Morning Chores on the Farm in Fall

(So, I'm way behind on my blogging.  I've had this one in the hopper a while and decided to just finish and post it, despite it being at least a month "old"...)

Chores.  Everyone has them, but for some us, the word specifically means the daily tasks related to caring for the animals on the farm.  At the height of things, we're doing chores three times a day. These are repetitive, daily tasks -- certain things that need to be done at certain times.

In general, Milan does all the poultry chores, and since he's already "out there", often feeds the horses, too (the horses aren't "farm animals", in Milan's opinion.  They are my hobby, so I try to feed them myself as often as possible).

Jack often accompanies his daddy in the morning, and knows all the ins and outs of what has to be done.  Being three years old, he's still in the stage where he really enjoys helping out, for the most part. He especially loves anything to do with water, although we'll see if he's still as enamored with that portion of things as colder weather sets in!

I followed Milan and Jack out one morning to get a few shots of the morning chore routine.

And they're off!  Down the lane and around the bend to the turkeys they go!

Jack, looking intent (followed by our happy-for-the-daily-outing Pyrenees-Maremma mix, "Cash"). It's a good eighth-mile out to the turkeys, and another eighth-mile and back from the turkeys to the chickens. Not a bad start to the day for a three year old...

First, let them out of their night quarters.  Nowadays, the first thing they do is dance around, puff out their feathers and reestablish their pecking order.

This way next!

Milan carries the water can in and Jack gets to fill it.  The mornings are just starting to get brisk (it's been the most amazingly mild fall), so we'll see how long his love of all water-related chores lasts... although from what I hear from other moms, temperature is rarely a consideration against getting wet!

Milan carries in a full can of fresh water every morning.

It's a ways from the hose to the trailer! Gotta have at least as much determination and stamina as muscle to get that heavy can from Point A to Point B every morning.

Free range!  For a while they were *really* free-range, as in they kept escaping so had the run of the whole property.  Then we wised up and purchased 5ft kennel fencing and clipped their wings (oh yes, turkeys can fly -- can they ever!) so they would stay in their intended pasture.

A Narragansett hen in the foreground, a Bourbon Red in the background.

Next, care for the chickens (I failed to get a photo of Milan feeding the turkeys -- he fills the tube you see over his shoulder and pours it in the feeder each morning).

First, untie Coda.  We stake him by the runs every night to discourage nosy foxes, coyotes, raccoons, weasels, and even bears and mountain lions.  Wildlife is usually interested easy pickin's.  Coda's presence gives the impression that "it ain't".

Next, move the runs.  The runs are moved morning and evening to new grass.  This involves putting on and removing the wheels each time...

Coda's a big help training the chickens to move forward with the run.  At this age, the chickens mostly know the drill, but when they're first learning to move with the run, they often pop out the back, which, due to the wheel, is raised a good 6 inches off the ground.  Coda shoos them back where they belong.

Milan designed these pens himself, integrating the better parts of multiple pen designs he read about and saw online or in person.  His handle is a bar with cables off each end.  The cable ends are designed to mount into brackets on every corner of the run, meaning he can attach his handle on any side of the run and move it toward him.  Jack likes to help pull, of course, and behind, you can see Coda doing his job, running back and forth shooing the chickens forward.

After the runs are moved, Milan fills the feed troughs with another contraption of his own design.  The tube consists of a 6" funnel into a 4" pipe necking down through a valve to the inch-and-a-half pipe you can see really well here.  With the valve controlling the flow of feed, Milan can very accurately dispense the feed into the long, narrow feeding troughs.  The design minimizes waste and makes feeding hungry, pushy chickens flocking to the trough (and into the way of filling it) much easier.

 Once the chickens are moved and fed, it's on to feeding the horses.  Here, Jack helps feed Henry, a mustang we borrowed from a friend for a few weeks this summer.  

It's apple season, so in addition to their alfalfa-grass hay, everyone gets plenty of apples in the morning.

