Robert Plamondon has written three books, received over 30 U.S. patents, founded several businesses, is an expert on free-range chickens, and is a semi-struggling novelist. His publishing company, Norton Creek Press, is a treasure trove of the best poultry books of the last 100 years. In addition, he holds down a day job doing technical writing at Workspot.
One of the nice things about owning your own publishing company is that you can publish what you like. My wife Karen likes old-fashioned boys’ adventure fiction, which she rediscovered when our son Dan was in cub scouts. Some of these books are very well-crafted and are buoyed up by the optimism of a can-do age where anything seemed possible. (An attitude I far prefer to today’s mood of learned helplessness.)
Karen has collected an impressive library of first-rate adventure fiction, most of which has been out of print and forgotten since around WWII. Well, we know what to do when that happens!
First out of the chute is Percy Keese Fitzhugh’s Tom Slade, Boy Scout. Tom Slade is a young teen hoodlum who discovers that the local boy scout troop is having way more fun than he is. Almost by accident, he pulls himself out of the downward spiral that is claiming his drunken father. Any synopsis of the book reads like a melodrama, but the book is put together with more sensitivity and realism than one would expect from the genre. I liked it far more than I expected to. It turns out that the characters were based on real boys. This is a great book.
First published in 1915, the book has a fascinating retro quality without being hard to understand.
Anyway, check out the book’s Web page and read the sample chapters.
This is just the first volume of the nineteen-book Tom Slade series. We intend to print them all, plus the books about Tom Slade’s friends: Roy Blakeley, Westy Martin, Pee-wee Harris, and the rest.
When I was working with the game designers at Activision in the Eighties, it was a truism that most players don’t really like randomness. They want games to be predictable. If there has to be some randomness, users want it to behave like a shuffled deck of cards — you don’t know what card will come up next, but you can be sure that you won’t bet dealt the Ace of Spades twice in a row.
True randomness isn’t like that: true randomness is the equivalent of using a zillion decks and shuffling them after every hand. Sometimes you’ll get the Ace of Spades sixteen times in a row. It doesn’t happen very often, but it really gets your attention when it does! And not in a good way. As with poker, you tend to conclude that the dealer is cheating! At Activision, we treated this as a basic fact of human nature.
So I was surprised when, all these years later, both Apple and Pandora have gotten this wrong. For example, I’ve recently started using Pandora (http://pandora.com) as my Internet radio player. It has a spiffy thumbs-up/thumbs-down system, but it has no clue about how to repeat songs properly. It will take a song I like okay and then play it over and over across the next several hours, until I never want to hear it again, while ignoring a long list of other songs that I told it I like. It’s maddening. All they have to do is shuffle the playlist and deal it out one song at a time until they’ve all been played once. Then reshuffle.
This is what people expect, and what they want, across a whole range of options: playlists, meal plans, store specials, gambling — whatever. The concept can even be jiggered so that favorites show up more often in the rotation than non-favorites without straining the analogy. As far as I can tell, the only barrier to doing it right is that people haven’t learned what we all knew at Activision ages ago.
It’s 18 °F outside and there’s about four inches of snow on the ground. My chickens are all in open coops that most people would consider suitable only for summer housing, never for winter housing. Not even in my mild Oregon climate.
But I not only have open houses, but all my feeding and watering is done outdoors, year-round. What’s up with that?
An open-front house in winter, from almost 100 years ago. Fancier than mine, but still wide open. From Fresh-Air Poultry Houses.
Yesterday there was snow, and the day before there was a little bit of snow, but it was above freezing. My chickens didn’t like the looks of the snow and most of them stayed inside. To get them out to the feed, water, and nest boxes, I drove them out of their houses. The first time, there was hardly any snow, and you could see their reaction of “Hey, this isn’t bad!” Once out of the houses, they were in no rush to go back in. Later, with more snow, they were less certain, and some jumped back inside right away. We’ll see what happens today. They’ll get used to it eventually, but they need to keep eating if they’re going to keep laying, so I want them to get used to it now.
Today, the temperatures are going to stay below freezing all day, so I’m going to have to schlep buckets of warm water out to them. In very cold weather, the water in the buckets will freeze, but I just bring them back inside and put them next to the stove, and eventually they thaw. A lot of people like rubber feed pans because the ice can be dumped on the spot, and I’ll be trying that, too.
