A month makes a big difference

first week of March

first week of april

first week of march

first week of april

What a difference a month makes.  Soon there will be duck for dinner.

$9.00 chicken quandary

I finally got to read the whole study about the cost of eating health food.  It just confirmed the quandary I'm facing.  I find my self approaching the problem of food from three different, and sometimes irreconcilable perspectives. As a local food activist I'm working to promote buy local even if it costs more.  As a producer I'm trying to produce great food and make enough profit that I am able to continue producing and expanding my business.  As a wage earner near the bottom of the wage scale I'm looking for the best food I can get for the limited money I have.  My $9.00 chicken sits right in the middle of this.  It costs to much for people like me (most of my county) to buy.  If I sell for less I don't make any money so what's the point of offering it as part of my food business.  The easiest way to balance this all is to scale up.  Tyson and co. can sell chickens for what they do because they pay a lot less for feed and processing  than I do, and because when you sell millions of chickens you can afford a much smaller profit margin.  I'm looking for creative ways to solve these problems while staying true to my vision.

I'd love to hear what you think.  Maybe together we can plot a course forward.

We still have some openings for our summer and fall chicken CSA at our Local Harvest Store.

Working Chicks

 Staff Meeting

The BOSS...

working...

Clean-up around the flowers

 Horseradish bed.

Lots got done today by a few old hens and a fat rooster.  Nice to have warm weather. 

Make Way For Ducks

All the chickens and ducks are moved to new quarters in the greenhouse.  They are loving the added space.  The older ones are starting on sprouted grain now and loving it.

"but I can get it for half that at Walmart..."

I was talking with a potential customer about our chickens today.  The topic of price came up.  Our chickens weigh in at 4.5 to 5 lbs.  They are raised on organic or non-gmo feed and pasture.  Most of the feed is produced within 100 miles of where we live.  We work every day to shrink that circle.  Average time from pasture to your freezer would be at most 5 days (mostly shorter, but some of our birds are held for people living farther away.)  The cost comes to $9.00 a bird.  What you get is a naturally raised, young (10 week old) chicken.  Nothing added.  YOU CAN'T BUY THAT AT WALMART.

I welcome comments.

more chicks and ducks...

This is batch number 2.  Light Brahma chickens and Khaki Campbell ducks.  Eggs, eggs, eggs!!!

Getting Bigger

The chicks and ducks are growing FAST!  They are already scruffy, awkward looking teenagers.  Soon they will be dinner!   The Spring CSA is sold out.  We still have some openings for the Summer and Fall CSA.  If you are in Ohio and interested, let me know.

Baby Chicks ... WHAT WAS I THINKING?

It was 5degrees F. when I got up this morning.  Kind of cold for baby chicks on pasture.  But don't worry, right now they are warm and happy in my seed sprouting room.  In about a week we will move them to a large pen in the greenhouse.  There they will have lots of room and they will start on sprouted grains and greens.  As it warms up outside and they get bigger we will open the greenhouse during the day so they can go out and forage. By April I expect they will be outside all day long.

Still have a few openings in our Spring Free Range Broiler CSA.  If you live in central Ohio, it is a great way to put some premium chicken in your freezer.

Edible Landscape Clean-up: Run for the Roses

Edible Landscaping

I don’t recall when I started to search out edible landscaping as a primary source of beauty.  It might have been when I saw how pretty my purple eggplants looked, tucked between some bushes because I did not have any more room in the REAL garden.  Or maybe it was the color of Swiss Chard under my cherry trees in the summer.  Well, for whatever reason, I am an avid edible landscaper.

I have been slowly trimming my rose bushes every other day.  They are not hard to manage but you do need to cut them back if you don’t want to live in Sleeping Beauty’s rose covered castle. Or was that Snow White and Rose Red?  Anyway, I never worry about trimming the roses too much because every bit of them are used.  In the Fall I use the rose hips for syrup.  In the Winter I give the trimmed branches to our goat, Lucy.  She eats them like candy.  The roof of her mouth must be made of titanium because these branches have thorns that really hurt.  The chickens clean up anything that Lucy drops and any spider cases, etc.

So, Lucy gets a special treat and I feel like I have cleaned up without adding anything to the landfill.  It’s a win-win.

Edible landscaping benefits not only the human critters but the birds, goats, and chickens.  Try it this year!

