The Golden Age

So when was the golden age of American farming?

I think the answer is different if you’re thinking from the point of view of the farmer or the consumer. If you’re the consumer, the answer is obviously, “The golden age is now.” You’ll see why in a minute.

For the farmer, we need to separate what’s picturesque from what’s good. Some aspects of the bad old days were:

  • Being connected to town by dirt roads that were often impassible.
  • Farming that was so labor-intensive that you couldn’t get along without hired help. (Even in Ten Acres Enough, Morris had to hire two people year-round on his little farm, and more at harvest season.) Let’s face it: the American farmer has never been a good manager, and never liked dealing with hired help.
  • No understanding of disease — the germ theory of disease wasn’t widely believed until the 1860s and wasn’t proven until the 1870s. This resulted in a generally low level of health in both man and beast.
  • Not being able to give your kids a high-school education unless they boarded with strangers in town.
  • Travel that’s so expensive that the local general store had a monopoly over your business — and mail-order hadn’t been invented yet.
  • No mass communication except newspapers and no free public libraries, leaving rural folks at a huge disadvantage in education.
  • Produce traveled to market via unrefrigerated slow freight, resulting in almost unbelievably low quality in the city.
  • An unbelievably high level of fraud and double-dealing at all levels of society, not just by politicians and CEO’s, resulting in low levels of both quality and trust.
  • Horses were essential, but many farmers weren’t good with horses. Few things are more dangerous than a team of horses hitched up to farm machinery and handled by a farmer who doensn’t have a close working relationship with them.
  • Farming is dirty work, but hot water for bathing and a room warm enough to bathe in were scarce.

So I figure that the Golden Age had tractors, paved roads, Rural Free Delivery of mail, high schools that could be reached on a school bus, radio, pickup trucks, tractors, refrigerated freight cars, the Sears Roebuck catalog, free public libraries, and labor-saving devices that allowed the hired help to be given the boot. So the Golden Age for farmers started around 1910 and ended roughly around 1960.

When I was a kid, people hearkened back to simpler times of horse agriculture and houses that lacked bath soap, but I think that such times are receding into the mists of antiquity — it’s a lot easier to relate to farmers with running water and a tractor than those of earlier times. And it’s easier to emulate them successfully as well.

Golden Ages sow the seeds of their own destruction. What’s good for the farmer isn’t necessarily good for the consumer. For example, eggs used to move from farm to city by unrefrigerated slow freight. In The Dollar Hen, Milo Hastings reports that eggs actually hatched in transit during the summer of 1901. Since incubation takes three weeks, this gives you an idea of how awful the distribution chain was back then!

Factory farms took over the egg business quite suddenly. Farmers with operations relatively close to town and who had walk-in refrigeration could guarantee the freshness of their eggs. Midwestern farmers whose eggs traveled by slow freight could not. In the Fifties, the market was taken over in just a few years by farmers who offered end-to-end refrigeration. The market price for eggs shipped the old way fell to unprofitable levels, and, just like that, eggs from diversified farms were a thing of the past.

Which goes to show that running a picturesque, old-timey, poltically correct operation counts for nothing if the eggs are bad. Lots of people don’t understand this, and when they start a little farm of their own, they skimp on quality six ways from Sunday, with the idea that they can do no wrong because they’re politically correct. It doesn’t work like that. As my Engineering professors liked to say, “Partial credit will not be given if the bridge collapses.” Only suckers give you credit for good intentions. Everyone else wants results.

Fortunately, in this day and age, results are at every farmer’s disposal, large or small. On-farm refrigerated storage is no longer a novelty, even on the smallest farms. Nearly a century of extending paved roads, telephone lines, and rural electrification mean that isolated farms are at no particular disadvantage except travel time. The nature of commerce ensures that most farmers and processors are focused on commodities and ignore niche products. If you play your cards right, this is a second Golden Age — and one that is more easily shared with your customers.

What’s it Take to Eliminate Factory-Farmed Eggs?

Let’s do the math. There were 76 billion eggs laid by US chickens last year (not counting hatching eggs), laid by 280 million hens (23 dozen eggs per hen). The vast majority of these hens are in factory farms. Suppose we wanted to get rid of factory farms. What would it take?

Well, before factory farms there were ordinary farm flocks. Between about 1900 and 1950, a typical “egg farm” held steady at about 1,500 hens. Some had more, some had less, but a farm family making most of its income from eggs typically had a 1,500-hen operation.

