Signs of Winter

Signs of the season: I’ve seen the first Christmas tree truck of winter, taking a load of freshly cut trees to be sent on their way. A lot of Christmas trees are grown in my area. Cutting starts about now and usually ends the day before Thanksgiving, though last year there was some activity into early December.

The local Christmas tree industry was developed by a neighbor of mine, Hal Schudel, who developed sustainable, low-impact Christmas tree farming long before these buzzwords were popular. He introduced helicopter logging in 1955, so that Christmas trees grown on steep hillsides could be cut by hand and hoisted out by air, with no need for roads or heavy machinery — and hence no erosion. He also knew a superior tree when he saw one, introducing the Noble Fir (which makes a much better Christmas tree than the local Douglas Fir). Hal’s company, Holiday Tree Farm, has an interesting Web page.

I like having a self-made millionaire as a neighbor and role model.

Not that Hal’s the only one. My property borders on Starker Forests on two sides. As with Hal Schudel, T. J. Starker was into reforestation and sustainable yield long before these concepts caught the public eye. Both men were professors at OSU, too.

Starker has a good-neighbor policy which must be experienced to be believed. It’s not just a matter of, “Sure, take some of the downed wood for firewood, what the heck.” It’s more like, “We’ll unlock the gate for you and show you where the good stuff is. When’s a good time?”

One of the things I like about living here is the quality of our neighbors. They couldn’t be better. The only thing I would change is that the Christmas tree truck drivers could slow down a little. 40 MPH is pretty fast for a wet and twisty gravel road.

City People Are Crazy

Recently, some teenagers in my area were camping out and decided to kill and eat a duck for their supper. Bad idea. They were caught.

Now, in the real world, this would have been treated like the imbecile case of poaching that it is, but Benton County is run by city people, who are crazy. There was a hue and cry for a charge of felony animal abuse. Lots of people were itching to get those kids under psychiatric treatment. What could be a stronger sign of mental illness than hunting out of season?

You can see the article here.

This is not an isolated case. A guy in Albany was cited because he had an old, skinny horse, whose skinniness and age were taken as signs of neglect, even though there was a younger, well-fleshed horse on the same pasture (how can you starve one horse and not the other when they’re running around together all the time?). If you’re not in a rural county, it’s important to slaughter your animals before they become old, skinny, or lame, or you’ll be arrested. Even if they can be cured, a convalescence within sight of a cell-phone Samaritan may land you in jail. Don’t risk it.

If you’re planning to move back to the land, don’t make the mistake I did by moving to a county dominated by city people. They’ll sic the law on you. Find a rural country, preferably one dominated by farmers. You’re trying to get away from urban attitudes as well as urban architecture, and this requires that you have at least a county line between yourself and the nearest urban population.

Farmers on the edge of town have always been slapped with nuisance lawsuits for being farmers (the sound of roosters crowing or tractors running, dust from plowing, flies, etc.). This is one reason why such farmers are eager to sell out to developers: city people won’t let them farm. But now we’re being threatened with jail or mental institutions.

I grew up in Del Norte County in California, which is an impoverished county in the redwoods. The largest segment of the economy was unemployed loggers, and poaching was universal. The game wardens looked the other way if you weren’t selling venison in the street, because it helped people feed their families. But by the standards of law enforcement here in Benton County, everyone I grew up with belonged in the loony bin. Go figure.

Keep Your Chickens Healthy This Winter in a Fresh-Air Coop

Recently, I was shocked to learn that tightly closed, Nineteenth-century-style chicken coops are back in fashion, in spite of being unhealthy for your birds and foul-smelling, besides! I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, since there’s something about Nineteenth-century superstitions that makes them immortal, but this one is particularly bad for your chickens.

The fallacy goes like this: “Chickens are delicate, hothouse creatures who can’t stand the cold. So we will coop them up in tightly shut houses, so they won’t catch cold from drafts, and will stay warm. Maybe adding a lot of glass windows will help keep the house warmer.”

It’s hard to decide which piece of nonsense to attack first. Chickens aren’t delicate! They tolerate cold very well, snuggled under a warm coat of feathers and kept toasty by a high metabolism. Lots of people have had their chickens decide that they’d rather roost in pine trees instead of chicken houses, and such chickens usually are perfectly healthy all winter, even in harsh climates — often healthier than their brethren back at the chicken coop. They don’t lay well if exposed to so much weather, and it’s hard to protect them from predators, but the outdoor lifestyle is good for them.

Like all birds, though, chickens have a secret weakness: bad lungs. Miners used to use canaries to detect bad air quality, and chickens are just the same. They’ll be hurt by poor air quality long before we are. That means that tightly shut houses are unhealthy for chickens, because they have terrible air quality (with high levels of ammonia, for one thing). Such houses are also too damp, and may be too dark as well. Like humans, chickens don’t “catch cold from drafts” — that’s a superstition.

Also, you can’t keep chickens warm by keeping them in an unheated shed. It’s going to be just as cold in an unheated chicken house as it is outside. (Okay, that’s not quite true: In an insulated, crowded house, the chickens’ own body heat can keep it warm. But for this to work, it takes a much larger flock than most of us have.)

All this was debunked a hundred years ago. The commercial poultry industry moved permanently to highly ventilated poultry houses. First they used open-sided houses, and now they use forced-air ventilation with giant fans to provide even more air movement. The small-scale poultrykeepers adopted fresh-air poultry houses at first, but recently people seem to have lost their way, and are building dank, dark chicken dungeons again. Some of these houses are very expensive. I’d hate to see you make the same mistake, putting your best work into something that won’t work out, and harming your chickens when you’re trying to help them!

