If You Find 200 Lost Baby Chickens, Call This Massachusetts Farmer

Photo via Kalon Farm

Keith Kopley has no idea who stole 200 baby chickens from his farm.

On Thursday morning, when Kopley returned to the Kalon Farm in Ashburnham after doing errands for several hours, he noticed that the pen containing the birds was completely empty. “There’s no way they got out, they were in a pen that they can’t get out of,” he said, adding that he checked on the baby chickens prior to leaving the farm. “I don’t know what people could have done with them.”

The alleged chicken-stealing culprits raided the coop just days after Kopley posted a message on the farm’s official Facebook page, announcing that the shipment had arrived, and that the chicks were would be ready to eat once they were full-grown. “We are ready for the first 200 broiler chicks. Arriving tomorrow and will be ready in 7 weeks. Fresh chicken!,” Kopley wrote on the Facebook page on March 10. Four days later, they were gone.

Kopley said it was the first time in the four years that he has owned the farm that he posted “something like that” on Facebook to help promote sales.

But now, the local farmer, who owns the lot where his family sells grass-fed meat, is baffled by the disappearance. “I got 65 of those [chickens] pre-sold, and I can’t deliver them the day I said I would,” says Kopley. He says he is hoping someone will either return the baby chickens, or the police will get a lead based on media coverage. “Maybe it will shake out something.”

The tiny, yellow fowl, which look impeccably close to candy Peeps, need plenty of space and heat in order to grow, according to Kopley. Without that, it could mean trouble for the birds.

“Basically what happens we start them in a heated brooding pen and then when the snow melts, we get them out on pasture,” he says. “But that first couple of weeks, they really [need] to be under the heat.” Kopley says he hopes the alleged thieves “rethink” what they did.