DOMREMY, Sask. – A health scare led Monique Denis to a farm diversification project that works for her and her family.
Eight years ago she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and while she recovered, the 27 year old decided she wanted to eat as healthfully as possible.
Besides planting and eating from a large vegetable garden on her parents’ farm northeast of Domremy, Denis also decided to raise organic pastured poultry.
“Mom, we can’t eat store-bought poultry any more,” Monique’s mother Rita recalled her daughter telling her.
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Monique’s Chicks is now three years old and continues to grow. She may have founded the business, but her entire family is involved, which is important because Monique is away this fall meeting her fiancee’s family in Scotland, leading up to a wedding in December.
While she is away, the rest of the family fills in, selling frozen birds from the farmgate. Monique and her husband intend to return to Domremy to raise chickens.
Rita said her daughter trades some of her organic chickens for bison and organic hogs in order to get variety in her diet.
Monique’s customers tend to be older people who remember the taste, texture and smell of farm-raised chicken. Some also have health concerns and, like Monique, want to reduce the chemicals in their food. They find her operation by word of mouth or advertising and generally order two to 50 birds ahead of time, coming to the farm to pick up their packages.
Monique produced 1,000 chickens in her first year of operation, raising them in batches of 300. She sold out in October and increased her flock to 1,700 birds the next year. This year she raised 2,700 birds, including turkeys, which are already spoken for.
She uses no growth hormones or antibiotics and said her poultry has less fat and calories but higher levels of beta-carotene, vitamin E and omega 3.
She orders the chicks in February or March and they arrive at the end of April. They spend the first three or four weeks in traditional coops and go outside in mid-May once their white feathers have grown in.
They then live on pasture for four to six weeks in portable three-metre-long wire cages, which Monique moves each day to a new spot of grass. The birds receive 30 percent of their diet from grass and insects. The rest of their feed is milled on the farm from a blend of the Denis’ wheat, peas, canola and flax.
Rita said slaughter is a family affair. Her husband Jean-Pierre kills the chickens by slitting their necks as they hang upside down.
After the blood drains out, a plucking machine removes the feathers and the family eviscerates the birds, cleans and weighs them and packages them for the freezer. During the busy summer period the family will process chickens two or three days a week.
Monique is limited by chicken marketing board rules to doing 999 chicks at a time. She could buy quota to do more but said it is too costly. Rita noted that in the United States, farmers can raise 20,000 birds at a time as pastured poultry.
Rita said while the operation is still small, Monique makes enough money to spend the winter travelling. She has been to Sweden, Australia, Scotland and Texas.
Monique’s parents and two brothers run a seed operation on the rest of the 4,000 acre farm. Rita jokes that she and her husband had five children because of the amount of hand weeding that needed to be done. The three daughters have all worked summers for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and one works in the off-season in Saskatoon as a hairdresser.
The Denis parents plan to eventually retire from the farm that Jean-Pierre’s father established in 1949. Rita shrugged when asked if the boys will take over then.
“If they want to,” she said with a smile.
