ABBEVILLE, S.C. (AP) - On the first day of her spring break, when most kids her age would probably be playing or maybe even sleeping, Adyson Ashley is processing chickens.
The 10-year-old was up until midnight the night before with her dad, Jason Ashley, and her uncle, Greg Nance, to harvest half of the 50 chickens she has raised from chicks to mature birds, and she will spend nearly eight hours working today.
But, that’s just part of having your own business, and Adyson’s is doing quite well. Last year, her first in retail operations, she made about $4,000 for 200 chickens. This year, she is on track to nearly double that number. With the money she makes, Adyson is saving for college.
“I like chickens,” Adyson offers when asked why she wanted to start a chicken farming business.
“You don’t have to have a big space to do it,” she explains, tilting her head slightly and shrugging her shoulders. “And you don’t have to have all the equipment. You can do it without all the expensive equipment.”
Adyson’s age and small business are not the only things that make her unique as far as 10-year-olds go. It’s also her product. Adyson is raising grass-fed chickens without hormones or antibiotics, using a rotating pastures method that allows for optimum nutrition and health. The result is a premium product that is not just good, but is in demand.
“If there were 20 Adysons right now, every one of them would be selling out their products,” says Mike McGirr, executive director of the Feed & Seed, which is working to connect farmers and consumers and to build a more sustainable agricultural system.
The perfect storm of a growing food culture coupled with a greater demand for high quality poultry products, and a lack of facilities equipped to harvest such products makes what Adyson is doing even more important.
“From Anderson and Greenwood to Spartanburg and everything in between, I know the restaurants and the markets that would sell the product,” McGirr says. “It’s just there isn’t the product.”
But McGirr sees potential to turn Adyson’s poultry business into something other kids around the state could model, potentially satisfying two needs - the need for high quality poultry production and the need for a way to save for college. He is currently working with Adyson and her father, Jason Ashley, who owns Johnson Creek Farm, on a way to catalog and standardize their process so that could be easily replicated.
For the love of chickens
At 10, Adyson is slight in build, freckled and shy. But she loves chickens. She began showing them when she was 6 years old in the county’s local 4-H competitions. The shows required learning how to care for chickens, understanding how they live, what they eat and also knowing as much as you can about them.
Ashley won three times.
And that’s when her dad asked if she might like to raise chickens for the family.
“I just said yes,” Adyson says, shyly. While Adyson does the majority of the day to day feeding and caring for the chickens, Jason helps whenever needed.
“It’s hard sometimes,” Adyson says of growing chickens. “But it’s pretty easy to do, sometimes.”
Adyson and Jason did research on the best feed, methods and types of breeds, settling on a Freedom Ranger variety, which is known to do well in grass-fed environments.
Adyson took out a $1,500 loan from her grandparents to invest in her first set of chicks, feed and materials to build pens and startup equipment.
The connection with Bacon Bros. came through McGirr, who has been working with Bacon Bros. Public House executive chef Anthony Gray on the Feed & Seed for more than a year. The restaurant had been buying Johnson Creek Farm beef for about a year when Jason mentioned Adyson’s chickens.
Gray was immediately impressed.
“If you eat one of these chickens compared to your average commodity chicken, there is no comparison,” the chef says.
Gray, along with his partners have built their brand on supporting local producers, but also on providing customers with high quality food. He, along with Bacon Bros. chief operations officer, Jason Callaway visit the farms they support to ensure the quality of their product.
“From the worms to the feeding, these chickens are really just eating the grass out there, and that depends on how the land has been taken care of,” Gray says. “And I think that really defines why the product out there is so much better than what other people are doing.”
Other restaurants have expressed interest in Adyson’s chickens, but there are limitations. One is school. But two is the fact that the Department of Agriculture regulates small farm operations like hers. Current law allows for small scale poultry producers to process up to 1,000 chickens a year as long as they are raised on their own land and as long as the product is only sold within the state.
Building a better product
There is a rhythm to the way Adyson and Jason work. They share a special bond, and it’s clear that even on these days they are working, they are relishing the time together.
On a day in mid-April, processing day, the two have spent the better part of the morning prepping the chickens they killed the night before. Jason bags the birds that have been kept in an ice water bath overnight, while Adyson diligently weighs them, sticks a label on them and records the stats.
