Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the 2009 Wheat Harvest and the incidence of Vomitoxin.

Vomitoxin is a mycotoxin that may be produced in wheat heads when wet weather conditions occur during the flowering and grain filling stages of development.

There may be severe negative consequences for both human and animal consumption.

Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of this wheat moving around our industry today at distressed prices. Low priced wheat relative to corn has many poultry producers considering substituting wheat for corn in their diets.

Bell & Evans does not use wheat in our chicken’s diet even when wheat quality is good.

When you honestly raise chickens without using antibiotics, wheat in the diet has been proven to be detrimental in raising healthy birds.

When I say without using antibiotics, I don’t just mean from birth.

At Bell & Evans no antibiotics means no adding antibiotics to the vaccine injected in the eggs before they are hatched; also not in the feed, water, air, old manure, or some other creative way.

There is a lot to be concerned about when your goal is to raise a good healthy flock.

There is more to come.

I recently participated in the opening of a new Whole Foods Market Store in Centennial Colorado, an area just south of Denver. My participation consisted of 3 days of cooking and sampling our Bell & Evans chicken nuggets to thousands of customers. This is a great format that allows me to answer questions that customers have and ask questions that I have for the customers. Sometimes I am able to convert Vegetarians back to eating chicken. Often they just need a little education and some good honest answers.

Participating in hundreds of these events over the years has helped me in the direction of how we operate at Bell & Evans. A popular concern I had from many in Colorado was the GMO issue and Organic Certification.

In recent years, large seed companies unloaded their GMO seed on famers in a big way. Those farmers were told GMO seed was the answer to feed the growing world’s population. Now they are told that we need GMO seed to produce enough corn ethanol to decrease our dependence on foreign oil.

All of the certified Organic corn and soybean we purchase is of U.S. origin and the farms that produce these crops plant non-GMO seed. The best certified Organic grain farmer cannot build a wall high enough to prevent pollen from drifting from a nearby conventional field from spreading across his Organic field. So to say our organic grain is 100 % GMO free would be wrong.

Now we have the lower cost certified Organic grain grown in China coming in through Canada and possibly other avenues. I don’t have any reason to believe their Organic certification has any value. Many in the poultry and livestock production have resorted to this grain to buy market share because of its lower cost. I am disappointed that retail buyers haven’t helped stop this wrong.

We can grow all the certified Organic grain we need right in the U.S.A. I like to know what I am paying for especially when I am paying a premium. There is more feed stuff to come.

90% of our diet consists of corn, extruded and expeller pressed soybeans. The remaining 10 % consists of vitamins and minerals.

Many years ago, we were struggling with a bird health problem. I thought maybe its cause was from mold in the rail car transporting soybean meal. I went to the feed mill and asked the mill operator to open the rail car unloading door to watch it unload and inspect for mold. As the door opened, this odor poured out. It smelled like model airplane glue. I asked the mill operator what the awful smell was. He said that’s Hexane, a cheap efficient solvent to extract the oil and vitamins from soybeans. I immediately made my mind up that anything that smelled like that was not going to be part of our future chicken feed. My next step was a lesson in soybean processing.

Soybean extraction/processing – The procedure involved in the separation of the oil and the protein meal from the whole soybean.

• Solvent extraction (Hexane) – The process where by the oil is leached from flaked soybeans.
• Pressing process – At elevated temperatures, using expellers or screw presses which utilize a worm shaft continuously rotating with a pressing cylinder or cage to express the oil from the beans after they have been ground and properly conditioned.

What is Hexane?

Hexane is a Petroleum by product of gasoline refining. It is a highly explosive toxic chemical. Hexane is a major air pollutant. In fact it is classified as a HAP- Hazardous Air Pollutant by the EPA. Hexane also steals our vitamin E.

At the end of this separation process the livestock producer buys the protein, and fiber. The oil may be further processed into consumer grade.

My question to you is – how can producers and retailers market chicken as naturally raised when one of the two main components of the diet are processed with a toxic chemical like Hexane?

There is a lot more chicken feed to come.

For further information, please feel free to read the Cornucopia report.

I am constantly asked what we feed our chickens that make them so different. Well let’s start with our philosophy.

Goal #1
Feed needs to be of the highest quality ingredients and properly formulated to grow a healthy bird without adding stress.

