Hen Lights At Last

Karen has been after me to set up hen lights this year, after a hiatus of several years. Hens normally don’t like to lay except when the day length is increasing or reasonably long or both, and neither holds true at the end of the year. Lights have been used since the 1880s to deal with this.

There’s a lot of superstition about hen lights, ranging from the idea that it somehow uses up the hens, to the idea that hens are kept under brilliant 24-hour light as a form of torture.

Lights may have been hard on the hens in the 1880s, which was before anyone knew anything about nutrition, and flocks were generally malnourished during the winter. But the bright-light idea is just silly. Hens respond to very low levels of light, and electricity costs money. Light stimulation works at levels so dim that the hens can’t see to move around. The real problem with traditional hen lights is that they’re so dim that it’s hard for the farmer to work by them. The hens have no difficulty sleeping with the lights on.

The main purpose of the lights is to shift some of the egg laying out of the spring and into the fall and winter. At best, it increases overall egg production by 15%, which is welcome but isn’t really the point. The point is to get the kind of steady, year-round production that occurs naturally in the tropics, but not in regions as far north as I am. I’m at 45 degrees latitude, and daylight lasts only eight hours on Christmas week.

My lighting system is distinctly retro. Because I use portable pasture houses, the main feature of my lighting system is a thousand feet of outdoor extension cord going from house to house. I use a single 40-watt incandescent bulb per house. The whole thing is on a timer set to remain on from 6 AM to 8 PM, which is in series with a dusk-to-dawn sensor to turn the lights off when it’s light out. This gives the hens 14 hours of light per day, which is the traditional amount to use. Traditionally, lights are used between September 1 and March 31. I’m off to a very late start.

I will post pictures later, after everything’s up and running.

Want a Great Book for a Penny?

Here comes a new auction! Every week, I auction off a copy of every book in my Norton Creek Press catalog. Two people got books for a penny in the last auctions, which closed yesterday.

Why do I do it? This is promotion, pure and simple. Bargains get people to try things they otherwise wouldn’t, and I have faith in my books. Try one, and you’ll want more.

And when a few more people start noticing the auctions, and as word gets out that these are all great books, the days when you can get one for a penny will be over. That’s good for me but bad for you. So get some insane bargains before they’re all gone!

Let’s Hear it for Amelia B. Edwards!

Heritage Key has an interesting blog entry about the fascinating Victorian novelist, travel writer, and Egyptologist, Amelia B. Edwards.

Nice to see I’m not the only one who’s fallen under Amelia’s spell. I liked her book, A Thousand Miles up the Nile so much that I republished it! This book chronicles her trip up the Nile on a sailboat (a dahabeeya) in the 1870s, with beautifully written and fascinating accounts of the people and antiquities she found there. It makes wonderful reading even today, which is not surprising, because Edwards was a highly successful travel writer and novelist, and became so fascinated by Egyptology that she founded the Egypt Exploration Fund.

To make things even better, Amelia’s quirky personality and turn of phrase were clearly used by Elizabeth Peters as a model for Amelia P. Emerson in her series of Victorian murder mysteries, where the main characters are Egyptologists!

So check out the article above and A Thousand Miles up the Nile. You won’t be disappointed.


Feed Quality: Who Cares Enough to Pay For It?

Is quality everything? Not to everyone. In his massive and invaluable “Poultry Nutrition” (now long out of print) W. Ray Ewing had this to say about quality in livestock feed:

First, let us look into the necessary quality levels. A feed is no good unless it can be sold and it cannot be sold unless it fits the community in which it is offered for sale. Therefore, we will have to study the community first.

If you go into any part of the country where feed is used, you will find that a small percentage of the feed users and prospective feed users have very high ideals with regard to feed quality. Possibly from 2 to 5 percent of the people in the community will say that they want a feed that is of absolutely top quality and that will produce the best results in growth and production of milk, eggs or meat that is possible, regardless of the price of the feed necessary to do such a job. You will find only a small number of people who have this ideal and are willing to back it up by buying such a high quality feed. Quite often those people have the idea that there is such a thing as one “best” feed and they want that “best” feed, but there are several of such high quality feeds possible, one or more of which may produce superior results, depending on the conditions under which they are used. Even when this viewpoint is understood, there are still people who want the best that can be made, with price no object.

At the other extreme we will find a varying percentage — anywhere from 10 to 30 percent or so, of people who look at a bag of feed from the standpoint of price as their first consideration. Then in the second place they ask, “How much for a bag of this feed?” In the third place they want to know how many pound of feed they can buy for a dollar. In other words, they have just one criterion for judging quality, and that is the price per pound, or per hundred pounds. Naturally, it also turns out that they are never a real customer of any feed dealer, because they buy only where the price is lowest and the man who is out with the lowest price at the moment gets the business — if you can call it business.

Incidentally, such people are not steady feed buyers for a considerable length of time, because they lack the sense to know that feed must produce good results in order to be worth anything and as a consequence, they fail in their feeding operations. A high quality community has relatively few of these folks.

