Raising Free-Range Chickens

This Freedom Ranger chick is about five weeks old.

He has been living in the outside covered pen for just over a week now and has most of his adult feathers. You can see the yellow chick feathers still on his head, but the comb has already started to be more defined which lets us know that this chick is male.

The Freedom Ranger has been bred to perform better than the standard commercial meat bird in free-range situations. There is a lot more genetic diversity in the breed and so they range in colour from pale grey to dark and from light blond to dark red. They are really beautiful with the variety of feather colouration.

They also are much better at foraging. From the moment they first go outside, they are busy scratching in the dirt and chasing flying insects.

We currently have birds shipped in from a hatchery in Saskatoon. There are a couple of farmers interested in starting a hatchery here, but for now, almost all chicks grown in the Yukon are flown in as day old chicks. In 2007, we raised 300 chickens for Yukon families.

When the chicks arrive, they must be shown how to drink and eat. As each chick is taken out of the box, their beaks are gently dipped in water until they've taken a drink. Then a little dip in the chick ration to let them know where to find it and they can be turned loose under the brooder. We use a propane brooder and wood shavings for bedding. The brooder must be turned on at least 12 hours before the chicks arrive so the bedding is at a nice, warm 30°C for their arrival.

We keep our chicks on a non-medicated starter crumble for the first few days then switch to a locally milled feed produced by Yukon Grain Farm that uses soybean as the main protein source. While still in the brooder, the chicks get regular supplements of fresh greens (weeds) from the garden as well as a little sprinkle of Fertrell's Nutri-balancer that contains kelp meal for chelated vitamins and trace nutrients, phosphorus, B vitamin complex and trace minerals.

Pastured poultry are raised outside with access to grass. What this often means is that the chickens are housed in portable pens that can be moved to ungrazed areas which not only provides fresh greens for the chickens but lets the chicken manure be spread over a wider area to maximize the benefits of the high-nitrogen manure while minimizing odours.

Several farmers who raise free-range birds in the Whitehorse area got together in the spring of 2007, obtained funding from the APF program and ordered chicken processing equipment to make the job of preparing birds for the freezer a lot easier. This equipment packs up into a utility trailer so it can travel from farm to farm throughout the season and is available to be used on other farms too.The group wrote a manual that describes the process and how to book the use of the mobile chicken processing equipment.