From the Farm to Your Table: The Story Behind the Chicken

By Karl Wiggers
Louisiana Farm Bureau News

Butch Oaks remembers when farming meant five-gallon buckets.

As a boy in northeast Louisiana, he spent time around the small dairies and farms that dotted the area. If he wanted to make some spending money, he could ride his bicycle to one of roughly 25 dairies nearby, many of which milked a few dozen cows and also raised chickens.

The work was simple, but it wasn't easy.

“Those chickens were fed by hand, they were watered by hand,” Oaks said. “Those dairy cows' feed was mixed by hand and carried in buckets and dumped in the trough.”

Nearly three decades later, Oaks is still raising animals, but the scale—and the technology—look very different.

On his farm in Ouachita Parish, Oaks raises more than 120,000 chickens every six weeks across six poultry houses. Instead of carrying feed and water by hand, computers monitor the environment while automatic systems handle feeding and watering.

“We have computers running the environment in our poultry houses,” Oaks said. “We have automatic feeders. We have automatic waterers.”

The technology even lets the farm alert Oaks when something needs his attention.

A chicken house can call him.

It is a far cry from the farms Oaks knew as a child, but the goal is much the same: care for the animals and keep the operation moving.

For Oaks, that evolution is part of what makes modern agriculture work.

Technology allows one farmer to manage a scale of production that would have been impossible when he was growing up, while still requiring the same attention to the animals that he learned as a boy.

But poultry wasn't actually what first pulled Oaks toward farming.

That came from cattle.

Oaks describes himself as a “skip-a-generation farmer.” His grandparents farmed in Oklahoma and Louisiana, but agriculture wasn't a continuous family tradition.

His grandmother was the person who gave him his first real connection to cattle.

“I had a desire to show cows, and my grandmother bought me my first Angus heifer,” Oaks said. “I just fell in love with 'em.”

That love stayed with him even after he chose a career as an electrical contractor. His father's work as a radio technician had given Oaks an appreciation for technology and problem-solving, skills that would eventually serve him well back on the farm.

Eventually, though, he wanted to return to agriculture.

“One day I just wanted to come back to raising cattle,” Oaks said.

There was a practical side to that decision. Raising the Angus cattle he wanted required an income stream, so Oaks built poultry houses to help support the cattle operation.

“The only way I felt that I could afford it was to build some chicken houses that would guarantee me an income and allow me to raise cattle the way I wanted, and the kind of cattle I wanted, which was Angus,” he said.

The decision gave Oaks a way to combine two very different sides of agriculture.

The poultry operation provided the foundation. The cattle gave him an opportunity to pursue the passion that had started with his grandmother's gift.

And eventually, that passion found its way to another generation.

Oaks' youngest daughter, Kristen, grew up looking at photographs of her father showing cattle. One day, she decided she wanted to do it herself.

“My love of cattle, especially show cattle, was fed by my grandmother buying me that first heifer,” Oaks said. “My youngest daughter came along and she would look at pictures in my grandmother's house of me showing cattle and all of a sudden she said to me one day, ‘I wanna show cows.’”

Oaks and Kristen traveled the country showing cattle, from Denver to Baltimore, and brought home more than a few championship banners.

But the ribbons weren't what mattered most to Oaks.

The lessons his daughter learned in the show ring were.

“They will take that and become a more productive person,” he said. “And I feel like if there was anything accomplished with my daughter, that was one of the most important things.”

There was another part of that experience that made the journey especially meaningful.

His daughter stayed in agriculture.

“She didn't leave agriculture,” Oaks said. “She stayed in agriculture and is still in agriculture today.”

That may be the most fitting part of Oaks' story.

The agriculture he knew as a child has changed dramatically. The small dairies are fewer, the scale of production is different, and the five-gallon buckets have given way to computerized poultry houses and 20,000-pound feed bins.

But the connection between generations remains.

A grandmother gave a young boy his first Angus heifer. That experience helped inspire him to build a life in agriculture. Years later, his daughter saw the same passion in her father's old photographs and decided she wanted to become part of it.

For Oaks, farming has never been about keeping things exactly as they were.

It has been about taking what he learned from the past, finding better ways to do the work today and giving the next generation a reason to carry it forward.

“I just fell in love with 'em,” Oaks said of the cattle that started it all.

That love may have brought him back to the farm, but it was the willingness to adapt that helped him build one.