Still No Chicks
I arrived at the farm store at 6:45 yesterday morning. There was one other vehicle in the parking lot, with a guy inside. He waved at me and I waved back, and when I got out to go stand by the door, he rolled down his window and we chatted for a while. By 7:15, we were the first and second in a line of about half a dozen people waiting for the store to open. He told me this was his third attempt to get chicks. Another lady in line said she’d been trying for two weeks. Eventually, after listening to all the stories, I was able to paste together an explanation of what has been happening:
The store orders chicks from the hatcheries. The hatcheries send them through the US postal service. The postal service is a hot mess, so chicks don’t arrive on schedule. When they do arrive, the chicks are extra stressed and many of them die en route or shortly after. As a result, the store has been handing out numbers when people get there at 7:30 (when the store opens), but then customers with numbers have to come back at 10:00 am to give the chicks time to get acclimated. The store also has a policy that any chicks that die within the first 24 hours will be replaced for free, so those customers get their replacement chicks before anyone else, even the customers with numbers. Sometimes, there are no chicks left for new customers after the replacement chicks are handed out.
WHAT. A. MESS. We cannot seem to do anything properly in this country anymore.
We all waited until 7:30, at which point, one of the cashiers came out and said that the expected chick shipment hadn’t arrived. The chicks were either east of the mountains or down in Texas.
I am not going to go back this morning. We got a mix of snow and rain overnight and I know the roads will be awful. Also, if this is yesterday’s shipment of chicks, it’s likely that they will be too stressed to survive. I don’t have time—or the desire—to go back tomorrow to get replacement chicks if the ones I bought today died.
These are my options:
Wait and try again next week, although my schedule next week is problematic. The week after could be better. The farm store will have chicks until the middle of April. By then, perhaps the newbie farmers will have gotten their chicks or given up.
Forego getting chicks this year, which means our egg production is going to take a hit.
Incubate eggs and deal with the inevitable surfeit of roosters in the fall.
Hope that some of my hens go broody and hatch out chicks of their own, in which case I will still have excess roosters.
Try to find a local person who has chicks to sell. WS came over to get eggs the other day and told me that he had done that and gotten a dozen chicks from a lady locally. Unclear whether I will have to take straight run (mixed sex) or can get only pullets. If it’s straight run, I might as well incubate our own eggs.
I have lots of thoughts about this entire situation. 🧐 You can ask me privately if you want to hear them.
On the plus side, Little Roo learned well from Dave. He does a good job with the hens:
Little Roo is half Black Australorp, one-quarter New Hampshire Red, and one-quarter Buff Orpington. I ought to change his name to Heinz (57), but he answers to Little Roo so I’ll probably leave it. Any babies he fathers are going to be mongrels, for sure.
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I’ve got some class prep to do today for next week’s classes. The Bernina event next weekend incorporates some PowerPoint presentations, so I need to get those set up on my laptop.
Tomorrow, though, I will be in the greenhouse, planting tomatoes. Lots of tomatoes.