Our Chicken Hatchery Story Means the Highest-Quality Birds for You

If you’re wondering which came first, the chicken or the egg, we’re here to tell you that it was neither. For the #1 chicken hatchery in Pennsylvania, it was family.

Since the beginning, our family of hatcheries has held firm to our ideals: to produce high-quality, free-range birds, hold onto the importance of family and community…and above all else, live through our love of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

We are believers in and followers of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God who will someday be revealed as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We have been created by Him for His glory and delight. By faith in His sacrifice for us on the cross, He has saved us from a life of sin and its awful consequences both now and in an eternal future. We believe God’s Word, the Holy Bible, is the source of truth and wisdom. As we live in a daily living relationship with Him and in obedience to His commandments, we are blessed with amazing joy, peace, and abundant life. We have chosen to live out our faith and practice in the Anabaptist Mennonite faith. For more information on Mennonites and Anabaptists, log onto www.anabaptists.org.

Free free to contact us about our business or our faith!

While we are a business working hard to bring you quality products and poultry, we want you to know that we’re not the average chicken hatchery. We’re a family with values just like yours—and we hope that makes you feel right at home here.

Experience The Ease Of Ordering From This Chicken Hatchery

This Chicken Hatchery Started in a Back Yard More than 40 Years Ago

JM Hatchery, the first chicken hatchery in the family of hatcheries, was born in Joel and Martha Martin’s backyard, on the same property where they raised their four daughters, Crystal, Ginger, Lisa, and Sonya.

The Martins started by raising Bantam Silkies and Guinea Keets in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, they began hatching their own birds. After years spent perfecting their hatchery practices with those two breeds, Joel and Martha expanded into the chicken business in the early 2000s. As Joel and Martha head into retirement, they will be handing over Guinea Keet hatching to Fifth Day Farm, Inc. in 2022.

Around the same time the Martins broke into the chicken business, their daughter Ginger married Kendall Fox. In 2005, the Foxes took over the hatching of Silkies. Then in 2007, they launched Fox Farm & Hatchery, Inc., which would become Freedom Ranger Hatchery in 2010. Today, Freedom Ranger Hatchery hatches our broiler chicks.

The family of hatcheries expanded even more when daughter Sonya married Stephen Horst, who joined the family business by lending a hand at the guinea hatchery. He also started managing Muscovy Ducks for Joel and Martha.

Around 2010, Stephen and Sonya established Fifth Day Farm, Inc. and took over hatching Muscovy Ducks and Khaki Campbell Ducks. In 2019, they added Brown Chinese Geese to their hatchery.

Also in 2010, Crystal married Rodney Moser, who had initially joined the family’s hatcheries by helping Joel and Martha with hatching guinea keets. Within a few years, Rodney and Crystal launched Blue Banty Farm and took over hatching the Bantam Silkies.

That wasn’t all that happened in 2010. Lisa married Art Detweiler, who had been working for Freedom Ranger Hatchery since 2012, where he quickly learned the ropes of the chicken hatchery business. In 2016, Art and Lisa founded their own hatchery, started as Art’s Hatchery and now branded as Hillside Hatchery. They exclusively hatch the family’s egg-laying breeds.

The Martin, Fox, Horst, Moser, and Detweiler families all welcome you to their family of hatcheries, and hope they make you feel at home and at ease while ordering chicks, ducklings, goslings, keets, or hatching eggs.

A Chicken Hatchery Family, Offering the Highest Quality Birds

Despite all of the expansion and changes over the years, one thing has remained steady—this chicken hatchery family’s collective goal of hatching the strongest, healthiest birds on the market. This includes a wide variety of broilers, egg-layers, ducks, geese, and other fowl.

Freedom Ranger Hatchery, Fifth Day Farm, Blue Banty Farm, and Hillside Hatchery all represent the sharing of our faith and family traditions in our eggs and birds. We are honored and humbled by the expansion of our family, as well as our family of hatcheries…all in dedication and honor of the Lord we’re committed to.

We are sharing our family legacy with customers like you, and we hope to continue doing so for generations to come. Read on to learn more about each of the chicken hatcheries in our family of hatcheries, including the variety of poultry each one specializes in, and why our family traditions and values make our birds so special.

The Four Hatcheries in Our Family of Hatcheries

To get a better idea of how we operate, think of it like this: Freedom Ranger Hatchery not only hatches, sells, and ships…it also oversees shipping from the three other operations that are included in our family of hatcheries. Think of Freedom Ranger chicken hatchery as the ‘Amazon of chicken hatcheries.’