Chicken Tragedy

What a weekend! Friday evening we loaded the first batch of chickens into a friends' horse trailer (thank you Brandy!!)...in the rain. We drove them to Yoder's (an Amish farm in Charlotte) where we left them for the night so Yoder's could begin processing at 4am on Saturday. We got back home around 9:30pm Friday night and had to move the 100 chicks from the garage to the outdoor pens. We finished that just before the rain started pouring. Paul had to work on Saturday so I went to pick up the chickens...I was told to be there at 9am. I arrived at 8:50am with $45 worth of ice. The chickens weren't ready to go until 10:15am...as you can imagine, much of the ice melted during that time. But the loss of the ice was nothing compared to the loss of chickens. 42 of them died over night in the trailer. Chickens are known to pile on top of each other and because of the storms Friday night it appears they did just that. That was a huge loss for us. It was definitely a weekend that will go down in our farm history book...a story we'll have in our back pockets when swapping tragedies or mishaps with other farmers.