yearofplenty

Happy Chickens, Happy Humans

Via Rod Dreher I found this article that reflects on the profound (and humorous) lessons we learn from sharing our backyard with chickens. He shares about the many lessons we learn about human life from observing chickens.

The most resonant part of the article to me was his commentary on his experience of taking year old factory hens doomed for the scrap heap of industrial farming and rehabilitates them into his more natural setting. His comments about the factory hens behavior when they arrive is fascinating;

Hens that have lived the first year of their life in commercial intensive-farm environments are amazingly clueless when introduced to my garden. Sometimes they won't come out of the hen-house for the first day or two, even with the open door right in front of them. They don't know how to roost, and instead sit all night (and day) on the floor. Once they do get out, they don't know how to scratch and peck. However, once hens have become used to the outdoor life and the freedom of the garden, if they are left shut in the compartment (which is outdoors, with plenty of food and water), they insistently march up and down the fence or try repeatedly to fly over...

If one actually lives with chickens, it's a lot harder to treat them as mere objects.Their preferences are astoundingly obvious, so what possible excuse could there be for giving them any less? If they like greens, why give them pellets? If they like sunbathing, why pack them into a tiny, noisy, smelly place with no natural light? If, as I suspect, the answer is something to do with the "efficiency" of food production, then the notion of efficiency is horrible, incompetent, brutalised and brutalising, and it's certainly not in the interests of chickens at all.

You can see our hens, in the picture above, gathering in front of the kitchen door this morning. They're not the smartest creatures on earth, but they are happy, and there is something about happy chickens that makes me happy.

Go to our "Chicken Dignity" post to see how our thoughts about food and animals were being formed during our year-long experiment.

The Year the City Slickers Took Their Chickens to the Fair

One fun annual tradition we started a couple of years ago is to enter items in the Spokane County Fair, mostly veggies from the garden. I remember visting the Puyallup fair growing up, and walking through the displays of animals and agriculture and eating a pile of raspberry jam smothered scones. (By the way, why don’t we have those at the Spokane County fair?) But I had no experience as a participant. It was always something other people did who lived very different lives from mine.

This move from observer to participant has been a real highlight for us in the Fall. Last year the girls got second place in the giant pumpkin contest and second place in the tallest sunflower contest. And we’ll never forget claiming the coveted Grand Champion Rutabaga ribbon.

This year we took it to a whole new level and the girls and neighborhood friends who have a stake in the coop entered our five chickens in the Spokane County Fair. Last Thursday we rounded up our brood, (it took about 45 minutes to run them down and box them up), and rolled into the exhibitors parking lot of the fair ground, nervous that someone would correctly identify us as being terribly out of place and tell us to go home. We parked our poultry stuffed mini van next to all the farm-worn trucks and put our birds in their assigned cages. One of the older students really saved the day in helping us get settled in. We returned on Friday for a lesson on how to show the birds for the judges on Saturday.

In a real surprise we showed up Saturday and discovered that Cheesy, Lily’s Buff Orpington, was on champions row, boasting best of class and best of breed ribbons and Zeina’s Golden Laced Wyandotte won “reserve” best of breed and best of class. Everyone got blue first place stickers. And then it was time for showing.

Lily was first up and you can see from the picture of smallish birds next to the towering Cheesy, that if it was a version of cock fighting we would have had the advantage. But this was about knowledge and the craft of displaying chickens, and with every other child drawing on experience as part of 4-H or FFA, we were our of our depth to say the least. I had been coaching soccer all morning so I instinctively yelled out instructions to Lily in the middle of the showing. The judge gently reprimanded me. I'm not up on chicken show etiquette, but I'm guessing that trash talking the ump isn't OK, so I refrained from any more coaching. All the kids received blue ribbons and really learned a lot from the experience. Thanks to all the mentors and leaders who help make these kinds of events possible.

I think the fair is one of the best things going for young people. It gives them a chance to recognize that they are not just observers of their environment, but they are participants in it. They are not powerless observers of food systems, they are powerful shapers of them. I think County fairs are one of the great untapped resources for engaging issues of the environment and food systems. I can see the way that the Fair is shaping my children as responsible participants in the environment, and they love the Mutton Busting and riding the Zipper too.

The Eggsperiment: A (Somewhat) Scientific Comparison of Store Bought and Home Grown Chicken Eggs

We gathered a freshly laid egg from Cheesy, the brown egg pictured below, and an egg from our neighbor that they recently purchased at Yoke's, and set out to make an observational comparison. They are both the same size, the brown shell doesn't make a difference in the contents of the egg. Cheesy eats standard chicken feed from Aslin Finch plus some scratch grains (crushed corn), oyster shells and crushed granite. She also spends much of her day free ranging around the yard eating grass (a good source of beta carotine that makes the eggs darker and healthier), bugs, our compost pile scraps and pretty much anything else she can get her beak on. Cheesy has never had any antibiotics or medications.

I'm not sure where the egg from Yoke's originated, but it's probably a large producer with thousands of chickens housed together, and it's probably several weeks old and eats a feed similar to the one we use from Aslin Finch.

Cheesy's egg has a very clear egg white, almost like water, whereas the store egg has a cloudy egg white.

