Ah, New Year’s Day. I love New Year’s Day because of the New Year’s resolution I made a few years ago: no more resolutions! It’s the only one I’ve ever kept.
Thinking Like a Consumer
You know, I think that a lot of people are approaching the whole “green” issue wrong. They’re thinking like consumers, and it ruins their chance to do anything meaningful. Being a consumer is like having an enormous flashing sign over your head that says, “SUCKER.” Worse, you see the “SUCKER” signs over the heads of the people around you, and peer pressure kicks in and makes you want to do what they do.
A lot of the people I know show some warning signs of thinking like a consumer:
They imagine that they can achieve a “green” lifestyle through buying stuff.
They think that joining organizations and pooling their ignorance with others counts as “doing something.”
Their retirement fund and their kids’ college funds are empty and their credit cards are full.
Thinking Like a Producer
All of these things are good for the kind of person who makes his money by selling to suckers, but it doesn’t get the cows milked. If you want to make a difference to the environment, you should do it directly by taking care of a piece of land with your own hands. And turn a profit while you’re at it, because the environment needs to be more than a hobby for the well-to-do.
As far as I can make out, this is very easy. Carbon abatement is a trivial exercise, for example. You take a piece of cropland or pastureland and plant trees on it, and in short order (and with little maintenance) you have a stand of timber that has fixed an enormous amount of carbon in the wood and the soil. Cut the trees when they are mature and repeat. Starker Forest Products land adjoins mine on two sides, and the Starker family has been making its living this way since the Thirties, and has donated millions of dollars to Oregon State University as well. You can do a lot worse than this and not regret your investment, and it can bring your carbon footprint down to zero, and provide you with peaceful surroundings, not to mention firewood.
In thirty or forty years I’ll be able to tell you how it’s worked out for me, since I’m letting a big chunk of my farm revert to forest naturally.
Nuts and Bolts
Thinking like a producer is useful, even if you don’t act on it directly. The best course I ever took in college was Engineering Economics, which taught me the basics of cost-benefit analysis and the time value of money. This is ABC-level stuff, and should be a required course for all high school students, let alone college students, but it isn’t.
You learn how to think about your purchases as they travel along their life cycle from “pile of money” to “valuable new purchase” to “worthless piece of junk.” Or, in the case of production equipment, from “pile of money” to “valuable new purchase” to “big pile of money plus worthless piece of junk.” The big pile of money comes from the things you produced with the help of the piece of equipment.
The difference between a producer and a consumer is that the producer is aiming for the big pile of money, while the consumer writes it off. Since consumers have a batting average of .000, it’s not hard to do better than this.
Unfortunately, consumers, being new to the production game, tend to come up with justifications and rationalizations rather than actual plans, so it can take a while before you start hitting the ball. “Never bet the farm” is good advice, especially when you’re starting out.
Even if you don’t ever try your hand at the production side of the picture, just being aware of how quickly purchases lose their value can spell the difference between living in a gilded, credit-burdened cage and true affluence.
For example, new cars are for suckers. They lose most of their value in the first few years of ownership, but cars are so durable these days that people are practically giving them away when they still have most of their life still ahead of them.
(Which is not to say that you can’t buy a new car if that’s your passion, but make sure your retirement fund and the kids’ college fund are topped off. First things first.)
Only an idiot judges others by the kind of car they drive. Driving an old or unfashionable car thus works as an idiot detector. If you get a hard time about your old car (from people who really mean it and aren’t just ribbing you), then you’re surrounded by Pod People and need to find a path back to the real world.
(Living in a non-snooty neighborhood will, in itself, save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the course of your working lifetime by removing the peer pressure to be as much of a sucker as your neighbors.)
I’ve spent a good part of my life thinking about chicks — by which, for the moment at least, I mean “baby chickens.” It’s just about the new year, which means that hatchery catalogs will start arriving in the mailbox any day now.
One thing I’ve been doing over the last few years is popularizing the insulated electric lamp brooder developed by the Ohio Experiment Station in the Forties. I have their paper on it here, and I devote two chapters to it in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. It’s done us proud over the years and I routinely get fan mail about the design. Check it out. Your chicks will be warmer and you’ll use less electricity, and the whole shebang only takes a couple of hours to knock together.
Another trick I’m fond of is using the little quart-jar waterers, but with narrow-mouth glass canning jars instead of the horrible plastic jars the feed store wants to sell you. Glass jars glint like water, and you can watch the baby chicks wander over and peck at the glass a couple of times before finding the actual water. Also, the plastic jars are hard to clean, and they’re not clear enough to see when they’ve gone empty. Just buy the bases and leave the plastic jars alone.
I don’t like bigger waterers (gallon waterers, say), because they have too much water area and day old chicks get soaked, then chilled. The quart-jar waterers are tiny enough that this pretty much doesn’t happen.
If you’re wondering about what kind of breed to buy, try one of the brown-egg commercial hybrids if you haven’t already. Not only do they lay a lot more eggs, but they do this largely by laying in the off-season. If you’ve found yourself having to buy eggs at the store in the fall and winter, a handful of commercial layers should fix this. My personal favorite is the Red Sex-Link from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. They are just about as docile as Barred Rocks but lay a lot better.
The snow continues, but a lot of it has melted. For the first time in two weeks, then hens came running out with their usual headlong greed when I appeared with a bucket of grain. Previously, the thick and unfamiliar snow had made them reluctant to spend any more time outside than absolutely necessary.
The snow should be gone tomorrow, and we’ll be back to normal Western Oregon winter weather — plenty of rain, occasional frosty nights, but daytime highs above freezing.
We have some pullet that need to be moved out of the brooder house. We kept them back due to the unseasonal snowfall. Other than that, things are pretty quiet.
I’m taking advantage of the holidays to prepare more books for publication. The second Tom Slade boy scout novel will be available in the next week or two, plus Amelia B. Edwards’ true-life travels in Egypt in the nineteenth century, “A Thousand Miles up the Nile.” (Amelia B. Edwards was clearly the inspiration for Amelia P. Emerson in Elizabeth Peters’ wonderful series of Egypt-themed mysteries.) And there’s even a novel of mine coming out soon. Stay tuned.
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!