Jack just loves Henry, for good reason!  Henry is the most amazing horse I've ever met.  Our friend bought him in Texas at the Extreme Mustang Makeover, and he is just the gentlest, kindest, most careful and easygoing horse ever.

What a beautiful, fall morning!

After the horses are fed, it's time to head back in.  Jack got lucky this morning with a wheelbarrow ride!  Usually, it's hoofin' it out and hoofin' it back...

Oh, and a stop along the way for a few blackberries is always in order...

Around the bend and up the hill... here they come!

A stop to check on "Daddy's Whiskey", as Milan calls it.  It's actually hard apple cider in progress.

And to finish off the morning routine?  A back rub, Jack style!

"Ahhhh!" ... kind of. :)

Cider and poultry and weddings! Oh, my!

Harvest time is such a busy time on the farm (kind of a "duh", right?!).  The pear and apple crops were so abundant this year.  Last year, it was all we could do to squeeze barely 50 gallons out of every, single last sorry-excuse-for-an apple we had.  This year, Milan spent yesterday pressing about 6 cart loads of apples that he easily harvested by hand, without a ladder.  His harvest didn't even make a dent in the loads on two trees (we have somewhere around a dozen mature, producing apple trees and six mature pear trees on the farm)!  Apples, anyone?!

On the poultry end of things, we are harvesting our fall crop of chickens next Friday, Oct. 12th.  We have one hundred "Heritage White" birds, all of which are spoken for (yay for being sold out!).  We have just a handful of our free range, organic, heritage Bourbon Red turkeys still available.  They will be harvested the Monday before Thanksgiving.

October also marks the month that brides (and grooms and parents and coordinators, as the case may be!) start calling to book weddings for the following year.  We are open for weddings (and other events) May through October.  Thanks to this year's couples, families and guests for a successful and fun 2012 season!  We look forward to more great events in 2013.

Chicken Challenges This Time Around

May comes, and I fall off the blog roll. Spring is just such a busy time of year on the farm. It's hard to come in when the light keeps me outside, thinking I can do a little more weeding, a little more planting... whatever. It's amazing how time gets gobbled up just puttering around, doing what seems like nothing but really adds up to something when you put it all together (like shelving my garden tools so I can find them again next time).

Anyway, with that as a beginning, I've been meaning to tell you all about some of the challenges we faced with our most recent crop of chickens (acquired March 23rd, harvested last week, this coming Monday (June 6th), and again in another 10 days or so... you'll see what I mean if you keep reading).

The first wrinkle began before we even ordered our chicks. The hatchery we ordered from last year had gone out of business, so Milan made more than a couple dozen phone calls to various hatcheries and resellers trying to get a batch of 100 White Cornish X chicks. Of course, we could always order from Murray McMurray, right? Yes, but one of our values is "local", and although the term is now almost as over-used and diluted as "free-range", to us, Iowa ain't local. I know they are a great hatchery in many respects, but it's hard for us to think of 100 little chickens traveling 2,000 miles without food or water. Call us softies, if you like. That left us with few options for getting 100 chicks at once, so we settled on getting them through our local Grange Coop (still, their chicks come from some hatchery in Texas -- not so local, either).

When our order arrived, we drove to Grants Pass to pick up 100 White Cornish X and 12 Red Cornish X (see"A Little Experiment: Part 1" and "A Little Experiment: Part 2"). At that point, it was clear that there were multiple ages of chickens in the box. Some were a good five-to-six days old, as they had lost their fluff and had their wing feathers in. Others were clearly only day-old chicks (as was the case with all 12 Red Cornish X birds).

The challenge of multiple ages is one that plagues the batch throughout its entire cycle. Plainly, older chickens are bigger and shove out the smaller ones to the point where the big just keep getting bigger and bigger and the small ones stay small because they can't bully their way past the bullies. This applies to both food and heat. We lost a couple of the smallest chickens early on to being crushed by their peers as they sought heat underneath the hover. Again, this was probably a result of multiple inputs: cold nights, not eating enough to get strong, not drinking enough to be well hydrated, etc., but then to be bullied out to the edge of the heat, well, that ends it. Chicks, and particularly the White Cornish birds, are anything but robust. Miss one element of their needs and it's curtains for them. They essentially give up, which comports with their manifested lazy nature as adults. It was such a striking contrast to me to watch the little Canada Goose gosling bounce back from his ordeal (see my post titled "One Little Gosling's Undesired Adventure"). A White Cornish X chicken would never have fought that hard to survive, and even if it would have fought to survive, would have probably crawled into a bush and died of exhaustion after being released.

