In our quest to build our dream farm, we started with a crazy, mid-pandemic move out of suburbia and onto a 10 acre rental property. We made the move in order to gain the time and resources to hunt for our forever farm and try out aspects of our desired lifestyle. What, specifically, would we do with our year of rural renting? It was the wrong time of year to start a vegetable garden, large animals take time to find and are hard to move, and bringing the soil ecosystem into good health would take years.

To start something immediately, we settled on raising enough meat chickens for our family for a year, about 100 birds. For us, those 100 meat chicks were a step towards more sustainable food, an experiment with pasture raising birds, and a chance to learn more about what we need to create the curated ecosystem that will support our food animals.