City Chickens Revisited

I wrote about keeping chickens in the city a while ago. Since then a couple of families I know have launched chicken projects in the city. Some friends from Cincinnati got chickens a few months ago and are now getting their first eggs. Its fun to talk with them and share their excitement. Another family in Portland, Oregon has also started a chicken project. They are blogging about their adventures at Growing Roberts. It's exciting to see the line between city and farm starting to blur. Urban/Suburban micro-farmers could change the face of food and farming in this country.

Breaking up the Mob

After raging at my animals the other day (and reading the comments from readers of this blog who felt that perhaps it was the farmer, not the animals who was stupid) I decided it was time to break up the mob into their summertime groups. So, I spent an hour rearranging my fences and wrangling chickens. Everyone seems happier with their separate spaces. The goats, cows, and ponies will spend the next month or so picking at the grass on the hillside. They will be moved slowly until the grass really starts kicking in. The chickens will follow, one paddock behind them, cleaning up the leavings. The system works quite well most of the time.

In the spirit of pro-activeness (and to keep me from making complete fool of my self yet again) I will also be clipping chicken wings. I have about a dozen who have discovered that a big hop and some flapping is all it takes to clear the fence. They have been enjoying rummaging through everything in the yard. Not a problem yet, but I going to start prepping garden beds, and chickens can take apart a raised bed in a matter of minutes. So, a few trimmed feathers to encourage them to stay in their area and out of the garden is worth the effort.

Chickens where they aught not be

The first time I did this I could have made a ton of money on tickets. All the neighbors lined up to watch the show and I didn't disappoint. Imagine one crazy farmer, 50 chickens, and a coop in the middle of a 6000 square foot ring. I did have the aid of a chicken catcher (a 4 foot wire with a hook on one end to snag a leg with, really useful, but not at a dead sprint). I eventually got everyone trimmed, but it was a bit traumatic for all involved. (One of the neighbors nearly ended up in the hospital from laughing too much). Now I'm smarter. I'll go to the coop after dark. The girls will just sit there on the roosts while I pick them up, one by one, clip their wings, and tuck them back in their space. No fuss, no muss. There is something cathartic about running around, raging at the top of your lungs for a few minutes, but I've already done that this month.

The best laid plans...

Yesterday I had PLANS. Lots to get done and detailed plan of how to do it all in the allotted time. I had the final skim coat of mud to put on the ceiling, 5 flats of herbs, lettuce, and some greenhouse tomatoes to plant, logs to move so the trees coming for the potager would have a home, kids school to supervise, laundry, baking, and dinner. Lots to do, but I had a plan. First thing, chores. Normally it takes me 45 minutes since we are not milking right now. I feed the chickens and give the ponies, cows, and goats their supplement. When they are done I put them out to pasture with the chickens, throw down a couple bales of hay, and call it done. The animals had a different agenda for the day. I turned them out into the pasture and went to get the hay. When I returned they were all in the chicken coop. I mean the cow, the goats, and even the pony had her head stuck in. They were trying to get the layer mash. They have been sharing the pasture with the chickens for a couple of months now and have completely ignored the coop and the chicken feed. I chased them out the back of the coop they had broken down and pulled the wire up. They wandered over toward the hay and I started back toward the house. I got about 5 steps and they were sprinting back toward the coop. The next hour and a half was spent retraining the goats and cow that the chicken coop was not their space, cobbeling together some repairs the would discourage reentry, and raging at the stupidity of animals in general. After that my plan fell apart and I got only half of the things on the list done. Maybe today the dice will role my way and I'll get caught up...

City Chickens

I've been running through ideas for the Patio Farm project in my "spare" time. Mostly I've been getting hung up on sustainable protein and fertility. It is such a small space. I want to do chickens, but I'm afraid they need too much room.

When I checked my email this morning I found this message from some other city friends.

"Yes, thought we'd share the news- we are getting chickens! Feb 25th, six lucky young red star chicks will grace our presence.

HELP!!!!

T"

They have been flirting with the idea of chickens for a while, but had been held off by the zoning regulations and the shear newness of it. It is probably illegal to have chickens or other farm animals where they live so these will have to be stealth chickens. I've never raised that few chickens before, or had to deal with zoning or neighbor issues. I can cover most of the general management issues, but could use some suggestions on micro-scale chicken keeping. Any books, suggestions, tips, etc. would be appreciated. I did send them a link to McMurray Hatchery for this brilliant stealth house.