On this day, they will process the rest. About 25 birds sit in cages awaiting their fate. If Adyson is nervous, she doesn’t show it. She has done this many times before and works diligently and efficiently, plucking a chicken from the cage, gently but firmly moving it to the cone, where Jason will swiftly sever its carotid artery and bleed it out, before Adyson will take over to remove the feathers.
The setting, just a few hundred feet from the Ashley’s house, in the bucolic expanse of their yard, feels oddly serene and calm, and almost kind of beautiful.
The harvesting is part of the process, and it’s just as important as the way the chickens are raised.
“If you’re not humane, I mean what’s the point anyway” Jason says. “You have compassion for the animals that you’re feeding, raising, processing, that’s what we try to teach her. They’re not here just to survive, they’re here to thrive.”
Part of what makes Adyson’s method of raising chickens so interesting is that it requires no antibiotics or hormones and little money for feed. Instead, the birds feed on grass, soldier fly larva (which boosts nutrition) and a supplemental corn-based feed that is mixed with crushed oyster shells (the shells help them digest their food).
Jason helped develop the system based off his grass-fed cattle. About 8 years ago he redesigned his farm to support a higher quality, antibiotic and hormone free cattle operation. In that process he learned a lot about the merits of grass as feed. Certain varieties offer certain nutritional benefits to animals.
The highest nutritional benefit is in the top part of the grass, which is why Jason rotates his cows from pasture to pasture. Adyson does the same with her chicken, moving each pen to a new spot of grass every day.
The Red Ranger variety is known as foragers, which means they like to move around and to forage for their food. They are particularly adept to a grass-fed system. And while they receive some supplemental grain feed, most of the time they just pick through it to get to the grass or larva.
“Chicken doesn’t have to be bland and white,” Gray says. “That’s not necessarily what it’s supposed to be, either. It’s supposed to have red color and depth of flavor. It’s supposed to run around and catch little bugs, which gives the protein color and flavor.”
Big potential
It’s not so much that Adyson and Jason are doing things that are revolutionary - you could find all of the info on the Internet and through the extension service - but the process they’ve created is. That’s why McGirr sees potential to standardize it for others, particularly other kids, to use.
Adyson has already begun recording her process through writing, noting things like why and how to grow soldier fly larva, and steps of the processing part. Currently, Jason is the one who kills the chickens and handles the gutting process, mainly because Adyson’s size prevents her from getting a good angle and grip, but eventually, Adyson will take over.
“It’s not for everybody,” McGirr says. “But you can scale to the size of the space. And it of course depends on the circumstances and the means by which to get the seed capital in place with which to buy the materials. But the feed is basically free, household waste, a local restaurant’s food waste and the soldier fly larvae that produce themselves.”
By the end of her first year in business, Adyson had made enough through selling to Bacon Bros. to pay back her grandparents’ and to buy more advanced processing equipment. And she still had $75 leftover.
This year, Adyson will double her output for Bacon Bros. and because she has already invested in the equipment she needs, she stands to more than double her profit. Half of it is going to college savings, she says, a quarter goes back into the business and a quarter is for Adyson to do with what she wants. Currently, she has her sights set on one day buying a car or truck.
“There is an opportunity for small producers who wish to process the animals on their own property as long as the meet the right packing and food safety criteria, to process their animals and to sell them into a marketplace,” McGirr says. “That is something we want to encourage.”
Thus far, plans are in the very early stages, but McGirr hopes to involve local 4-H and Extension programs to spread the word. Because the process is quite simple and requires just a small space, McGirr and Gray see potential for a sort of a small chicken farming revolution. Maybe, they say, other kids throughout the region or even the state, could copy Adyson’s method to raise their own high quality chickens, either for their families or as a small-scale business.
Back at Johnson Creek Farms, Adyson and Jason have hit a snag. The water that is an essential part of the plucking process is not heating to the required 150 degrees. After some tinkering, testing and sighs, the stagnant temperature remains a mystery.
It all means that a job that should have been done by early afternoon will be extended to later in the day. But neither Adyson or Jason seem too upset. Instead, they continue on, working carefully and methodically, together in their long established rhythm.
“As long as she’s happy doing it I’ll keep doing it with her,” Jason says. “If she gets to where she’s not happy doing it or it seems to be frustrating to her, then we’ll stop. But I’m hoping as long as I’m not pushing her that she’ll continue to do it on her own.”
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