Category: Farm/Country Living

Grass and Chickens

Time to put the mower on the tractor. I have a 1957 Ford 640 tractor and a five-foot rotary mower.

The surest sign that it’s time to mow is that the electric fence starts shorting out against it. You’ve really gone too far when the chickens have little jungle paths through the tall grass to get from their houses to the outdoor feeders.

Chickens do best on short grass. They can’t digest grass unless it’s bright green, and tall grass is a serious barrier to them. I read some research done way back when that said that two inches is a good grass height for chickens. Six inches is too tall. Also, when tall grass starts providing seclusion, they start laying there instead of in the nest boxes.

Predators, on the other hand, prefer tall grass. It allows them to lie in wait, which works better for them than chasing chickens all over the yard.

It’s important to either be (a) the kind of person who always puts everything back where it belongs, not matter what, or (b) to start mowing the pasture before the grass gets high enough to obscure the stuff you’ve left lying around. Otherwise you discover your missing possessions by shredding them with the mower.

There are different kinds of tractor mowers. Like everyone else, I use a “bush hog,” (which I put in quotes because it’s really a generic rotary mower, not by Bush Hog) — a rotary mower with swinging blades that make it resistant to damaging itself or your tractor’s drive shaft if it whacks a stump or a big rock. Don’t forget to fill up the oil in the transmission and sharpen the blades if you can get at them.

Also, you really need to have an “overrunning clutch” between the bush hog and your PTO drive shaft. Otherwise, the inertia of the spinning blades will act like a flywheel, making your tractor hard to stop. (The power take-off is on the wrong side of the clutch, so stomping on the clutch has no effect on this. The ratcheting mechanism on the overrunning clutch does the trick.)

What about lawns, you ask? Oh, yeah. I mow them with a lawn mower, or, more often, Dan does. I don’t do lawn care besides that. I prefer working on a field scale, so a lawn seems too dainty to me. We don’t plant or fertilize it, we just mow whatever chooses to grow there. Grass and frisbees, mostly. And Oregon’s Coast Range plays this geological joke on us — it rains half the year, but that doesn’t mean your well produces much water. So we don’t water the lawn in the summer, either.

But take it easy on your first mowing session of the season. Tall wet grass is exhausting to deal with, except on a tractor or riding mower. The word “dainty” I used earlier doesn’t apply to the first cutting in the spring. My grandfather found this out the hard way back in the Seventies, duking it out his lawn and losing. Gave him a heart attack. That’s why he’s not the world’s oldest man today.

Let’s raise all our food in a bunker.

Alert reader David Fiske sent me this link to a New York Times op-ed that expresses surprise and alarm that livestock raised outdoors are exposed to more pathogens than ones raised in confinement. Outdoor pigs can get trichinosis and other porcine infestations, some of which are dangerous to humans.

None of this should be news to anybody. If you raise livestock in a bunker, you can control what they’re exposed to (though in practice this is hit-or-miss). Outdoors, nature gets a vote.

I don’t know about you, but people who want to seal themselves away from nature get on my nerves. That goes double when they want free-range stuff to be sealed away from nature, too.

Maybe this is just a bad attitude on my part. No doubt I should be building a farm in a giant tunnel somewhere, where everything is under absolute control. Then, just for luck, I’d irradiate the bejesus out of all my products after packaging to ensure that it’s more sterile than moon rocks. Too bad Howard Hughes isn’t alive anymore. He’d love it.

In the meantime, my advice is: nature’s full of all kinds of stuff, good and bad. Get used to it. Revisit “The Joy of Cooking” once in a while to refresh your memory about rules like, “Cook your pork thoroughly, even if it came from a gigantic, concrete-floored confinement facility.”

For home-raised pork, trichinosis is sort of a joke threat, since hard freezing kills it eventually, and that’s how we receive our pork from the butcher. Country people know better than to eat rare pork, anyway.