Hen Condo

Chickens in the deep freeze

It's cold out. We had just shy of 8 inches of snow yesterday and today. The temp went from 23 deg F yesterday to a high of 6 today. (which is like -14 deg C without the windchill.) We had 9 - 15 mph winds all day. Cold! Tomorrow is expected to be colder. During all this my chickens have been living in a tent. Actually they have lived in a tent for the past 3 years without any problem. They have survived two feet of snow and temps down to - 11. I always chuckle at the folks who pamper their chickens. Chickens are tougher than we think.

Snow Chickens

Chicken house in the snow

COLD!

Confessions

I laughed about the breaking eggs in coat pockets the other day (and embarrassingly I can't remember who posted the brilliant photos of the event.) I was going to add my own, but my crap camera wont work now that I took it out in the cold. Anyway, I came back from the chickens with a pocket full of broken eggs. Ruined my ski coat. No snow boarding for me this week.

I've also reneged on my "no oil this heating season" pledge. It is supposed to get down to - 11 tonight with sustained winds of 15 miles an hour. In other words "frigging cold!" Since half the house is tarped off and torn down to the studs from our last frozen pipe, I have opted to put 20 gallons of oil in the tank and run the furnace at night. That will let me sleep better and probably save the house and my marriage.

Nothing else to confess. Just a public THANK YOU to Nancy of Soliloquy for the consultant recommendation. I'm honored that you think I have something to offer.

A shift in the balance of power

I promised to never write about politics again, but sometimes it just happens. On our farm there are two ongoing political battles. The first is my battle with the government, trying to keep from getting buried in the ever increasing blizzard of regulation aimed at putting small producers out of business. The second battle that has been raging for a while is for dominance in the chicken flock. We have two roosters (yes, I know that is two too many). Polka-dot, the Silver Spangled Hamburg, who has been in the flock from the beginning, and an Araucana (as yet unnamed) who is just a bit over a year old.

For most of his life Polka-dot was second and spent a lot of time avoiding everyone. We had a huge Silver Laced Wyandotte rooster (called The Big Mean Rooster, because he was) and he ruled the roost. When he moved up the mountain to fight with the raccoons at another farm (we still see bloody coons coming down the mountain.) Polka-dot came into his own. The Araucana hens and rooster were introduced shortly after that, but Polka-dot was definitely the boss. As the Araucana got older he spent his time running from everyone.

Yesterday everything changed. I went out to the coop to gather the eggs and found Polka-dot huddled in a corner, head buried and looking dead. I pulled him out and was pleased to find he was fine, but the second he came out the door the Araucana set on him and chased him all over the run. Complete role reversal. Today there is an uneasy truce. Polka-dot is out foraging with the rest of the flock, but he leaves the hens alone, keeping to the fringes, and bolts anytime the Araucana moves in his direction.

What we haven't told the roosters is that their only purpose in life it to give the hens someone to pick on so they don't kill each other. It works really well. According to C it works at her office too. The one male thinks he is the top of the heap, but he really just serves as a target for all the hens to snipe at so they leave each other alone and can work together.

The new King - Mr. Araucana

Polka-dot - King in exile

A bit more on chickens

I seem to have failed to answer one of the questions posed by Robbyn. Advice for someone thinking about getting chickens.

The most important thing is to decide how many you want and what kind of relationship you want with them. Most people I know who only have a few chickens have them named and pamper them way too much. If you have a lot (more than 20) it's hard to get that attached to any one of them. Healthier in my opinion. I like raising them from chicks. They bond better to me and learn my system.

My friend Jack-of-all-thumbs at Self-Sufficient Steward has a great system using a permanent coop and rotates his chickens around his garden. You should check it out.

Chickens

A while back Robbyn at The Back Forty asked about chickens on her blog. I somehow miss-sent my reply but I really wanted to respond. So, here are my thoughts (at least the publishable ones) on keeping chickens.

Robbyn's questions and my answers

1. Do you have a particular favorite breed of chicken, and if so what is it and why do you prefer it? Or if more than one, which ones, etc?

I really like Red Star from McMurray Hatchery. They aren't as attractive as some of the older breeds, but they produce a lot of eggs for the amount of feed. We have tried others and have enjoyed the visual aspects of lots of different kind of chickens but for egg production, I haven't found them worth the feed cost.

2. Do you use your chickens for your family, to sell, or both? Meat, or eggs, or both?

We raise ours for eggs for our family and to sell. We only sell from home. Taking the eggs to market was too much work and there were plenty of others with eggs. Currently we have no problem selling everything we can produce.

