Month: February 2009

Baby Chick Time

We’ve got two brooder houses in operation now, one with New Hampshire Reds we got from Oregon State University, and another with broilers from Privett Hatchery (actually, they were drop-shipped from Welp Hatchery, but I know that anything ordered via Privett is going to be good).

We get a deal on chicks from OSU every once in a while. These were straight-run New Hampshires. Normally I recommend that people avoid straight-run chicks, because most people have no desire to butcher their own chickens, and even less skill, and the last thing you want is a zillion roosters cluttering up the place. But Karen is a whiz at chicken butchering and we can always get rid of the excess it the Woodburn Small Animal Auction.

(Important tip: never buy poultry at an auction. They’ll come with free parasites that you’ll spend ages eradicating. Auctions are for selling, not buying.)

We’re right in the middle of false spring right now, with warmer temperatures, budding plants, and occasional blue skies. This always happens, and the weather always turns savage again (well, for Oregon) later. But it’s hard to resist buying baby chicks and seeds and trowels and stuff at this time of year.

We butcher broilers at approximately 8 weeks, give or take. The outdoor farmers’ markets start in mid-April, so we’re right on schedule. Hens are in full lay at about six months, so the chicks will start laying just as the older hens enter their summer slump. Half the time we botch basic planning exercises like this (too many calls on our time), but it looks like we got it right this year.

Though the weather is still uncertain across the country, it’s a good time to start baby chicks. A lot of hatcheries have specials up until the March baby-chick frenzy starts. If you don’t know what you want, my rule of thumb is to call the hatchery and ask which of their commercial-quality layers are the most docile and non-cannibalistic. That maximizes the egg-to-heartbreak ratio.

And don’t forget to take a look at my book, Success With Baby Chicks while you’re at it. Even if you’re a pro, it’s easy to forget the fine points between the last batch of last year’s chicks and the first batch of this year’s. You’ll get your money’s worth out of the book within 24 hours of the chicks’ arrival, I promise.

Why I’m Not a Vegetarian

A few years ago, the weeds and rushes were growing out of control on one of my pastures, so I mowed it with the tractor. Chickens range widely over short grass, and mowing the grass helps keep it green. (Chickens can’t digest tough, brown, woody plants, but they can deal with succulent green plants.)

As I mowed, crows appeared. Mowing uncovers field mice and other rodents that live in the grass, exposing them to predators. The mower also kills some creatures outright.

“It’s a good thing I’m not a vegetarian,” I though. “If I’m killing this many animals just by mowing, imagine what would happen if I plowed this field every year to plant corn and soybeans!”

If you think through the process, you’ll see just how hard farming is on the local wildlife. You start by cutting down all the trees that make up the normal ground cover on your land (at least, that’s what grows naturally in my part of the world.) This displaces all the birds and animals that used to live there. Because all ecological niches are already full, displacing creatures has the same effect as killing them. The only real difference is that the cause of death — starvation, exposure, and disease — is more lingering.

Then, each year, you plow the land, killing burrowing animals outright and preventing the land from being colonized by ground- and tree-dwelling creatures. By growing only one or two crops, which become edible only for a brief period before harvest, you create a wasteland with little food value 11 months out of the year. No creature can survive by eating for one month and starving for eleven, so farming greatly reduces the amount of wildlife the land can support.

So a piece of cropland is an open scar on the landscape that kills and starves birds and animals every year. And vegetarians pat themselves on the back and feel smug, because they didn’t actually eat any of the dead creatures themselves. They died anonymously, out of sight. To a lot of people, that’s the same thing as not dying at all. It makes me angry. We’re all in the same boat: animals are being killed so that we can eat. Being a vegetarian doesn’t change this. We’re all benefiting equally from the deaths of our fellow creatures.

If you’re interested in treading lightly on the earth, the best lifestyle is probably that of a hunter. In this case, you are basically displacing your weight in predators. That is, a 150-pound hunter eats about as much meat as two 75-pound wolves. The impact on the prey species is the same either way.

Nomadic herding is also low-impact. In this case, you’re displacing your weight in predators again. The total biomass of ruminants will end up the same, with your domestic animals displacing their weight in native animals.

