Catching Chickens 101

Huh? How do you catch a chicken? Fish net? Snare trap? Baseball Glove? Y'all were such good students in my Cotton 101 class, I thought that I would introduce a new subject! Some of you may have heard of chicken catching from one of the guys currently on "America's Got Talent". I believe his name is Kevin Skinner. They list his occupation as "out of work chicken farmer", but he's not a farmer, he's a chicken catcher! Our chickens were caught last night, so lucky for you, I have plenty of pictures to explain!

First, you get your catch times from your field tech (the person who comes out to the farm periodically to check the chickens). Our catch times were House #3-3:00AM, and House #1-5:00AM. They like to catch chickens when it is cooler outside, which usually means night time. There are two catch crews with about 7-8 guys a piece, and they do two houses each. House #4 and House #2 are caught at whatever time the catchers finish catching their first house. There are certain times when you have to turn off their feed (so their stomachs will be empty when they are processed at the plant), raise feed lines/water lines, etc. So here is the schedule from last night. Notice the times? Yeah, you never get sleep when your chickens are caught. This is actually one of best schedules we've had. They usually like to string us out so that we lose two nights of sleep.

Here's one house full of 32,000 unsuspecting chickens!

Look, we have a racially diverse farm!

As soon as we get the feed and water lines raised out of the way, the catchers roll up the front door and go to work! It's hard to get good pictures inside a chicken house because the older the chickens get, the less percentage of light you give them. The day we catch, the light is 30%, but when the catchers come in, they like it to be 0-5%. The less light there is, the less the birds move.

When the catchers grab the chickens, they put one chicken between each of their fingers (they can hold eight at a time), and put them in one of these coops.

When a coop is full, this guy drives the fork truck in there and picks it up. You better be outta the way too because he's fast. He would probably run over his own grandmother to get finished.

He then places it on the trailer, grabs an empty coop and brings it back inside.

If it starts to get hot outside, the catch crew usually has a designated "chicken sprayer", which is someone who squirts the chickens with a water hose to keep them cool. If the chickens aren't upset enough that they were thrown into a coop and put on a trailer, spray them in the face with some water. No wonder they squirt poop at you when you walk by the trailer.

When a trailer is full, it sits and waits on another truck to get back with an empty trailer. The truck unhooks from the empty coops and then hooks up to the full trailer to take it to the plant. It takes about 4 of these trailers per house, so they're tearin' up the roads!

When they are finished, you have to go in the houses and pick up any "casualties", then all you're left with is empty houses! Time to clean 'em up and get 'em ready for next time!

Thanks for attending Stephanie's School of Farming. I hope I've enlightened you more than confused you. In a few weeks, I'll be teaching you how to "Dump Chickens".
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Check out some of Lance's watermelon crop! He grew about 1/4th of an acre of them this year.

Here's some of the cantaloupe he grew too.

Our peanut trailers arrived last week. These trailers will be used to transport the peanuts after we pick them to the buying station in south Alabama. The big opening in the front of the trailer is for a dryer. The dryer is a big fan used to dry the peanuts.
---------------------------------------------------------
The sheet rockers have just finished sheet rocking our house! The finisher is currently "finishing".

Here's our garage.

Here's the living room.

Here's Lance checking out the sheet rock in the dining room.

It's kind of dark, but here's part of our bedroom!

Thanks for visiting the farm!