Free-Range Chickens on my Small Farm

Our farm is in Oregon's Coast Range, which has a mild climate that allows our free-range hens to maintain an outdoor lifestyle year-round, even during rare winter snow, as shown in the photo. We have a flock of about 500 chickens in our free-range egg operation, and around 1500 pastured broilers during the six-month broiler season. We also raise a batch of turkeys for Thanksgiving.

We've been raising free-range eggs and pastured broilers since the mid-Nineties

We've been rediscovering the old-time American free-range poultry methods developed during poultrykeeping's Golden Age between 1900 and 1960. We read pretty much the entire collection of ancient poultry books and magazines in Oregon State University's Valley Library, and tried or adapted as many of these as possible. We've put our findings up on this site.

One of the things we learned is that pasture-raised chickens product better-tasting eggs and meat, and are a lot more fun to deal with than confined chickens. We also discovered many cases where simpler, more inexpensive methods worked as well as complex and expensive ones, and often better.