Homesteading Series: How to Raise Your Own Meat Chickens This Summer

You’ve probably heard that chickens are the gateway into Homesteading life. There’s a reason! Raising your own chicken meat and eggs requires fairly minimal inputs and infrastructure to begin on your own.  With egg and meat prices on the rise, this summer sounds like a great time to begin raising your own!

Jonathan Kilpatrick has been raising chickens since age 10, developing hands-on expertise in brooding, raising, processing, and marketing poultry. One of the stops in his agriculture education was an internship and apprenticeship at Polyface Farms, where he gained extensive experience with commercial scale pastured production of broilers, layers, and turkeys. With over 20 years of experience, Jonathan combines practical knowledge with real-world insights to help others succeed in poultry production. His experience spans every stage of the process, from chick to market, offering valuable guidance to farmers at any level. Jonathan and his family raise pastured broilers on their farm in Alexandria, MN, and plan to make that one of their centerpiece enterprises.

We’ll talk specifically about:

• Ideal breeds to raise for meat – different characteristics of each
• Where to get chicks – many places are sold out or not accepting new orders
• Raising chicks in the brooder – ideal temperatures, body language to be attentive to, starter feed, why protein content matters
• Determining when chicks are ready to transfer to outdoor conditions – using feathers as an indicator, growing ration
• Differing types of Outdoor Raising Methods – tractors, mobile coops, electric netting
• Predators to be aware of
• The end – how to know your birds are ready for processing

As a follow-up to this event, we plan to do a Hands-On ‘How to Process your Meat Chickens’ Workshop mid-Summer in South Central MN… Stay Tuned! All Homesteading Series events will be posted to the Minnesota River Chapter’s webpage.

Registration required to receive Zoom meeting link. It is free to participate.

Info: Mary Fischer, mary@sfa-mn.org