My Story

Hi my name is Jarvis Cartledge and my story with chooks began when I was about 4 years old. In the beginning I started off with around half a dozen chooks, I used to spend a lot of time in the chook pen playing with them, so much time the my mum ended up investing in a foldout chair so she could watch me play with them.

Moving on, at the age of 10 years old I started with my first layers so I could start selling a few eggs. This soon developed into my first heritage breeds (Light Sussex) which soon turned into a 300 square meter chook pen being built to accommodate the new birds. Which can be seen here. But shortly after the Light Sussex's were sold to make room for more layers. 

Thanks to the new coop I was now able to bring in my first lot of commercial layers (about 20 birds) I soon started selling eggs to friends and family. At the age of 12 this grew into double the amount of birds and supplying a local café. While doing this I began brining birds in and selling them on gumtree as a additional income stream for my hobby. Unfortunately for the café, Covid hit and forced them to close. Due to this I was forced to find new customers as the hens were laying 20 dozen a week at that stage. When I was 13 (2020) I decided that I would expand my business into the breeding and rearing of pure-bred chooks as these birds are worth at least double the regular layers, this led to the construction of the breeding pens as shown here. (five were built)

With the new pens came new birds, we ordered 6 dozen fertile eggs from a breeder, we then hatched them out and reared them up. As the birds reached maturity we only kept the best 8 birds of each breed (7 hens and 1 rooster) we then sold the rest as they were no longer needed. I then started looking for high quality roosters of each breed to swap out for the ones I kept because they were brother and sister.

Thanks to a LOT of bad luck one of the roosters I bought was infected with infectious bronchitis. Which then went on to infect the rest of the breeders devastating my 2021 season.

The new roosters also brought mites with them infesting the pens. Luckily because the pens were steel the mites were not as bad compered to the layers wooden coop. Due to the affect the mites have on the layers, we are now planning a new steel coop to lessen the affects. This coop will be attached to a 700 square meter grazing area which will be split into 6 parts and rotationally grazed so the birds have constant access to grass.

Present day.

At the moment my hobby has grown into supplying over 10 customers with eggs every week, A heritage breeding operation and now an online chook merch store. As I look into the future I hope to start supplying pasture raised eggs, expand my breeding operation and help hobby farmers like myself find high quality equipment and merch to help them grow their hobby.

Thankyou for reading.

Jarvis from the chook warehouse.

If you have an inquiry about my chooks or the online store feel free to email me here.