On my farm, I have always used open-front chicken houses in all weather. The hens like these well enough, though many prefer to roost on the roofs rather than inside. It rains 60-90 inches a year here, and snows sometimes, and bad weather never seems to bother the chickens. Other people tell me that their chickens get sick in the winter, but this has never happened to me. Like the folks whose chickens roost in trees, my chickens are in robust health year-round.

On the other hand, If you stuff your flock into an under-ventilated coop, the ammonia will stunt, sicken, or blind them. If it’s dark, they won’t be able to eat properly. The lack of air movement means that the water in your chickens’ manure can’t escape, but new water is being added all the time from their breath and manure. Of course, your house gets wetter and wetter, promoting disease and frostbite, since wet combs get frostbitten but dry ones don’t. This is how housing mistakes can suck all the joy out of poultrykeeping and cause you to abandon it forever. Don’t let it happen to you!

The bible of the fresh-air housing movement is Dr. Prince T. Woods’ Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, which I have just brought back into print. It’s an oldie but a goodie. There’s nothing else like it. For caring chickens owners like you, it’s something you have to have. Check out the sample chapter on my Web site and you’ll see what I mean.You’ll see that the book is a gold mine of information.

Agricultural Uses of Dynamite, and Other Farm Tales

Did you know that dynamite was a traditional farm tool? For decades, you could buy it by the case by mail-order from Sears. It had many uses around the farm: blowing stumps, shattering boulders, breaking up plow-pan, digging holes for tree planting, and even (believe it or not) digging ditches.

I’ve republished We Wanted a Farm by M. G. Kains, which has a whole chapter about his newbie experiences with dynamite in the old days, including snake-holing and other semi-exotic techniques. M. G. Kains is the author of the 1936 back-to-the-land handbook, Five Acres and Independence. It turns out that (not surprisingly) the wisdom that went into Five Acres came partly from having a farm of his own, with the triumphs and tragedies that go with it.

If you head over to my We Wanted a Farm Web page, you can check out the sample chapters, including the one on dynamite!

Kains had an interesting approach to the back-to-the-land problem. He had a day job a an editor in New York City, and didn’t want to quit right away. So first he moved from his apartment to a rented house in the suburbs and had a big garden. Then he moved into a purchased house and tried berries and orcharding. Finally, he bought a farm and went into orcharding in a big way. So it’s not just a book about dynamite: there’s plenty about gardening and orcharding, too, more or less alternating with his yarns about his adventures, and even two poems insulting the Ben Davis apple, the Red Delicious of the day, which, among other things, “tastes like a mattress and drives you to crime.”

I think this multi-step approach is good. My parents went back-to-the-land, leaving L.A. (where my dad was an aerospace engineer) and building a campground in the redwoods. Not a bad idea — working in a campground in beautiful surroundings with happy vacationers was the ideal job for me (I was eleven when the campground opened, and had a built-in summer job) — but we did some things wrong. How could it have been otherwise? We hadn’t done this stuff before. The campground was never profitable, and we didn’t have enough money to fix our mistakes. So we limped along rather than flourishing. So I think the model is “three strikes and you’re out,” not “one strike and you’re out.” If you give yourself permission to swing at the ball several times, rather than placing a single giant bet, you’re more likely to succeed.

We Wanted a Farm is a great book but seems to have been forgotten. Not anymore! You can read sample chapters (including the one on dynamite) and order the book on my Norton Creek Press site. Check it out!

(If you just want to know more about dynamite, and don’t care about back-to-the-land books), check out this free online 1912 dynamite handbook.

More of My Favorite Back-to-the-Land Books in Print

The reason I went into the publishing business in the first place was that most of my favorite books were out of print. It was frustrating — people would ask me what books I recommended, and then not be able to get their hands on them. Often they couldn’t get them even through inter-library loan. So I started publishing my favorites.

I stuck to poultry books for the last few years, but now I’m branching out. I’m starting with my favorite back-to-the-land books, the ones that either inspired me to get out of Silicon Valley or educated me once I’d escaped.

A lot of people think that the back-to-the-land movement was a Sixties thing, but it’s something that’s happened repeatedly. Milo Hastings mentions it in his 1909 book, The Dollar Hen. Both the Depression and the end of WWII saw their back-to-the-land movements. People get tired of city life and yearn for the country in every age: it’s universal.

In a previous post, I announced the availability of Edmund Morris’ 1864 book, Ten Acres Enough, which I like to compare to Thoreau’s Walden, since Morris actually stayed on his farm (and kept up his literary career), while Thoreau went scurrying back to the city after only two years. If you read both books, you’ll see why.

I’ve introduced two more back-to-the-land books: We Wanted a Farm by M. G. Kains (author of Five Acres and Independence, and Gold in the Grass by Margaret Leatherbarrow.

We Wanted a Farm is the story of how Kains got himself out of Manhatten and onto the farm in easy stages, without quitting his day job. Written in 1941, it’s interesting and entertaining, and provides food for thought. I’ve run into too many people whose back-to-the-land efforts were little more than a naive act of faith, and they run out of money and faith before they’ve picked up the skills they need to be successful. Kains did it more slowly, building up his skills before buying a full-sized farm.

While Kains’ book emphasizes fruits, vegetables, and orcharding, Gold in the Grass focuses on pasture and livestock management. Written in 1954, it describes Margaret and Alfred Leatherbarrow’s struggles on a farm that was played out. Crops wouldn’t grow, they had no money, and they seemed doomed. What saved them was the use of soil reclamation and sustainable agriculture techniques, which restored the fertility of their farm and provided superior nutrition to their livestock. This book is a great read, in addition to being thought-provoking and inspirational. It helped convince me that permanent pasture is one of the keys to dealing with exhausted soil (of which I am amply supplied, thanks to overgrazing by previous owners of my farm.)

So check out the books: I’m sure you’ll like them.