As time passes, the big continue to get bigger, so they need to be harvested sooner. We harvest our White Cornish birds at 9 weeks. This time around, it meant we had to have two harvest days -- one last Sunday, May 30th, and one coming up June 6th. Actually, we'll even have a third harvest day to process the Red Cornish X birds, which don't grow as quickly and don't convert feed as well. Having them this go-round was an experiment on our part, and it's clear they cannot be raised with the Whites, which have to be ration-fed to even live to nine weeks of age (commercial facilities process their birds at 6 weeks of age because that's about when they start dying anyway, as their skeletal structure and organs begin to fail due to their incredible weight -- think of them as 200-lb human two-year-olds). The Reds, on the other hand, at 9 weeks of age and ration feeding, feel like the classic "rubber chicken" when you pick them up: the breast-bone protrudes way out and they feel like nothing but feathers. They need to be free-fed and grown to 10-12 weeks of age.

Setting up these harvest days is no small matter, so having to do three of them for one batch of 100 birds is deflating. We harvested the 50 oldest birds last Sunday, will do another 28 on Monday, and the remaining 10 Red Cornish birds... well, we're not even sure yet when we'll do those. Maybe in another 10 days or so, like I speculated in the beginning of this post.

The next and more depressing challenge we experienced with this batch of chickens was something we didn't even consider before we were faced with it. As I said, the first wrinkle was not being able to get our chicks from the same hatchery we patronized last year (Lazy 54 Hatchery in Hubbard, Oregon). Apparently, they had great chicks, because we never had a one with any obvious genetic issues. Well, that changed this time around. The genetics on this batch of White Cornish X was bad. We started to notice it around 4 and 5 weeks of age: more and more birds were turning up with legs turned out at crazy angles or crumpled feet. A few died for no discernible reason, so we suspect there were internal manifestations of their poor genetics to blame. Milan watched a few weaken and would always put them in the sick bay and give them special attention for a few days. Only two such chickens rallied; the others went down hill to the point that Milan put them out of their misery (did someone say farm life is "romantic"?!). In the end, we had over 20% loss for this batch, which is a horribly high number. Industry average is 10%, and we had less than 5% all last year!

White Cornish X with deformed feet.

Here's an example of the crumpled feet, and this isn't even such a bad one. The bad ones didn't make it past 6-7 weeks; this one is 9 weeks old (photo taken the day before harvest).

Suffice it to say, it's been a tough road this Spring. Even though we realize some things were out of our control, we feel responsible for the birds we lost, not to mention that it's hard to tell our customers we can't fill their orders this time around. We usually have 5-6 birds as back up, but we've long blown through those and are telling folks that ordered 5 to expect 2.  Not a message I like to deliver.

As a result of all this, we will probably move away entirely from raising the White Cornish X breed.  We were optimistic after raising them last year.  Some of last year's got as old as 12 weeks and were still up, pecking and scratching, hale and hardy, with all their feathers intact on their breasts (they're often featherless there because their breasts get so heavy they can't stand up, so their feathers fall out and don't grow back and as a result, the breast skin gets really dirty), but we must have just been lucky to get 200 really healthy ones.  This year was just a whole different story, and reminded us that the White Cornish X is a bird that's been highly bred and re-bred specifically for the Foster Farms situation: sitting in a cage in front of a feed trough (that's never empty) for 6 weeks of life.  Here's a good visual of how chickens have changed to meet the Foster Farms standard in the last 50+ years (courtesy of Nature's Harmony Farm in Elberton, Georgia):

White Cornish X at 68 days old in 1950, vs. 47 days old in 2008.

