Chick-fil-A, Zaxby’s use chickens raised at this Middle Georgia farm. Take an inside look.

Middle Georgia’s booming agritourism industry has a new addition.

The three peach packing houses in the area already draw nearly a half million visitors a year, but now people can see how a chicken is grown.

Cooley Farms in Roberta has opened the Poultry Learning Center. It’s a mini mock up of a broiler house, also known as a chicken house, attached to an actual broiler house where visitors can peer through a large glass wall and see 25,000 chickens.

Larry and Terri Cooley co-own the farm along with their son and his wife. They have long allowed school groups and others to come but it was difficult to let them see the inside of a broiler house.

Due to concerns of disease being introduced to the flock, visitors would need to put on coveralls to walk inside. Now with the center they can see it through the glass.

“Chicken houses are mysterious,” Terri Cooley said. “You just drive by and see these long houses and nobody knows what’s in there. There’s always misconceptions. We’ve never had anything to hide so anytime we can, we open the doors and let people come in and see.”

Recently they held an unveiling and visitors included Georgia Secretary of Agriculture Gary Black.

The Cooleys have operated the farm since 1985 and grow 3 million chickens a year. Since 2004 they have grown all of their broilers for Perdue Farms, which supplies Chick-fil-A, Zaxby’s, Church’s and others.

Perdue hatches the chickens at a facility in Forsyth, and brings them to the grow houses the day they are hatched. It takes 56 days to grow the chicken to size.

The house is 20,000 square feet, and with 25,000 chickens that might sound like they would be packed tight. But with the chickens in the viewing house in late October, which were about half grown, there was a fair amount of empty space as they huddled together in spots.

“If you were to throw them out in the yard, they would still come together,” he said. “They wouldn’t be scattered all over.”

Terri Cooley said treating the chickens humanely has always been important to them.

“They look happy enough to me and they are well taken care of,” she said.

Chicken is one of the most economical foods in the grocery store, regularly selling for around a $1 per pound or less. But Larry Cooley said that’s not because of anti-biotics, steroids or hormones as some people may think.

“Our birds have no antibiotics ever,” he said. “There’s no hormones. There never have been hormones in chickens.”

And steroids, he added, would have to be injected individually into each chicken.

“It would be humanly impossible,” he said.

The reason chickens are grown so efficiently, he said, is because of improvements in breeding and feed. They can grow a chicken at a lower cost per pound than in the 1950s, he said.

The couple knows of only one other broiler operation in the country with a public viewing facility. That one is in Owensboro, Kentucky, and earlier this year the couple visited it.

From that, they drew up plans for their own, and Larry Cooley built it himself. Their suppliers donated equipment to show how the birds are fed, watered and cooled.

Unlike the peach packing houses, the center will not have regular hours where people can just drop by. Visits are by appointment only, but it is open to anyone who wants to come, Terri Cooley said.

This story was originally published November 11, 2019 at 6:00 AM.