Doughboy, maybe I spelled it wrong ?Doboy? IDk..
I believe it was a large chicken or feed company back then.
they brought chicks and feed to my uncle.
he would raise them for a certain length of
time and then the company would bring in
trucks and load up the chickens and haul them to butcher facilities.
then a guy would pay my uncle for the manure and come in and clean out the barns.
my uncle would take a week off and maybe take a trip, or do nothing.
get the barns ready and receive more chicks.
Sounds like what my grandfather did, but I have no idea which company he raised for, not anything I cared about as a kid. Maybe that company you mentioned was in your neck of the woods, not here on the east coast. Anyway, doesn't matter.
I think most folks here on BYC, not all, but more, are backyard hobbyists and most got chickens for eggs, primarily. Some butcher their hens, some don't. Some rotate stock, some don't. Some like them for their pet value, some don't go that route.
I used to be overrun with eggs when we had larger numbers of young birds years ago, 55 chickens was our highest number, which included 3-4 roosters at the time, but since we have so many hens who are very old and don't lay regularly, some not at all, we must occasionally buy eggs plus feed non-productive pets. I figure they're animals, not machines *(note my sig line), and I can't make them produce every time I want them to so I make concessions for them. I like them as pets as much as a dog because they produce something we can eat, they know their names and a good bit of vocabulary, can learn commands to a degree, some better than dogs I've had, and they also provide usable fertilizer for our gardens, unlike dogs. If they don't lay, well, I don't like not having their awesome eggs to use, but I live with it.
I do have plans to change up my management in the future. I quit buying hatchery hens years ago because of all the reproductive malfunctions, but they were good layers until their bodies betrayed them. I may get a few hatchery hens again, but not the common production types that died on me, one after the other. That is very frustrating after awhile. It is not easy to euthanize your pets. We plan to do the all-day free range route again to lessen the feed bill as well. But, that will take some time to change up my stock and for the old gals to die off. Shouldn't be very long, not as old as many of them are, though they are generally all quite healthy at the moment. That's the upside and the downside of better stock--they live longer....
and, they live longer, much longer, if you get what I'm saying.
Hope everyone starts getting eggs within the next month or so. Seems mine take a break in the late fall and begin laying in the dead of winter, for some reason.
