This past spring/summer, my son hatched a bunch of chicks in his homemade incubator. He sold most of them, while holding back a given number for his own flock. His intention was to have more laying hens, but as they got older, it became clear that a number of the chicks were males.

He’s already gotten requests from a past buyer and from new potential buyers about his chicks for the coming season, and has close to one hundred eggs ready to incubate. For a few weeks I’ve been asking him to dispatch the excess roosters, but that hasn’t yet happened. When he mentioned being ready to start incubating his first batch of eggs, I absolutely put my foot down – no new chicks until the roosters are processed.

That was the motivation he needed, and he made arrangements for the shochet who taught him to come over.

As soon as Shabbos was over, I drove my sixteen year old son to the bus station so he could get travel back to yeshiva and was surprised when I got home to find a yard teeming with activity.

My fifteen year old son did all the shechita; the shochet was there only to oversee him. He shechted six roosters, five of which were kosher. The sixth was a mixed breed rooster, which is very hard to get a kosher shechita done on. This was additional validation of the decision my son made to move from raising mixed chickens to a heritage breed.

While he was doing the shechita, there was a chicken plucking party with five or six boys of different ages going on! They had a great time, and I was grateful to all of them for doing it so I didn’t have to.

The next morning my husband salted all the chickens as the next step in the kashering process, then rinsed them all and now they’re all in the fridge, ready to be cooked. When I watched him salting them, he commented that it’s a lot of work to process your own chickens.

Yes, it really is.

Is it empowering to raise your own animals, to know what they’re fed, how they’re treated, and to know they are healthy and disease free? Yes, absolutely. Our animals all enjoy a standard of living that is far above factory chickens. But it’s also a lot of work.

Is it a frugal thing to do? A lot of time, energy and feed went into raising these chickens. Honestly, it’s very hard to compete with industrially raised food on a cost-point basis. At this point it’s not a money saving endeavor, since my son has to make back all that he’s invested into the coop, supplies and purchase of his original chickens, which cost around three thousand shekels.

So why do it?

This is something that interested my son and as a homeschooling mother, I try to support their interests. Additionally, I value traditional knowledge combined with hands-on skills, skills that were widely known for centuries but have been lost to most of us in our modern lives. I want my children to have these skills, and I myself want to have these skills. Raising chickens is a skill-set, and my son has gained real life skills in the raising and processing of chickens.

As a society, we have become dependent for all of our needs on a supply chain that is becoming increasingly fragile. It’s nice to know that there are things that we can do for ourselves, and be less dependent on others to do them for us. I like knowing we can raise some of our own food – currently we supplement our store bought food with home-raised eggs, milk and now chicken.

While we’re very far from being independent in raising our own food, every bit of progress is something to feel good about. This was our first batch of chickens, and it’s taken time to get to this point. My son bought the mother hens as week old chicks that he raised, eventually incubated the eggs they laid when they reached maturity five months later, and now has raised those chicks to adulthood. It’s quite an accomplishment.

When my son first talked about doing this, it was just an idea. Now that it’s come to fruition, I’m more enthusiastic about him increasing the number of chickens he raises in the coming months.

Avivah