Goal #2
When we eat the bird, we should be proud of the quality of its life. The taste and tenderness should be excellent. A quality protein we enjoy that also nourishes our bodies.

I don’t like the idea of eating chicken that was fed a lot of junk and might even end up smelling or tasting like what it ate. Many of our competitors and especially some store brand chicken have a different philosophy in mind. It’s all about cost and margins. They sometimes forget that someone is going to eat this stuff. Usually, we are talking about least cost formulating feed and it usually isn’t pretty. They need to grow big and fast and cross the finish line alive.

Protein, fiber, energy, vitamins and minerals are the main components of a chicken’s diet. Our Bell & Evan’s chickens get all the protein, fiber, and energy from our corn, extruded and expeller pressed soybeans. I will stop here for today because I next want to get into the details of our feed ingredients and that will be a big story by itself.

We will start with preparing for a new flock that has just been hatched and is being immediately transported to the farm.

The house preparation actually started two weeks ago, when the last flock went to market. The manure was immediately removed. The house was de-dusted and the concrete floors swept. Disinfecting the house and letting it set empty for two weeks really helps kill bacteria, break virus cycles, and put a fix to rodents that would contaminate the birds with salmonella. Two or three days before the new flock arrives, we spread new clean wood shavings over the entire floor for a nice comfortable bedding. Baby chicks have very sensitive feet and need to start on a warm comfortable floor. We start the heat in the house a day or two before the flock arrives to bring up the floor temperature and provide a comfort zone of about 90-92 degrees. We do not need to start day one with any extra stress if we are going to raise clean, natural chickens honestly without antibiotics or other crutches.

It is very sad that the cost and profit pressures have forced most of the brolier chicken industry into alternative production methods and I do not know how they get natural labels approved. Most of these lower cost alternative production methods use ground dirt floors. If you have ever tried to clean a ground dirt floor, you know it is difficult. In the case of our organic production, we let the birds go outside and scratch in the grass and dirt but they sure like to come back into their clean protected house where their feed and water is kept. Once I tried a dirt floor in my chicken house until the rodents drilled a hole in the ground from the outside and came up in the inside of the house and attacked my chickens. Well that was enough of that!

Just to give you some idea what these alternative methods are, I will start with the flock that just went to market. The house is immediately prepared for the next flock that may be started as soon as the next day. Most of the old manure stays in the house to compost, and maybe some new litter is added. They usually take a machine through the house to break up the manure. There may be five to ten flocks of chickens in the house before the manure is taken out. By leaving the manure in the house flock after flock, there is a big challenge to manage the ammonia coming out of that composting manure that can and will cause blindness and serious respiratory problems to the chickens. I feel sorry for the chickens being raised that way.

The result of these alternative methods of production can be horrible and these chickens should not be labeled natural. I think I wrote enough for today, but there is a lot more to come.

Me at Age 10

Me in one of my chicken houses

My name is Scott Sechler, and this is my chicken blog. I’ve worked with chickens pretty much all my life, but until a couple of months ago, I’d never even heard of blogging.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, my dear ole Dad bought my first flock of chicks. I actually spent days cleaning and sanitizing the chicken coop where they would live. I made sure that the chicks were comfortable in their house.

I even came up with my own techniques for growing my birds healthier and tastier than others. I learned that feeding my birds good clean grain and keeping their stress level to a minimum was the way to go.

Don’t get me wrong – there were skeptics who didn’t believe in my techniques. Even my own Dad wondered how I would get enough customers to keep growing my chicks in this off-the-wall fashion. Everyone else in the chicken industry at the time were using very different methods. They were focused on making money, not on the quality of their products. But eventually all my hard work would pay off.

I bought my first truck to haul chickens when I was 16, and I started selling my chickens in Canada. The processors there wanted specific sizes of birds, and the other suppliers seemed to bring them everything except what they actually ordered. Not me. I delivered what my processors ordered, and I delivered the quality they expected. Eventually, I was taking my trucks into Canada every day of the week.

To this day, at Bell & Evans we take pride in the fact that we deliver on our promise. And that is to deliver the Excellent Chicken, free of antibiotics and growth hormones. We deliver what the customers want and what they come to expect of our products. After all these years, quality is still the most important thing to us.

Bell & Evans is a family business, and our customers are an important part of that family. I started this blog because I can’t think of a better way to keep in touch with you – or for you to keep in touch with me.

Welcome to my Chicken Blog.