Chicken Business

 

Being in the chicken business was a change of life.  We bought baby chicks and waited for about three months to get our first egg.  The chickens were all laying good when they got sick..  The eggs had a thin shell and weren’t saleable.  Farmers Feed and Supply, where we had bought the baby chicks, told us what to use for medicine and to just put it in a tank on the third floor and let it go into the water fountains.  What they didn’t realize and neither did we, was that the medicine needed to be mixed thoroughly.   The medicine came out to strong and all the chickens had a double dose of sulfa and were dying fast.  We should have just killed them but we struggled to keep them alive.  They never did lay good again.  Now instead of eggs being sixty cents a dozen they were thirty cents a dozen, just what it cost to produce them.  That was the only disaster we had.  The next batch of chickens really produced and we made a healthy profit.

  We realized that the middle man was making the most money so we started delivering to the stores in I.F. and some families in Rexburg.     It required a lot of work to feed, gather, candle and package the eggs.  People came to the house to buy eggs and wanted to sit and visit for hours and I didn’t have time for that.  I finally figured out a way to get my scriptures read.  I would have Steve read aloud to me while I worked with the eggs.  I thought he would gain a testimony of the gospel that way.
       The bad thing was that we packaged the eggs in the basement.  Once a week Jess would lift the cases of eggs, up through a basement window and I would load them in the pickup.  Jess  had a bad back and lifting up with a case of eggs made his back bend back wards and he had severe pain.  The doctor told him he could be cured if he would sleep in a bed with his knees raised up and take the pressure off his back.  We set up a hospital bed in the front room and Jess slept there every night for months.  Eventually his back pain eased but he had to be careful how he lifted.  I had to stand on a chair with a case of eggs and lift them through the window.  One of the boys would finish pulling them through the window and then I would go outside and lift them to the pickup.