The Geography of Fertilizer

The parts of the country with the most intensive animal farming have so much manure they don’t know what to do with. Manure is bulky — it has a low value per ton. This is a problem. The reason Iowa farmers are putting chemical fertilizers on their cornfields instead of manure is that it’s a lot more concentrated, so it’s cheaper to ship. In fact, it’s cheaper to ship oil halfway around the world, make fertilizer out of it, and truck the fertilizer to the farm belt than it is to truck free manure to the farm belt.

So people are doing various dodges to try to get around this. An article in Wired discusses duckweed’s ability to grow in manure lagoons and create a lot of starch for ethanol, which is a lot simpler and cheaper than growing corn, and it uses manure that’s just being wasted, anyway.

But you gotta wonder. It’s supposed to be like the old ads for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “Hey, you put manure on my cornfield!” “Hey, you put cornfield on my manure!” Two great things that go great together.

You’re supposed to generate manure in an area where people will pay you money for it. You’re supposed to grow crops in an area where you can get cheap manure. In spite of the current namby-pamby attitude towards manure (“Ewww! It’s so organic and smelly! Shouldn’t we disguise its origins by composting it first?”), manure is something that belongs out in the field where plants can benefit from it directly. Plants know what to do with manure. Plants and animals co-evolved for 600 million years. Plants have this manure stuff figured out. Farting around with methane generation or composting is okay if you don’t have any fields to spread it on, but it’s second-best.

On a regional level, getting the location right is hard. Crop generation and animal raising have different needs and cost structures, and livestock production drifted away from the Midwest back when fertilizer was cheap. Now it looks like the poultry industry is shifting back towards the Midwest, with its insatiable appetite for fertilizer.

On a local level, though, your setup is more controllable. For one thing, it’s possible to go into the manure-generation business yourself, by raising enough livestock to generate the fertilizer you need for your crops. This is what Edmund Morris describes in his 1860’s classic, Ten Acres Enough, one of my favorite back-to-the-land books. (Go buy a copy.) Morris had a ten-acre farm near Philadelphia, where he grew high-grade fruits and berries. His expenses for manure were astronomical, so he started keeping cow-calf pairs over the winter. This operation only broke even when you considered just the cash, but was insanely profitable when you counted the value of the manure.

This can still be done today. Frankly, I’m amazed that anyone even considers going into the contract broiler-growing business without having enough acreage to use all the manure profitably, because it’s the only edge that’s available to you. But most people don’t, so manure is free, or at least cheap, near broiler-growing areas.

In our case, we do things the laziest possible way, and raise our chickens outdoors, where their manure is added to the soil with no intermediate steps. This increases the fertility of the pastures and keeps them lush and green through most of the year. Chickens can eat lush green plants but not mature, woody plants. A diet that includes lush green plants does wonders to the flavor and appearance of eggs and meat, so we’re getting direct value from the exercise, plus restoring the fertility of the land.

Quality is Something You Can Taste

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing people talking about chemicals when they think they’re talking about food. What’s the flavor of the month? Is it still Omega 3?

Egg hucksters always claim that their eggs are superior, at least with regard to the flavor of the month. People used to claim that brown eggs had more vitamins, then less cholesterol, and now more Omega 3. Those are pretty tall claims. (People don’t eat the shells anyway, so it doesn’t matter what color they are.)

The real test is a taste test. If an egg tastes better, it’s more nutritious. Seriously. The same is true for other products. What do you think your sense of taste is for?

This is also useful in dealing with feed. Taste your chicken feed from time to time, especially when you try a new brand. It should be bland but not unpleasant. If it tastes nasty, there’s something wrong with it. Feed your chickens something else. The feed industry has a lot of second-rate or spoiled ingredients flowing through it. You want to buy your feed from an outfit that won’t touch that stuff.

Your chickens and other livestock know this. You can starve them to the point where they’ll eat bad feed and then get sick or die, but if they have alternatives, this is very unusual. So if you see them turning up their noses (or beaks, as the case may be) at their dinner, pay attention.

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