfortable to crouch that low. Also, once when I had the roof open I found a chick perched up on the edge, which would be remedied by taller walls.

In all, I love this design so far! The chicks have been living in the brooder for almost two weeks and they’re happy.

P.S. If you’re on Instagram, check our page out! I post pictures of farm happenings almost daily on there. 🙂

This is Just the Beginning – Chicks

They have arrived! 204 tiny fluffballs came in the mail on April 13th. These are cornish cross chicks, which is a meat breed. I counted them and dipped each little beak in sugar water (this gets them started on the right foot by helping to hydrate and energize them until they find the food and water on their own) then spent some time watching them as they got used to their new home.I actually hung out in the brooder for a bit… It’s a good practice to spend time watching your animals regularly to make sure everything is going smoothly, but the only time I’d recommend actually hanging out in the brooder is within the first hour….. while the bedding is still clean. 😉 The chicks are super curious and aren’t very afraid of people for the first day or two, as you can see here! This little guy wanted to take a selfie, so I obliged. This is the brooder! Judah built it in a few nights and the chicks are happy, warm, dry, and safe. Next up will be a post all about the brooder – stay tuned!