Cheesy's egg white above has some real body to it.

The store bought egg white is cloudy and runny. Notice how it oozes over the whole plate. If I were a pastry chef I'd definitely want Cheesy's egg. Imagine the difference in the firmness of the whites when they are whisked up.

The store bought yoke is surprisingly puffy. It is probably very fresh because over time the yokes will sag and will lay more flat.

Cheesy's egg to the left is much darker and richer looking. All that foraging and free ranging really make a difference in the nutritional value as evidenced by the color.

And the winner is - Cheesy. We didn't have a taste test component to our comparison but the kids report that the home grown eggs are much more rich and buttery tasting.

Backyard Farming Follies

A few weeks ago a friend emailed and explained that as a teacher she needed to do some field trips to maintain her credential and visits to farms counted toward this requirement. She wondered if it would be OK to visit our house to see our chickens and garden, the implication being that we had arrived at some sort of farm status. If we are a farm we have to be one of the most comical varieties around.

For example, yesterday morning I let the chickens out at 6:30 am to free range. They have a rhythm where they roam around and two by two take turns laying eggs in the nest. They are usually fairly orderly but yesterday all heck broke loose. They clucked and cawed and made a racket because Cheesy, the Buff Orpington prima donna of the coop, hogged the nest, driving all the other hens insane. Things settled down and it was time to go but Chrysanthamum, one of our two Silver Laced Wyandottes, was missing. We combed the neighborhood yelling, “Chrysanthamum.” (Do chickens recognize their names like dogs?)

After 20 minutes of looking I resigned myself to losing our first bird. I imagined a hawk swooping down in an instant, leaving no trace. Or a giant neighborhood cat or a dog or even those feisty suburban hamsters. Who knows? She was gone. We were a farm under attack. Chicken kidnappers on the loose.

I was headed to my car when Nancy called out that she found her. Turns out she was sick of the drama of the nest and carved out a nice secluded nesting area under the dense asters alongside the house. Determined to teach her a lesson, I plucked her up with both hands and went to put her in the nest before she could lay the egg. That’s what my chicken farmer friends told me to do with renegade layers. Just as I reached for the door of the coop I heard a hard thud by my foot. Chrysanthamum had dropped her egg like a grenade from four feet up, or maybe I squeezed it out of her, but in a miracle of oyster shell supplements the egg didn’t break.

After chasing Chrysanthamum around for 10 minutes this morning I gave up and let her lay her egg in the asters. At least I don’t have to post a bunch of “Missing Chicken” posters around the neighborhood.

Chicken Dignity

I've been in research mode with my farmer friends trying to learn about the differences between locally raised meat products, and those that are mass produced through big agribusiness. The basic premise of our experiment is human dignity, and the belief that it is important to know and care for the people involved in bringing our food and other products to market. But as I learn about the processes of bringing meat to market, I'm reminded that I need to add another dimension of dignity to our premise; chicken dignity.

Rich Mouw, one of my mentors, helped me understand this dignity when he described the comments of a man at a gathering of Mennonite and Dutch Reformed farmers;

Colonel Sanders wants us to think of chickens only in terms of dollars and cents," he announced. "They are nothing but little pieces of meat to be bought and sold for food. And so we're supposed to crowd them together in small spaces and get them fat enough to be killed."

"But that's wrong! The Bible says that God created every animal 'after its own kind.' Chickens aren't people, but neither are they nothing but hunks of meat. Chickens are chickens, and they deserve to be treated like chickens! This means that we have to give each chicken the space to strut its stuff in front of other chickens.

I like the idea of a "strut your stuff" test for human and chicken dignity. If a person doesn't have a chance to strut their human stuff in making, growing, and producing a product, then something is wrong. Of course chicken dignity is a different kind of dignity, but it deserves strutting nonetheless.

In my research I was talking to Dave Mcculough, from Susie David's Cattle. Dave has a herd of 16 grass fed cattle that he shepherds north of Spokane near Mt. St. Michael. He also has a big chicken coup with some hearty hens that provide us with eggs. In the midst of learning the ins and outs of the beef industry over the phone, he told me about the way his huge bull cow was playing with the calves out in the field yesterday. He praised the steer for being so gentle, and said the scene would have made a great picture; a big bull, getting worked over by a little calf, strutting his stuff, and everyone enjoying it, including Dave. There's a lot of dignity going on in that picture, both human and cow.

So stay tuned for more on the virtues of grass fed beef, but let it be known that the best part, as far as I'm concerned, is the strutting.

For more on chicken dignity go to the post on Happy Chickens.

Happy Chickens

We get our locally and naturally raised free range chickens from Rocky Ridge Ranch in Reardan, Washington. Gary & So Angel are quite a team as they work together to bring to market chicken, beef, duck/chicken eggs, wooly pigs and all kinds of greens and veggies in the summer months. You can buy their duck eggs and frozen chickens now at the Spokane winter Farmer's Market at the Community Building from 1 pm to 5 pm on Thursdays.

We love the way So describes the chickens. She says, "I love my chickens. They walk around, they eat, and they're so happy." We've never met someone so enthusiastic about the mental health of chickens. So is also good for human mental health because you won't get through a purchase without a warm hug and an encouraging smile.