About Robert Plamondon

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.

The Recession Takes a Swing at Me, But Misses

My day job is as a network acceleration expert at Citrix Systems, which is feeling the economic slowdown (as who isn’t?). Wednesday afternoon they announced they were reducing their workforce by 10%. Thursday afternoon I learned that I was not going to be shown the door — which meant that I still had to meet my horrendously difficult Friday deadlines!

I’m sure we all know people who have lost their jobs in this recession. I feel fortunate to have been through this before, having been given the old heave-ho at Activision in the Eighties and WEITEK in the Nineties when their respective wheels fell off. Plus some other gigs when I was a free-lance contractor. Once you’ve been through it a few times, the prospect is a nuisance rather than a terror. In fact, I’ve never left a job of my own free will. Gigs don’t last, not in high tech, anyway.

So I’m still on the job at Citrix, which is good, since there are some cool things in the works that I want to help push out the door.

As for recession-proofing tips, I don’t suppose that I have any special insights. The key is to keep your expenses well below your income and avoid debt so you can constantly build up savings for emergencies and retirement. In our case, we bought a farm that was within our means, never buy new cars (our newest vehicle is a ’96 Toyota pickup), pay off our credit cards every month, and if our income goes up, we put most of the increase into savings. We fell off the wagon around 2000, running up considerable credit-card debt just before getting hammered by the recession that followed the dot-com bubble. That wasn’t very smart of us. But we got back out of debt eventually and are in okay shape again.

Metal Siding on Chicken Coops

My chicken coops have always had metal roofs, and now I’m trying out metal siding, on the grounds that I want anything I build to last 20 years without maintenance, and the exterior plywood I’ve been using doesn’t deliver that.

[Update: Seven years after writing this blog post, the corrugated metal walls are holding up well. Seven years is long enough for plywood walls to start falling to pieces, but the metal walls are holding up well, with only a bit of rust here and there.]

Chicken coop with metal siding — One of my old pasture houses, with a 15-year-old metal roof and 7-year-old metal siding.

Does Metal Promote Condensation and Wetness?

People will tell you that metal siding sweats, because of condensation. This is true if the inside of the house is warmer than the outside, since moisture from the warm house will condense on the cold walls and ceiling. But it’s not about metal vs. wood, since condensation forms on any kind of roof or wall, no matter what it’s made of. In marginal cases, it’s more visible on metal because it’s 100% non-absorbent.

A Fresh-Air House is a Dry House

But you can dodge the problem with a fresh-air poultry house. If you add enough ventilation, the inside of the house is just as cold as the outside, and you get no condensation. My metal roofs don’t have condensation unless there’s snow on the roof and temperatures are above freezing. The rest of the time, my highly ventilated houses have dry ceilings and walls.

This is one of the main points of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the chicken-coop book I’ve republished (check out the sample chapter if you haven’t already). It focuses on the advantage of well-ventilated houses, a concept that still needs to be repeated constantly today. You won’t read anything about metal walls or roofs in this book, since it predates their use, but it’s a treasure trove in other ways.

You can also prevent condensation with insulation, but I don’t do that.

Can you really prevent damp chicken houses through ventilation alone? Well, it works for me, and I live in Oregon, which has a famously wet climate!

Installing Corrugated Sheet Metal Walls

Back to the construction project. In keeping with my other rule of construction (never use a saw when you can buy stuff that’s already the right size), I ignored my existing stock of 10-foot metal roofing and obtained some cheap 8-foot corrugated roofing from Home Depot. My chicken houses are 8×8 feet.

Karen and I banged these sheets onto a couple of sides of a chicken house where the old OSB siding was falling to pieces. We used roofing screws. These are hex drive screws with neoprene washers. We used to use roofing nails, but they pull loose too easily and we hate having roofing panels flapping loose in the breeze! And using power tools instead of a hammer keeps my shoulders and back from seizing up. I bang the screw in a short way with a hammer, then drive it home with a cordless drill.

I’m told that roofing screws have three times the holding power of nails.

These panels went on very quickly, and if they ever rust through (which they will, at the bottom edges anyway, if I allow chicken manure to pile up against them), I can take the screws out and replace them just as easily.

So far, so good. The shiny metal really brightens up the interior of the chicken house, and because it’s non-porous, it provides no place for roost mites to accumulate.

Cheap Roofing is Good Enough

Plain old “ripple metal” (corrugated steel) is less rigid than V-channel roofing, but it’s proven to be stiff enough, even for a house that gets dragged around behind a tractor, which can put all sorts of stresses on it, especially if it gets hung up on holes and bumps along the way. So far, so good. That means that, so far, the cheapest possible corrugated metal has been perfectly adequate.

Watch out for translucent corrugated fiberglass. In my experience, it’s not very strong and becomes increasingly brittle over time. I’m sure it has its uses, but don’t think of it as being structural in the way that plywood and corrugated steel are.

You Don’t Have to Settle for Ugly

Of course, you can build a much prettier house with metal roofing with baked-enamel finishes in designer colors, and you should probably do this if you don’t want a silver house, since it’s hard to get paint to stick to galvanized steel. While I’m always looking for the cheapest, longest-lasting, easiest-to-build designs, there are plenty of other ways of approaching the problem of chicken-coop design.