In between these two extremes we have the great majority of feed buyers. They are people who want a dollar’s worth of results for each dollar they spend. As a matter of fact, they should have more than a dollar’s worth of results for each dollar expended. They are the sort of people who know what it costs to feed their livestock and they know the results they are getting. All of them may not know these things to the exact fraction of a cent, but at least they have more than a very general idea with respect of what is going on. To be sure, some of these people have rather high quality ideals — they approach those who want the best possible results regardless of price. On the other hand, we will find some who take at least two looks at the price before they concern themselves with results-producing ability. Success lies in sizing up the people in this general classification, particularly with regard to their relative quality ideals…

These considerations result in most feed manufacturers making more than one grade of feed. The manufacturer makes his first grade of feed to fit the quality ideals of the majority of the people in the community he serves. Then he makes a second grade where the price factor enters into the consideration more extensively. Some manufacturers also make a third grade of feed. Quite often these feed grades are “price” feeds only…

The first grade feed of a feed manufacturer must be quite complete from the nutritional standpoint. At least, the feed must be good enough that it will compete for animals under the more adverse conditions of feeding.

The second grade of feed is usually fairly correct from the nutritional standpoint. In making poultry mash feeds, the second grade of feed usually contains more wheat by-products and less of the high quality protein sources, such as milk and fish meal. The use of increased amounts of mill feeds may make the second grade of feed somewhat less palatable, but it is not always possible to attain as good palatability with the cheaper feeds. As a general rule, the second grade feeds possess a fair degree of nutritional excellence only, but the relative quality also varies with various manufacturers…

The third grade of feeds are practically always a price proposition. Nutritional ideas and ideals have been pretty well discarded. The feeds are often put together from the standpoint of meeting necessary legal guarantees only. When applied to poultry feeds, such feed mixtures are not worth what they cost, even though they cost very little. The poultryman must have results. Low feed intake and low feed cost never produced eggs or meat at a low unit production cost.

Robert’s Conclusions on Quality and Purchases

Note that the premium, “I want the best feed” market is only 2%-5% of purchasers, while the cheapskate, “I want the cheapest feed, no matter how bad it is” market is 10%-30% of purchasers. I have no data, but I’ll bet this pattern it true in just about everything, not just feed. You can guess that 2%-5% of people want the best socks, cars, or tax accountant that they can find, while 10%-30% look at the price without ever really noticing the actual product.

If you’re in the quality-product business, as I am with free-range chicken and eggs, then the quality obsessed 2%-5% are your best friends. The 10%-30% who are cheapskates are total write-offs. I’ve started posting my prices in bigger numbers so they won’t even approach my farmer’s market booth. No point attracting them when my prices are three times as much as what they’re willing to pay. The majority that’s sort-of price conscious is a mixed bag. Probably going after the quality-conscious folks is Job One, since it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but if you can reach the majority without going broke, it’s worth a shot because there are so many more of them. An attractive farmer’s market booth, sales or coupons or free samples to get people to try your product, and other techniques can tempt people who would otherwise balk at the price.

On the farming side, it should be clear that buying cheapskate feed is bad for you livestock and is also a stupid business move. Be suspicious of feed with the word “Country” in the title — that’s a code word for “cheapskate” in the feed biz. Any name that implies thriftiness is a warning not to buy.

If you ask around, most people know who has the best local feed mill, and you should buy from them. In alternative farming circles, some folks are obsessed with custom feed for some reason, but it’s the the competence and quality of the manufacturer, not the use of a special recipe, that makes all the difference.

Tasting the feed is a good quick test. Blandness is okay, off-flavors and off-smells disqualify the feed. It never hurts to use your senses for their intended purpose!

Don’t Get Too Fancy: Basics Always Matter

From World Poultry:

Poultry and pig producers who don’t test the new corn crop before feeding it are taking a risk this year, said Purdue University experts. Due to wet harvest conditions mould in corn is present in much of the Midwest crop.

This reminds me of something that I’ve seen over and over in the alternative foods movement: people take basics like moisture control for granted, and obsess instead over concerns that are trendier but less important.

You can make your livestock a lot sicker with moldy corn than GMO corn, and no doubt plenty of people are doing this right now. Poorly handled grain is bad news, regardless of how good it looks on paper.

I like to run my hands through grain, given the chance. You’d be surprised how much it varies. Some grain is moldy, some smells terrible, some is runty and full of straw and other contaminants, and some is pretty as a picture.

All of this means that your feed recipe means a lot less than you’d think. Whether the feed mill will take your top-notch recipe and turn out good feed or a travesty depends on their competence and good will, which vary all over the map.

In general, my experience is that organically certified grain makes a poorer showing when you do this than conventional grain. Less competition means that suppliers can get away with sloppiness and sharp practices, so they do. And a lot of buyers put more faith in certification than in the evidence of their own senses, so they don’t notice.

With mixed feed, I like to smell and taste it. Feed should not taste bad. It’s okay for it to be bland, but off-tastes are a flashing “do not buy” sign. Same goes for pet food, by the way.

We should all be careful to descend from the realm of theory and put our senses to work. Farming is a full-body experience, especially for our livestock!