It All Began with the Chickens

For Orren, it all began with the chickens—and he’s not even cer­tain exactly why. “When I was about nine, I must have been read­ing some­thing or heard some­thing on the radio con­cern­ing chick­ens that kind of caught my atten­tion,” Orren told Organic Connections. “I’m not quite sure what it was, but one day I just had this large inter­est in them. I looked around online to see what I could find, then went and got a bunch of books about them and read all I could. There was some­thing to do with chick­ens that was really intriguing.”

Through vis­its to a nearby farm, his inter­est really took hold. “One of our neigh­bors rec­om­mended to us this one lit­tle farm, about two miles away from our house,” Orren con­tin­ued. “When I was younger I would go over there every Saturday and take care of her birds, feed them, give them water, do the basics, col­lect the eggs. There was just some­thing about it that I com­pletely loved and admired, so I kept feed­ing her birds, get­ting more used to them. Then one day the neigh­bor asked me if I wanted to get a few of my own birds. So we went down to the local feed store and got a dozen sweet lit­tle hens, and that’s kind of where it began.”

Orren’s inter­est was fur­ther boosted by a report he did in the fifth grade. “Each year at my old school the fifth graders would all do a research project,” Orren said. “It was a very big deal. For my topic, I chose chick­ens and gave short pre­sen­ta­tions; a cou­ple of the days I would bring in one of my birds so peo­ple could have a bird to hold and touch and feel. The report was a way for me to really find out a lot about birds and to get to know more about them.”

It was while he was research­ing this report that Orren learned how chick­ens are treated in indus­trial farm­ing. “One of the chap­ters in my research project had to do with fac­tory farm­ing,” Orren recalled. “I found out the unfor­tu­nate truth about the way many com­mer­cial farm­ers raise their birds, and some of the con­di­tions the birds are in cer­tainly don’t appeal to me. It was a bum­mer to learn this, but it’s some­thing that I’m glad to know so I have another per­spec­tive on birds and chick­ens in general.”

This infor­ma­tion fur­thered Orren’s resolve to treat chick­ens humanely. “I wanted to pro­vide an envi­ron­ment that my birds were happy in, in which they would have lots to do and lots to eat,” he said, “not at all like the fac­tory farm­ing peo­ple. I wasn’t into hav­ing birds that weren’t happy and were just lay­ing eggs because they had to, not hav­ing enough room to set­tle down and just in bad con­di­tions in gen­eral. I wanted to pro­vide them with a great place to live, and I think I’ve held that up pretty well, if I can say so myself.”

Today, for a hobby farmer, Orren has quite a num­ber of chick­ens: he has 29 that he pur­posely acquired, and recently 16 chicks have hatched. Nobody will be eat­ing those chick­ens, how­ever. Except for nat­u­rally occur­ring egg production—which has pro­vided a small extra source of income—the chick­ens are pri­mar­ily pets.

A few years after he started with the chick­ens, Orren also became intensely inter­ested in bees. “I had a friend who occa­sion­ally brought honey into school, and he got me hooked on the whole idea of bees,” Orren related. “Then our local county fair, dur­ing the win­ter, offered a course that taught the basics of car­ing for bees. My mom and I went every Tuesday night for a few months, learn­ing how to take care of bees and how to make sure they’re healthy. That really got me going and has pro­vided the foun­da­tion of my car­ing for my nice lit­tle bees.”

In a sim­i­lar way to the chick­ens, Orren loves the sheer life of the bees. “Bees are much more self-sustaining, so I visit them less often,” he said. “But I love going to the bees. I’ll open up the hive because I might need to change something—maybe a piece of hive broke, or there’s some­thing that I need to clean out, or some main­te­nance that needs to be done. As soon as I open it up, it’s kind of a good feel­ing to have all the bees (don’t take this the wrong way) get really angry and come out, because you know that the hive is thriv­ing and healthy. You open up a hive and you observe this flour­ish­ing com­mu­nity and lots of happy, healthy bees. It’s fun to see what you’re doing to their hive, and it’s really cool to see how a queen is grown, how a hive can change over the sea­sons and pro­duce honey. Every lit­tle aspect about it is intriguing.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Through the blog Orren has cre­ated, Happy Chickens Lay Healthy Eggs, thou­sands of vis­i­tors share in his expe­ri­ences and can learn much con­cern­ing the care of chick­ens and bees, as well as a bit about where their food is com­ing from. “When I first got my birds when I was younger, I started to keep a lit­tle jour­nal and peo­ple were curi­ous as to what I was writ­ing in it,” Orren said. “I thought, ‘How can I share all my ideas and thoughts about my birds?’ So I started a blog, and a lot of peo­ple began fol­low­ing. Now I have many, many peo­ple who con­sis­tently go on it. It’s just a way for me to con­vey infor­ma­tion about my bees and chick­ens. It’s also a way to get peo­ple to know about chick­ens and bees, because in gen­eral peo­ple don’t really under­stand where their food comes from. It’s good to know what you’re eat­ing. People aren’t eat­ing my birds, but they are eat­ing the honey that comes from the bees and the eggs that come from my chick­ens. It’s a nice way to get peo­ple on board with local food and what they’re eating.”

The blog also brought Orren con­sid­er­able atten­tion, and resulted in many media inter­views and requests to appear at numer­ous events.

Orren isn’t plan­ning on a career in farm­ing. But the fun he’s having—and the good he is doing for the future of agriculture—surely isn’t lost on him. “I’m not really aspir­ing to become a farmer,” he con­cluded. “But the bees and chick­ens are a great hobby; they’re a ton of fun. I’ve seen many other kids get intrigued because I’ve had all these ani­mals, and get­ting chil­dren involved is really a big part of what I’m hop­ing to do through my blog because the kids are the next gen­er­a­tion. If they’re more aware of what they’re eat­ing and where their food comes from, it all sets up for a bet­ter future.”

Visit Orren’s blog at www.happychickenslayhealthyeggs.blogspot.com.