Raising Chickens

By: Jerry Blackerby

Growing up, I raised chickens for many years as a 4-H Club member and then in the FFA in high school. From about the sixth grade on, we never lived where I had room to raise a calf or pigs, so I raised chickens. In most small towns in west Texas, people still raised chickens as late as the 1950s.

Mom always had several laying hens for eggs and now and then a baked chicken. She normally kept White Leghorns, because they seemed to give more eggs than most breeds, although we did have a few others mixed in. Usually, a hen would set on a few eggs and we would have a few young fryers.

I always liked banties, so from quite young, I had a few banties mixed in with Mom’s chickens.. I would go into the chicken pen and bug the banty roosters. One of them would jump on my legs and spur the heck out of my leg. Of course, I had on Levi's so it didn't hurt. One time, Mom went in the pen and my mean banty rooster jumped her bare leg and began spurring it. She grabbed that banty rooster by the head and wrung his neck. She said that if any more banties tried to spur her on her bare legs she would kill them also.

As a 4-H Club member, I began raising chickens. We would order day-old baby chicks through the mail. Hatcheries sell day-old baby pullets at a premium, so I would order cockerels, which were lower cost. The order would come in during February, I think I do not remember exactly when, but it was always cold.

I had an old wash tub with a hole cut in the center of the bottom. I would set the tub upside down on some bricks and suspend a light bulb in the hole. Mom had fixed a cloth with slits cut in it hanging around the tub to hold the heat in. The baby chicks could go under the tub to stay warm. I would put this arrangement inside a small building or garage to protect the baby chicks from the weather.

When the chicks were a few weeks old and the weather had warmed up I would put the young chicks into the pen with the other chickens. They would grow up to fryer or broiler age/size in the fenced in area with the other chickens.

White leghorns were good as fryers, but did not have as much meat on them as some other breeds. I began raising New Hampshire broilers. They were not as dark red color as Rhode Island Reds, but still a reddish/orange color. They made great fryers/broilers.

Most hatcheries shipped a few extra baby chicks in an order, because some will die in shipping and within the first few days. Normally, I would get about 95 survivors. In 1950, we received 105 cockerels, all alive. I only lost three of those baby chicks during the first few days.

We never had a freezer in those days, but would kill and package the chickens and take them to the local locker plant, where they would be frozen and available in our locker anytime we needed them. We just paid a small fee to rent locker space. Then we would take out what we needed as we needed it.

In the spring of 1950, my Vocational Agriculture teacher suggested that I caponize some of my chickens. He came over and taught me how to caponize them. I caponized about 25 young roosters. I had never seen a capon before. They grew really fast and became some of the largest chicken I had ever seen. The meat was really tender. We stored several in the locker plant with the fryers/broilers we had also killed and cleaned.

Dad had gone overseas in the summer of 1949 and returned in the fall of 1950. He arrived a day earlier than we expected, so we did not have anything ready for a good meal. Dad and I walked downtown to the locker plant to pick up some chickens. Dad looked at what we had frozen and asked about all the frozen turkeys. Even though I had written him about how big the capons had gotten, he never realized that would be as large as a small turkey.

1950 was the last year I raised chickens. I have thought about it a few times, but never lived where we could until now. I have mentioned it a few times to Billie since we moved back to Oklahoma, but she says that we are not going to raise anything anymore, so we have not.

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