When Humansville still had the hatchery, they sold baby chicks but the big business was selling broilers for frying chickens.
Understand, all the chickens my folks raised were truly free range. My mother would toss them some corn scratch to get them to come up, and she sat out oyster shell and grit, but those chickens all ate everything there was left over on the farm.
Chickens sold by the dozen, and in that huge chicken hatchery with pens full of white birds, there was always a few little black chickens.
The owners would make sure a little kid like me would get a free black chicken, which thereafter I’d always name Blackie.
When it came time to slaughter the frying chickens Blackie, always got a reprieve.
That meant most of the layers, were black as a coal mine at midnight, until the hawks or the owls or other critters ate em.
Understand, all the chickens my folks raised were truly free range. My mother would toss them some corn scratch to get them to come up, and she sat out oyster shell and grit, but those chickens all ate everything there was left over on the farm.
Chickens sold by the dozen, and in that huge chicken hatchery with pens full of white birds, there was always a few little black chickens.
The owners would make sure a little kid like me would get a free black chicken, which thereafter I’d always name Blackie.
When it came time to slaughter the frying chickens Blackie, always got a reprieve.
That meant most of the layers, were black as a coal mine at midnight, until the hawks or the owls or other critters ate em.