3. What advice would you give to anyone wanting to start out raising them, other than reading some good books on the subject?

4. Do you primarily keep your chickens in a coop/enclosed chicken yard, or do they roam your property?

Our chickens are enclosed in a yard that we move every few days in the spring, summer, and fall. They follow our herd of goats and cows on pasture, cleaning up the paddocks after we move the herd. We use a coop that we are able to move around the pasture with the chickens.


5. Do you ever let them into your garden? If no, do you have a fence or something to keep them out?

In the fall we move the chickens to the garden for clean-up duty. They do a great job and contribute a lot to weed control, bug control, and fertility. We use poultry netting from Premier 1 to contain our chickens. It keeps them in (unless I forget to trim their wings) and keeps the local predators out.

6. Do you ever use a chicken tractor, and if so, is it for meat birds only? do you use electric/ net poultry fencing? I'm interested in which has worked for you and which has not. What has been your experience with pastured poultry 'a la the Joel Salatin sort (follow behind the livestock grazings at the optimum time), if that applies?

We don't use chicken tractors. We have used them in the past and found them to be a lot more work than we have time for. Well managed they work well, but you must be able to move them often and monitor them well. I've seen whole pens of birds die in hot weather. We get the same effect with poultry netting and a mobile coop. If you have livestock on pasture, following them with chickens or allowing the chickens to share the same space has a lot of advantages. They really help with fly control and manure management. They also use a lot less feed than chickens in containment.

7. Do you keep chickens year-round, or raise them for seasonal processing?

We keep our hens year round. We are finding that moving them off pasture and into a more permanent coop with better protection and light improves our egg production in the winter. We have overwintered our hens in the mobile coop (basically a tent) and had no problem with health or survival, even in 2 feet of snow and -11 deg temps, but egg production really dropped.

8. How many chickens of a certain type do you raise at one time (what works best for you as far as how many to raise at a time?)

We maintain a flock of about 50 hens. This fits the mobile coop we have and seems to work in our system. We could sell a lot more eggs than 50 hens produce, but that would require reducing some other aspect of our farm and we choose not to do that.

Grazing challenges

Keeping livestock on pasture is great, but it comes with some challenges. One that I constantly watch for is predation. So far my chickens have done very well on pasture with only electric poultry netting to protect them from predators. Occasionally one gets stupid and gets out of the protective fence and not back in before dark. I used to chase them around like a crazy person every time they got out, but there are a few who just will not stay in. Last night one of the "suicide gang" didn't make it back through the fence before dark. Reddy the fox (or some other night time opportunist) eliminated them from the gene pool and put their molecular resources back into community circulation.


The other challenge we have been facing recently is grass, or more precisely, the lack of grass. We have had about 3/4 of an inch of rain in the last 8 weeks. Not a good situation for growing grass. I did some measurements today and the paddocks coming up in the rotation are about half as high as they should be. The paddock we left 20 days ago, which should have grass at least a foot tall, is mostly brown with some spots of grass standing three to four inches. We should be back on that paddock in about 10 days, but there wont be anything for the critters to eat. I still have about two months of grass left, counting my winter stockpile, but that won't take me to January. If we don't get extremely lucky and have some consistent rain move in, paired with a nice long warm fall, I'll be at least two months short of grazing. That means one of two things, I can reduce the number of grazers (which extends the amount of grass), or I can buy more hay. This is the second year this has happened. We got through the first year without a problem, but we have more livestock this year. Not sure what I will do, but it will hurt either way. We are, however, in much better shape than our neighbors. This year, like last year, they started feeding hay in August. They run about the same stocking density as I do (stocking density = the number of pounds of livestock per acre) but they set graze rather than using a rotational system. Works fairly well when the weather cooperates, but it is a disaster when it gets dry or otherwise stressed.

I've explored this and other grazing issues in my soon to be released e-booklet about grazing.

Farm Camp - 2008

Farm Camp has started here at Roberts Roost. Five days dedicated to kids enjoying the best of farm life. It's small, only seven kids plus our two, and most of them will only be here for a short time. But, it is a chance for kids to run free, enjoying the space and the animals we share our lives with. Here are some pictures from this morning. I think they capture the spirit of our camp.

Chickens in the mist

Morning Feeding

Bringing in the milk goats

The milk comes from WHERE?

Milking

More pictures and stories to come as camp progresses.