My houses don’t have insulated roofs. It usually it doesn’t matter, because with open housing like mine, the inside temperature is the same as the outside temperature, so water doesn’t condense on the ceiling and drip on the chickens. If temperatures are above freezing but there’s snow on the roof, this isn’t true anymore. The floors in the houses were pretty nasty yesterday. No doubt they’re frozen now. I haven’t been out to check yet.
I’ll report back later and tell you how it’s going. Based in past experience, the chickens’ health will be completely unaffected by any of this, just like it says in Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, (which is full of all sorts of surprising stuff). I’ll post some photos, too.
First Look, 8:15 AM, 20°F, Light Winds
Here is one of my “low houses,” whose occupants don’t seem to want to go outside. Note that some of the hens are roosting on the front wall rather than inside. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them.
Only a handful of chickens were moving around outside, but I scattered some whole wheat and drove the chickens outside. Once there, a lot of them started their usual routines, heading off to the feeders or the nest boxes.
Here’s a view after I scattered some grain and made them go outside. Business as usual, more or less.
The snow is a very light powder and my houses are very open, which means that there’s some snow in all the houses. The chickens look active, alert, and dry, though they would like the snow to go away.
The chickens all looked fine, except one hen who was shivering badly. I think she spent the night outside. I put her in a nest box, which gets her out of the wind and should allow her to warm up quickly.
Later I’ll bring them some warm water. Their waterers are hidden under the snow and are frozen solid.
Noon, 21°F
Partly sunny. I brought two buckets of warm water out to the chickens, who pretty much ignored them. Obviously, they aren’t very thirsty.
Buckets of warm water are the second-simplest approach to winter watering. The simplest is to believe “they’ll just eat snow and it won’t crater their rate of lay” (which is only true if their rate of lay has already cratered for some other reason). See my winter watering article for the full range of cold-weather watering solutions.
They showed more interest in the grain I scattered for them, but they aren’t acting like they’re starving. There were a reasonable number of eggs to collect.
The hen I’d put in one of the nest boxes died, which surprised me, because I didn’t think she was in that much distress. I also thought the nest-box trick would work. I have community nests (with are big nests that hold a lot of hens at once, and have no interior partitions), and I knew that there would be other hens right up against her in there, which would help warm her up. It wasn’t enough.
All the other chickens look fine. The situation looks stable. Tonight at dusk I’ll go out with a flashlight to make sure there aren’t any other hens sleeping outdoors.
This cold snap is supposed to last about a week and will reduce egg production significantly unless the hens get used to snow in a hurry. I don’t expect any other ill effects (except for any remaining chickens that sleep outdoors).
This kind of cold snap occurs only about once every five years. If it happened more often, I’d take more steps to prevent it.
7 PM, 19°F. All Quiet
I took a a tour around the houses. One hen was sleeping on the roof of a house, a couple were roosting on the side walls, and at least a dozen on the low front walls. I moved them all inside.
I retrieved the two galvanized buckets I’m using for waterers, since they’ll just freeze solid if I leave them out. I’ll take them back onto the pasture first thing tomorrow morning.
Back when I used winter lights, I had extension cords out on the pasture, so I could use electric birdbath heaters to keep the automatic waterers from freezing (see my winter watering article). This didn’t prevent the hundreds of feet of garden hose from freezing, but most days have highs above freezing, and the hoses thaw by themselves. During a cold snap, I can just fill the chickens’ usual waterers with cold water a couple of times a day. Without the extension cords and the birdbath heaters, I’m reduced to buckets of warm water. [Note: when I wrote this post, I wasn’t using winter lights, but I’ve since started again]
I forgot to mention that I’ve seen weather this cold before, and this much snow before, but not both at the same time. Before, with cold weather but no snow, the hens were happy to leave the houses and visit the feeders, and my only problem was providing water. In previous snowstorms, the above-freezing temperatures meant that the watering system continued working and (more importantly) that the snow didn’t last long enough to cause much trouble. We’re in for a week of this snowy, below-freezing weather.
