08/20/2026
Some have asked why we do the chickens. The biggest reason? Family heritage. Carl Dick had a dairy farm and Adrian Bouma had a meat market. Both life skills are very well known in the Netherlands and Dutch heritage.
Adrian Bouma’s butchering skills had quite a legacy. He was a cook in the navy during WWII, he worked in Orange City Iowa at Woudstra’s meat market. He had a meat market in Edgerton Minnesota with his father, uncle and brothers. When he came to Michigan for Ron and Bette’s wedding, he wrote a recipe on a napkin for Mark Ebels who was in the early years of starting Little Town Jerky. He also did some on farm butchering for Mark on some other visits to Michigan if memory serves correct.
He grew up in the depression and knew the hard times just as well as the good times. He would sometimes bring pig bladders home, tie off the ends, fill it with air and make a ball for the kids to play with. He often would say “ fix it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” His meat market ran on macgyverisms before all the regulations were put in place that today would probably not meet code.
Why is this information important? Uncertain days are coming in our lives; and the best part? We know we can survive them because the generations before us had hard times too. The chickens are the one animal we can grow and butcher ourselves with the P.L. 90-492 exemption to legally sell any extra we may have to help support our community.
We get to farm like Carl, eat like Adrian and relive some of the fond memories of their lives, and the biggest lesson they left us, freedom comes from your own knowledge and action, not dependency on a system.