This makes sense when you realize that studies of labor efficiency on old-fashioned egg farms measured productivity at 2.0-2.5 hours per hen per year. A 1,500-hen operation would take between 3,000 and 3,750 hours of labor, which will soak up the time of two wage-earners.

Factory-farm techniques allowed the number of hens per attendant to increase to the current astronomical levels (around 150,000 birds per henhouse, with multiple houses per installation, and only one attendant per henhouse.)

280,000,000/1,500 = is about 187,000 egg farms that would have to be created, providing jobs for 187,000 new farm families. A 1,500-hen flock should lay (at 23 dozen eggs/hen) 34,500 dozen eggs per year.

Now, the median household income last year was about $50,000. Presumably, we can’t get rid of factory farms without paying an average wage, so we need to extract $50,000 of wage income per 1,500 bird flock. $50,000/$34,500 = $1.45 per dozen (as opposed to only about $0.0145 per dozen for the factory farm). That pays the farmer. Because the farmer only receives about half the retail price of the eggs, the consumer will have to pay about $2.90 extra for non-factory-farmed eggs.

This cost premium is more than the price of a dozen factory-farmed eggs (around $2.25 the last time I looked). Various other economies of scale that benefit factory farms won’t be available to smaller farms, so I figure that, in rough terms, non-factory-farmed eggs will triple the cost — in round numbers, $7.00 a dozen.

That’s for old-time confinement operations, which would have eggs that taste just as bad as factory-farmed eggs. Real free range eggs (not the fake kind that produces the eggs in the stores) cost more to produce. The labor efficiency isn’t that much worse, but production plummets in poor weather and there are predator issues. I figure that the costs will work out to around five times as much as factory-farmed eggs — $10-$12 a dozen.

True free-range farmers are thin enough on the ground that most of them can sell all their eggs locally, which is why you can’t get them in the city. Eggs are cheaper in the country, so eggs you buy from me for $5 would cost you $10 in the big city.

Power Outage Tips

I don’t know about you, but here in Western Oregon, all the power outages happen during the winter. They vary from flickers that last less than a second to outages of around three days. Here are some tips that work for us:

  • Have a wood stove you can cook on and heat the house with. I have two! If you have propane or city gas, pilot-light-style ranges, water heaters, and some kinds of furnaces will keep working when the power is out. (I don’t have gas.)
  • Have a ridiculous number of flashlights and lots of batteries. Trying to get anything done during a nighttime power outage is very difficult without a flashlight! Everyone in the family needs a flashlight, and you need a bunch more because they get misplaced.
  • Pick your poison where lamps are concerned. I’ve settled on propane Coleman lanterns even though they are expensive to run. They’re convenient, bright, and clean-burning. Gasoline Coleman lanterns set off my smoke alarms. Kerosene lanterns are too dim for area lighting. I’ve put hooks in the ceiling in my living room and bathroom just for the lanterns.
  • Have your water situation figured out. I have a generator and can run my water pump during an outage. Your situation might be more complicated.
  • Get a Honda generator. It’s sort of fun to go without electricity for a couple of days in the summer, but it’s a pain in the winter, especially when your basement floods without a sump pump, you have freezers full of chicken, or, worst of all, if you brood chicks with heat lamps during the winter. Honda generators are good. Some other makes are probably just as good, but I don’t know which ones they are. Figure out how to use your generator before the power goes out. Remember to have some gasoline. Buy plenty of extra-heavy-duty extension cords and multi-outlet adapters and store them somewhere sensible.
  • Use APC Smart-UPS UPS systems. These are the only ones I know of that work well when plugged into a generator. Put them on your computers and your TV/DVD/Tivo setup. There’s a “sensitivity” adjustment on these to determine how eager they are to switch to battery power. Set the sensitivity to “low.” Your equipment won’t mind. I always buy used units, since the systems themselves last forever, though the batteries (which are replaceable) rarely last beyond five years. See if you can find a local source for both UPS and batteries: they’re expensive to ship.
  • Have a good library. Even if you keep the Tivo running during the outage, the loss of power restricts your actions.
  • Have a method of brewing good coffee. This is essential! A Melitta one-cup coffee maker and a stack of filters will see you through until the ol’ Mr. Coffee starts working again.

There are plenty of other ways to do it, but these work for us.

We’re probably going to get a super-insulated electric water heater this winter, and we’ll get one that’s twice as big as we need, so it will take a long power outage to run out out of hot water.