Pretty incredible, isn't it?

So, expect to hear more about Red Cornish X birds in the future, and maybe even Freedom Rangers at Sojourn Farms.  To all our loyal customers, thanks for sticking with us through our learning process.  We really are trying very hard to raise healthy, happy, free-range, organic, pastured chickens.  It's not always easy and definitely not glamorous, but hearing how much you appreciate our efforts means a lot to us.

Roasting Your Chicken, Making Stock... & Beyond

Let's start with a little poll:
1. How often do you cook up a whole chicken?
2. If/when you cook a whole chicken, do you cut it up for braising, BBQ'ing or frying, or do you cook/bake it whole?

Most of our customers seem pretty savvy about knowing how to cook a whole chicken, but I did have one customer ask about how to use the remains of a roasted bird for making chicken soup.

So, I thought I would give a little run down on how I typically prepare one of our homegrown chickens, from removing it from the freezer to eating it in three different meals. The photos are of a chicken I recently cooked for my toddler's 2nd birthday dinner.

DAY 1:
First step is to plan, plan, plan. Good meals are all about thinking ahead, especially when your meat is kept in the freezer. So, at least a week before I plan to roast a chicken, I take it out of the freezer and place it in the fridge. I put the frozen bird breast-side up in a stainless steel bowl, because the packaging will weep chicken juice as it thaws. You don't want that all over your fridge. It takes a good two days to thaw in the fridge, and I'll often flip it over after the first day so the top side of the bird doesn't get dried out as the juices thaw and run downward.

DAY 2:
Next step, brine. I make part of the brine on day two and place the then-thawed chicken in it on day three. My brine recipe is inspired by Martha Stewart's Thanksgiving turkey brine recipe, but the main thing is salt and you can vary the spices however you want. For the smaller chicken, I use 1/3 cup of salt, 6-8 cups water and 4 cups dry white wine, and then some combination of whatever spices I have on hand. I boil up the salt, water, bay leaf and seed-type spices (not the fresh herbs, garlic or onions) and let the concoction simmer a while and then sit until I need it the next day.

DAY 3:
Remove the chicken from the fridge, remembering to contain all that liquid and observe good sanitation with the chicken juices. Thoroughly wash the chicken inside and out, removing the neck and gizzards from the cavity. Once rinsed, I place it breast-side down in my 7qt dutch oven. I pour in all boiled (and cooled!) brine, add the wine, onions, garlic and fresh herbs. I put a plate over the top of the chicken to weight it down and keep it well in the brine. Then, on goes the lid and the whole kit-n-kaboodle goes back into the fridge. At this point, use the neck and gizzards as the first part of your stock. Place them in a small sauce pan, cover with water, throw in a bay leaf, and bring it to a boil. Once it has boiled, turn to simmer and let it bubble gently for an hour or two. Let it cool before pouring it in a glass jar and putting it in the fridge. You'll either use it in your gravy or add it to your stock later.

DAY 4 or 5:
Martha's recipe says to brine the bird for 24 hours. I brined one chicken for 5 days! I don't recommend it, just because there is definitely a limit on how long chicken will stay good in the fridge. In brine, however, the salt acts like a preservative. Our 5-day briner was one of our tastiest roasted chickens. Still, 24-48 hours does the job just fine.

Before you remove the brining chicken from the fridge, get your roasting veggies ready. This is another trick I learned from my mom: put carrots under the chicken to catch the drippings and function as your roasting rack. The carrots come out so tasty and your chicken doesn't get stuck to the bottom of your pan or overcooked, etc. Peel small carrots and leave them whole; peel enough to completely cover the area underneath the chicken. You can also use parsnips for this. I also usually throw in onions and garlic to flavor the drippings that come out of the chicken, since the flavor makes for better gravy.

When your carrots are cleaned and peeled, get your chicken out of the fridge. Remove it from the brine and discard the brine. Rinse the chicken and pat it dry. Let it sit while you chop up fresh thyme, marjoram, parsley -- whatever fresh herbs you like -- to make an herb butter spread. I love butter, so I use a generous 4 tablespoons for one chicken. You need softened butter, not melted. Mix in your herbs, add a tiny bit of salt (your chicken should be well salted from the brine, remember) and whip it up.