Tuesday Evening, 19°F
Today was more of the same, except that the chickens look happier now that they’re getting used to the snow. They’re spending more time outside. They greeted buckets of water and scratch feed with little more than polite interest, meaning that they’re probably making it to the feeders on their own and learning to eat snow. If anything, they looked less cold today, although the temperatures weren’t any higher than before.
Bottom line: except for one hen sleeping out in the open, none of the chickens seem affected by the cold, in spite of wide-open housing and temperatures as low as 15°F. Being freaked out by their first encounter with snow has been by far their biggest problem.
The weather report is for pretty much the same kind of weather for another week — highs in the twenties or low thirties, lows in the teens or twenties, occasional snow — which is very unusual for around here, a once-a-decade event at most.
Our household water system nearly gave out, but we kludged a fix for it. We have a two-pump system, with a submersible pump in the well, which pumps water into a 1500-gallon cistern, and a jet pump that pumps water out of the cistern and into the house. The path between the well pump and the cistern was frozen. I didn’t notice until I peered into the cistern this morning. It was almost empty and had a skin of ice on top. Not good! The pipe-heating cable that was supposed to keep things flowing had failed. We managed to bypass it with a length of garden hose from a convenient spigot at the wellhead and into the top of the cistern. The water comes out of our well at 50°F, which should prevent any more ice from forming in the cistern.
(In a colder climate, we’d have put this 1500-gallon black plastic cistern in a shed, but as it is, we just left it out in the open.)
Saturday
The weather is slightly above freezing but there is more snow than ever. The chickens are behaving normally and there are no problems. As I said before, my previous problems were not caused by the cold but by the chickens’ reluctance to go out in the snow, but they had to in order to eat and drink. In a normal operation with feeders and waterers indoors, there would have been no difficulty at all.
The snow causes another problem, though. Normally, my highly ventilated houses don’t have any problem with condensation. The air inside the house is the same temperature as the air outside the house, so there’s no tendency for moisture to condense on the ceiling or walls. But when the temperature is above freezing and there’s snow on the roof, water condenses like mad and drips into the house.
I only have to put up with this for a few days a year in my highly ventilated coops, but people with ordinary coops put with this all winter. By going to great lengths to shut their coops up tight and to keep the temperatures higher inside than outside, moisture is condensing on the walls and ceiling all winter long and dripping back into the house. It turns the chicken house into a disgusting, unhealthy mess. The dampness leads to frostbitten combs, the sight of which tends to make people redouble their attempts to add heat and prevent ventilation. It’s a vicious cycle.
I’ve republished Prince T. Woods’ excellent book, Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, to help get the word out and teach all the nuts and bolts of open-air chicken houses, summer and winter. You should at least click on the link and read the sample chapters. This week’s bout with unusually cold weather (for here) has certainly vindicated Dr. Woods’ main points.
To misquote Polonius, “Neither a sucker nor a charlatan be.” People spend a lot of their lives deluding themselves, often spending vast amounts of money in the process. Don’t do that.
There’s good money catering to suckers. Being a charlatan pays. You help them along with their happy delusion, and they’ll love you for it. Don’t do that, either. It’s dumb to sucker yourself, but it’s loathsome to sucker other people.
When I started out at the farmer’s market, I didn’t fully understand this. Customers wanted to project their suckerdom onto me. Okay, fine, it’s a free country, but the bad thing is that I really felt the pull of their expectations. I wanted to nod my head when they talked about organic certification when, in fact, I think that the organic movement is a hollow shell (besides, I don’t join things that want me to fill out more than two sheets of paper per lifetime.) I wanted to agree with them when they said that raising eggs the way I do is VERY IMPORTANT. Come on, let’s get real. Much as I like the whole process, free-range eggs do not peg the Important-O-Meter.
I even felt that I was letting the team down by openly drinking diet sodas.
Well, this spasm didn’t last very long. I’m used to being an authentic eccentric, and I reverted to form pretty quickly. I don’t even bother concealing the McDonald’s bag if that’s what I’m having for breakfast.