Check Out Mother Earth News

Mother Earth News has always been a good magazine that people tended to ignore for the wrong reasons. It has always had plenty to offer to people who were willing to get their hands dirty. When I’m looking for obscure poultry information on the Web, I often find a thorough article in Mother Earth News. Maybe the ink is barely dry, maybe it’s thirty years old, doesn’t matter. Country living is not well-anchored in time, anyway.

My parents had a subscription, and so do I. It’s worth checking out. They do cool things like nutritional testing of free-range eggs (including my eggs, which tested out very well, thank you.)

There’s plenty of practical, hands-on stuff that can either be cut out and pasted down or provide food for thought.

My biggest beef is the pop-up ads on the Web site. Geez, Louise! They’re not just annoying, they’re positively hostile. Please, Mother, get rid of them!


Check Out Mother Earth News

Geometry, Chickens, and You

If you understand chicken geometry, your life will be a lot easier.

Take perches, for instance. Chickens will roost on the highest available perch. This might be on the railing of your porch or a beam above your car, or (in a pinch) on top of the car itself. (Free range is not an unmitigated blessing.)

If you have managed to keep your chickens within the confines of their yard, they’ll still want to perch on the highest thing they can reach. The smart money, then, is to ensure that the highest thing is an actual roost. This will save you a lot of trouble.

Now, hens like to lay eggs in dark corners at the back of the chicken houses, so you need to be able to go there. This is easier if the roosts are very high, so you can bend down and walk under them, or very low, so you can walk on top of them. Anything in between becomes a barrier. I have used roosts as high as four feet off the ground and have had chickens roost on rafters ten feet off the ground without any trouble. I suppose it’s possible for them to sprain their little ankles jumping down, but I’ve never seen any sign of it.

With very high roosts, you’ll have fewer chickens sleeping (and pooping) in the nest boxes, which his a good thing.

Another piece of chicken geometry is the nest boxes. Chickens like to lay in dark corners, so it’s a good idea to do it their way and put the nest boxes there.

Ordinary nests are okay, but I like nests that aren’t quite so cramped. I once had an ordinary eight-hole wooden nest box, but it seemed like three hens always tried to squeeze into the same nest, so I took out half the partitions (so that the nest had four double-width holes), and that worked better. Cornell University used nests with no partitions at all: just an eight-foot-long nest trough.

I tried an old gimmick from the Oregon Experiment Station and used 1/2 hardware cloth for the nest bottoms, with straw on top. This puts gravity to work by letting dirt and crud and broken eggs fall through the mesh, and the nests stay cleaner. The mesh is softer than a solid floor, too, so fewer eggs get broken.

Acreage is another example of chicken geometry. Chickens generally don’t wander more than a couple of hundred yards from their houses, usually less. The more distant a fence is, the less eager a chicken is to go through it. I can confine chickens with an electric fence consisting of a single strand of aluminum fence wire, if the wire is far from the chicken houses. But if the chickens are fenced into a small area, it’s hard to hold them even with 48″ high electric netting.

One final example: 100 hens will eat about 25 pounds of food per day, which is about two galvanized buckets of feed, drink about six gallons of water (again, about two buckets), and lay about half a bucket of eggs. Since I don’t have four hands, I would object to feeding and watering 100 hens from buckets — I’d have to make too many trips. But 25 hens would need about one bucket of feed and one bucket of water, which is plausible. You can put the eggs into the feed bucket after you’ve poured the feed into a trough.

Now, you can carry a feed sack over your shoulder, which gets you to 50 pounds of feed per trip, enough for 200 hens. After that, carrying the feed in a pickup truck starts looking good.

If you want to drive to the feed mill only once a week, a half-ton pickup truck can carry a week’s worth of feed for more than 500 hens. More hens than this might mean that you’re spending your Saturdays making two trips, which might not be what you had in mind.

You get a price break if you buy a ton of feed at a time. Feed should be used up within a month at the outside. A ton will feed about 250 hens for a month.

A standard egg basket can carry about ten dozen eggs, which is the output of around 150 hens, give or take. A three-gallon bucket holds a couple dozen less. Carrying more than one basket at a time is awkward, and carrying more than two is impossible. If you have a lot of hens, you’ll want to collect the eggs directly onto flats and pack the flats into egg crates so you can carry the crates off the field in your pickup. I figure that even a small pickup should be able to handle the eggs from several thousand hens.