You don’t start cutting a serious swath through the ecology until you start farming. That’s when all hell breaks loose. Farming lets us achieve a human population that is much larger than we could with hunter/gathering or herding, but it’s not all that easy on the planet, even when you do it right. (Also, I suspect that native peoples with a more nomadic lifestyle have more fun than we do, since they’re living the lifestyle with the longest track record. It suits us.)

Ethically, of course, it doesn’t matter whether you kill an animal outright and eat it yourself, or whether it dies because you displaced it so you could grow soybeans. You killed it for your own purposes either way.

I think people are approaching the whole issue from the wrong end. The real issue is that everyone has a yearning to be connected to nature and the land. It’s a basic human need. Almost by definition, people with a lifelong disconnection from the land don’t know how to connect to it appropriately. Their yearning will attach itself almost at random to one of the half-measures or palliatives offered by the people around them — who are also lifelong city dwellers. After all, the people who have achieved a true connection don’t live in the city anymore! Their good example is not very visible to their former neighbors.

The Sky Isn’t Falling

Since I raise free-range eggs and talk about alternative farming, you’d think that I’d be like everyone else in the biz: running around in circles and screaming, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” at the top of my lungs.

I had a subscription to Organic Gardening when I was a child. This was around 1970. According to its writers, the environment was due to dry up and blow away within the next few years, but it hardly mattered, because the chemicals in our food was going to kill off first, and that hardly mattered because the Russians and the Chinese were going to have a nuclear war whose fallout would kill us before our food poisoned us.

Fortunately, there was usually one article about gardening per issue, by Ruth Stout. She didn’t do the whole sky-is-falling stuff. She talked about gardening. God knows why they let her write for them, since she didn’t fit in. Most of their writers couldn’t talk about selecting the right garden trowel without throwing in some gloom-and-doom stuff.

And so it goes. Here it is, almost forty years later, and nothing has changed. I’ve been trying to use Stumbleupon (one of the social bookmarking services) to find interesting farm sites, but it’s mostly hypochondria, politics, conspiracy theories, and doom. Everyone’s so busy bitching and making each other afraid that they don’t have any time for farming — or living, as far as I can tell.

I’m awfully tired of a steady diet of doom. Frankly, I don’t think the doom-meisters know what they’re talking about. I mean, take Big Oil. A hundred years ago, everyone bitched and moaned about John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil monopoly. A hundred years later, everyone still bitches about big oil. What does that tell us? Bitching about big oil doesn’t do anything, even if you do it for a hundred years. So knock it off!

So I recommend that we all affiliate ourselves with soft-spoken causes with a positive outlook. Maybe we can set a good example, like Ruth Stout did, by tending our own gardens.

I Hate Stress

So I worked for a whole month straight to meet an impossible project deadline (successfully, yay!), my employer lays off 10% of the workforce (not including me), and lots of change is in the air, mostly good change. All well and good, but of course the result was that I got sick. I won’t bore you with the details, but these various causes have gotten me way behind on blogging, answering emails, and putting out my newsletter.

Egg production is way up, as it always is at this time of year. A month ago, the increase was due to pullets who were just starting to lay, but now we’re getting into the time of year where all the hens are laying like mad. That will probably peak in April and then slowly decline until the end of the year.

I stumbled across something odd a couple of weeks back — using exercise balls as chairs. Exercise balls are big inflatable rubber balls around two feet in diameter. Like the old “kneeling chairs” that were popular in the Eighties, they’re yet another gimmick to make you sit up straight instead of slumping against the back of your chair. I have a bad back from all the hours of desk work I do. Kneeling chairs were good for my back but hard on my knees. Exercise ball chairs are comfier, not to mention bouncier. They don’t lock you into a single position the way other chairs do, and in fact the unnoticeable amount of effort you expend staying balanced on one can add up to about 300 calories a day of exercise, just by sitting!

You can just buy a 55cm or 65cm exercise ball and sit on it, or go whole hog and buy an Isokinetics chair, which has a base with castors on it to put an exercise ball into. I’m trying both.

My back is apparently quite weak, and I wake up stiff if I use the ball chair for more than half an hour a day. My son Dan can sit in it all day long without problems. In theory, I’ll be able to work up to a full day in the chair.

One thing I’ve noticed already is that, while sore from the workout, my back is no longer complaining to the point where I like to do some of my Web surfing while standing.

In general, being on the farm is good for my back, but office work is bad for it, and I spend a great deal of time in front of the computer.