Celebrating Our Chicken Farmers on National Farmer’s Day
October 12th is one of our favorite days of the year – it’s National Farmers Day! On National Farmers Day, we celebrate the dedicated and hardworking farmers who help feed the world. It’s a day we celebrate and thank our farmers.
This National Farmer’s Day, we’d like to spotlight chicken farmers. Chicken farmers work everyday to produce wholesome and healthy chicken for you and your family.
We invite you to celebrate all of our farmers and join us in thanking them for all that they do to care for their chickens, be stewards of the land, and help feed the world.
To continue the celebration, check out some of these lesser-known facts about chicken farmers in the U.S.
Chicken farming is a family business.
In fact, about 25,000 family farms raise chicken in the U.S.
For Jenny Rhodes, her favorite thing about chicken farming is working with her family. She shares, “I wanted to raise my sons just like I was raised, working together, working hard and learning responsibility. What is not to love about owning your own farm and raising healthy, safe and affordable food? I love that as a single mom I have taught my sons how to farm and today they both own their own chicken farms.”
Matt Lohr is a 5th generation farmer and he operates a family farm with his wife. He hopes that “some of our children will want to continue the farming tradition one day.”
Chicken farmers take their job very seriously and put the welfare of their birds at the top of their priority list.
As you’ll see in our Day in the Life video series, raising chickens is a 24/7 job. After all, the financial success of farmers ultimately depends on the health and welfare of their birds.
Jennifer Odom, a chicken farmer from Mississippi, shared that “farmers have a 24 hour a day job. There are no sick days and the farm has to be managed no matter what. Poultry farmers work very hard to market a good healthy bird for the consumer. Farming is not just a job, it is a farmer’s life and livelihood.”
Put simply, a farmer’s livelihood depends on the health of his or her flock. It is their job to ensure their chickens’ needs are met so they can comfortably grow to healthy market weight – to feed America’s families.
Daniel Hayden, a chicken farmer from Kentucky, shares that “the care that the chickens are given is second to none on any other way a chicken can live. Farming is composed completely of passion, we put our hearts and souls in what we do and people need to experience just a taste of that passion.”