Which has worked out pretty well. The fact is, a couple of color photographs with chickens, green grass, blue sky, and fluffy clouds are better than political correctness anyway. (Especially if there are also little kids in overalls.) Consumers know that they’re constantly being suckered, so it can come as a relief to them when you show ’em a little reality. It doesn’t work on all of them — look at all the suckers who are buying bottled tap water because they don’t trust tap water — but reality-based marketing has enough appeal that you don’t have to be a con man if you don’t want to.
Of course, the product has to be good, too. Real free-range eggs off a green pasture look good (with dark yolks) and taste good. People who start off thinking that my farm is just a scammy way of getting five bucks a dozen get converted after trying them.
This is where the organic biz has fallen down on the job. If you grow the same old crops but leave out the chemicals, you get the same old produce. It doesn’t look or taste any better, but it costs a lot more. How much fear of chemicals must a consumer muster to buy produce that isn’t worth a second glance otherwise?
The local organic growers are starting to distance themselves from the organic movement because all the supermarkets are full of boring organic produce from out of state. So they grow better-tasting and more interesting varieties, leveraging the fact that they are extremely skilled farmers who care a lot about food. One local farm has opened a restaurant! They aren’t afraid of low-grade organic produce from Mexico. Sure, the same people who buy bottled tap water will buy low-grade organic produce, but these folks aren’t paying enough attention to be captured by a high-class vendor anyway.
So my advice, as both a consumer and a producer, is to see trends as a warning sign and be extra careful. If you find yourself repeating what people expect you to say, you’re doing it wrong. And if you shell out big bucks to buy what other people are buying, you’re really doing it wrong!
For those of you who know how to mess around safely with car batteries and other high-amperage/low-voltage applications, here’s an interesting one (please note the warning below!:
APC makes an extended-run UPS called the Smart-UPS XL, which supports external battery packs. The ones I have (Smart-UPS XL 1000) are a 24V system, which means that the internal batteries and the external battery packs are all 24V. The external battery packs and replacement batteries are expensive.
So when my batteries gave up the ghost, I wondered what would happen if I replaced the 20 amp-hour gel-cell batteries with 100 amp-hour RV batteries, which were cheaper in spite of having five times the capacity.
Using a battery connector from a spare/dead battery pack (you can also scavenge them from most dead APC batteries), I wired up two new RV batteries in series and plugged them into the expansion pack connector. Result? Greatly extended run time, as expected.
The batteries have been in use for five years now and have been slowly losing capacity. It’s about time to replace them. Five years is what I got from the APC batteries when the units were new. (By the way, this really does mean that an APC UPS will last more than ten years if you replace the batteries.)
Now, RV batteries are deep-cycle versions of car batteries, which means that they outgas hydrogen and need topping off, so use them in a well-ventilated area. Also, since they’re full of sulfuric acid, they are a little harsh on the surrounding area, as you know if you’ve ever looked at the area around the battery in an old car. Thirdly, gel cells use a slightly higher charging voltage than flooded-cell batteries, so water evaporates out of the battery faster than it should, and you need to top the cells off several times a year with distilled water.
All of these problems would be solved by using gel-cell batteries instead of the cheaper flooded-cell batteries. Good maintenance-free batteries would help but would not solve the problem.
I have also tried this trick on two Pacific Power Vanguard 1200 UPS systems, systems that I got for almost nothing years ago. Converting these was trickier because I had to open up the units and add external battery cables. The APC Smart-UPS XL is the only line that I know of with a convenient external battery connector. The Vanguard overcharges more than the APC, and was generally much less satisfactory.
I’d stick to Smart-UPS XL units for this trick if I were you, but if you ignore this advice, one thing to look for is a UPS with a cooling fan inside. I think that some of the short-duration UPS systems expect to run out of battery power before they have time to overheat, and thus would be lousy candidates for having their battery life extended.
Tip for anyone who would rather do things more conventionally: replacement batteries are very heavy and expensive to ship. Ask at your local car-supply stores and battery shops if they can get what you want. They get daily delivery by truck anyway, and the shipping should be free (ask). This will save you beaucoup bucks.
Tip #2: The world is full of low-quality gel-cell batteries that are shipped halfway around the world just to fail immediately in your UPS. If you buy them locally, you’ll probably get a warranty that means something. Ask. If you have to ship them back, the shipping alone will kill you. I know that APC batteries are good, and I think that ABC batteries are also good.
