OUR STORY

A Backyard Education That Never Left

I was born into a home where chickens were part of the family. My mother kept a backyard flock, and my earliest memories are of collecting warm eggs in the morning, refilling feeders after school, and watching her handle every bird with a patience that made it look effortless. She never gave me formal lessons. I simply absorbed the routines, the sounds, and the way she could spot a sick bird hours before it showed symptoms.

Those were full, simple days — just me, my mother, and the flock. My father had passed away when I was one year old, so it was always the two of us.

Everything changed when my mother was diagnosed with blood cancer. She passed not long after. I was still a teenager, and I tried to keep her flock alive in her absence, but I wasn’t ready. The birds I had grown up beside — the ones she had cared for with such quiet mastery — I couldn’t save them.

From Loss to Purpose

That failure sat with me for a long time. I moved in with my grandmother, finished high school, and made a decision: I would go back to the work my mother had done, but I would do it with the knowledge she never had the chance to pass on.

I studied veterinary medicine at university, then spent years working with commercial poultry farms, learning the science behind what my mother had always done by instinct. When I eventually settled in New Mexico, I started small — just a few birds in a backyard coop.

Friends began asking questions. What breed should I start with? Why aren’t my hens laying? How do I keep predators out? I realized there were thousands of beginners standing exactly where I once stood.