The time has come to cast aside the shackles of high-stress factory chickens. Imagine what kind of bird you could raise if you gave it a low-stress environment, daily fresh grass and clean water, and a properly balanced diet of non-GMO feed steeped in probiotics and essential oils. You could grow some Texas Style Chickens.
Texas Style Chickens are what we’re doing at Raising Wood. This is our fourth go at raising Cornish Cross birds on pasture to stock our freezer with meat, and it’s the best. Let me show you what we’re doing.
Start with chicks a day old when the frost may still fall to the ground, but you can also break a sweat working the garden in the afternoon. Put them in a warm, dry space with water and feed and a heat lamp and wood shavings, and check them obsessively for two to three weeks.
Before you know it, they have sufficient feathers to handle the cool dips at night. Move them out to your prepared chicken tractor on the grass. Each day, you will move them forward one tractor length. You will update food and water each day as well.
Before you know it, the edge of winter has passed, and the heat of the summer is threatening. Your birds will be hot. Texas Style Chickens have to deal with random Texas heat spikes. They need shade, in a hurry.
Then you’re going to realize that the shademobile nestled right up against the chicken tractors makes everything hard to move again. Then you realize that it’s going to be low 90s most of the week, and something has to change, or your birds will perish from the dang heat. So you root around in the shop with your wife for a while and come up with the “hey, don’t we have Radiant Barrier left over from the roof project? Let’s use some of that to cover them up. Then you congratulate yourself for being such a dang clever farmer. Then you go to cut your Radiant Barrier to size and realize you already cut them to size when you used this same solution last year and forgot about it. Farming is great for the mind, I tell ya.
This stuff works. You can feel the heat radiating back into your face when you stand near it. Chicken heat issue, solved. You can see the boys putting their own Radiant Barrier covering over their chicken tractor, as they raised 5 each this season to sell for profit.
Then the processing day comes quickly. You use your souper cubes and deep freezers to freeze 240lb of ice. You get a pasture-raised pork shoulder out of the freezer, and you smoke it for 28 hours to make lunch for the incredibly dedicated and diligent friends who have volunteered to do hours of hard work for the pleasure of learning the process.
Then your wife spends all day Friday setting up the carport for the killing, scalding, plucking, processing, dunking, icing, drying, and bagging of the birds. We are very blessed to have a covered carport and abundant hoses.
Notable improvements this year: Using a pickup truck bed to schlep birds from the tractor, energetic boys were ideal for loading and unloading. Then +2 kill buckets. A waterproof timer for the scald stand. Hoses with nozzles suspended over the processing table. Waterproof ergonomic mats for the table. +2x150qt Coolers. +1 folding table to drying. Poly Aprons. Meat Lug Liners. XXS gloves for kid hands. A bundle of terry cloth towels for handwashing/drying. Tractor with Post Hole Auger to dig holes and schlep the leftovers into. Custom Raising Wood labels.
When that last bird skids into the cooler and you clean up and go inside for lunch, it’s a tremendous feeling. There’s some work still to go, but the bulk is complete.
Bag the birds and freeze the birds, and do more cleanup, and that’s the end of the Texas Style Chickens for Spring of 2026.
So how did we do? There were changes made from last year. We moved from a 20% protien feed to a 22% protien feed. We started two weeks later in the year by virtue of hatchery availability. We moved to a different pasture area.
How many dollars were consumed, separate from capital expenditures?
Separate from the new tractor, equipment expenditures were $633, we’ll set those aside for their reusable nature. Labor is part of the equation, but I’m still sore and don’t want to talk about it.
What was the output?
60 birds processed. Average weight of 9.13#, blowing past the prior high of 8.25#. New High score in the largest size birds, with a pair of birds ringing in at 11lb 5oz, blasting past the prior high score of 10lb 6oz. As we were processing the final batch of birds, I cracked a joke that there were some big chickens, but it would be annoying if the boys managed to make a chicken bigger than the ones Jenny and I raised.
Sure enough, the boys clocked a bird in the freezer bag at 11lb 6oz, and hold the new high score for the largest Texas Style Chicken on the Raising Wood Farm.
8.5 weeks. Birds were healthy. Non-GMO feed and abundant grass converted into chicken to feed my family. Boys learned about working, each day, every day, until the job culminates in a forever-long processing day, then learned about order fulfillment and seeing customers delight in a quality product. Friends learned a new skill.
Texas-style chickens are the best type of production, one that brings people together and nourishes the family at the table and in the soul.