Place your carrots on the bottom of your dutch oven, situate the chicken nicely on top, and start spreading your herb butter as evenly as possible all over the chicken. I put it on the outside, but lots of people like to pull up the skin and put the herb spread underneath the skin. I've never done it that way, mostly because I've always had success doing it "my" way, which seems easier to me. One person I know even makes herb-cubes by freezing her herb butter in ice cube trays and then shoves the herb cubes under the chicken skin and inside the chicken for roasting. Another great tip (again, from Mom!) I've used before is to place strips of uncooked bacon over the chicken breast and legs. It adds flavor and keeps the bird from over-browning, but you don't get that awesome, bronzed, crispy skin under the bacon.

Your chicken is now ready to go in the oven! Especially with heritage and homegrown, pasture-raised chickens like ours, I recommend a lower-roasting temp and longer time in the oven. A 6-pound Sojourn Farms chicken takes about three-and-a-half hours in a 325-degree oven. Yep, that's a long time, so again, plan ahead! The great part is that while your chicken is roasting away, you can make all the side dishes, dessert, AND clean up the kitchen! Not bad, right?

So, how do you know when the chicken is done? Here's another tip I learned from my mom: the juices must run clear, not pink or cloudy, and when you grab a drumstick, it should twist and loosen easily. Of course, your cookbooks will tell you to get out a meat thermometer and check that it's at 160-170 degrees. I've never had much luck with that method, but lots of people swear by it.

Another tip from mom: if you think the chicken is browning too quickly but isn't baked through (and you didn't do the bacon trick), cut a triangle of foil to place over the breast and narrow foil strips for the drumsticks.

As the time approaches for the chicken to come out of the oven, get prepared to remove it and the carrots from the dutch oven. I prep my serving dishes either by pouring boiling water into them to warm them, or I'll adjust my oven racks to allow the dishes to fit in while the chicken is still cooking (oh, for the day when I have two ovens!). Make sure your dishes are oven safe if you opt for the latter method! Remove the chicken onto a platter, cover with aluminum foil and let it sit 10-15 minutes while you make the gravy out of the drippings from the bottom of the dutch oven.

I don't want to tell you how to make your gravy as there are so many ways to do it, so many options ingredients-wise, etc. The only main thing I know is to use the drippings from the roasted meat for flavor. To thicken gravy, I will either start with a roux (butter and flour) or add cornstarch later in the process. You can add wine, any kind of spices, mushrooms... the sky is the limit, really. Here is a good, simple (turkey, but it works fine for chicken, too) gravy recipe if you need one (minus the eggs, in my opinion!): Martha Stewart's Giblet Gravy. Use the giblet stock you made earlier as part of the four cups of stock called for.

Well, it's about time to eat the first chicken meal! I like to bring the whole bird to the table and carve it up there. I'm not an expert carver by any means, and you don't need to be. If you know to slice down each side of the breast and cut through the joints, that's enough to do the trick. I will give people whole drumsticks, but pull apart the thighs so that everyone else gets at least a little dark meat (our family prefers the dark meat). I always put a bone bowl on the table to collect the very valuable bones to use for the stock.

Now, you're ready to make stock! As you clean up from dinner, pull the rest of the meat off the chicken into a storage container (we use GlassLock). Put that in the fridge, and put all the chicken bones from dinner and every left over chicken part (including your already-once-used giblets) back into your dutch oven or a large stock pot, if you have one. Add celery, a carrot or two, some mushrooms, onion, garlic and herbs of your choosing. Cover the whole thing with water and bring it to a boil. Let it boil a minute or two, then turn down to a simmer. Cover, and simmer for 12-24 hours. Yes, your entire house will smell like chicken soup for a few days. That's definitely not my favorite part of the process.

DAY 5-6:
The stock is done! Turn it off and let it cool a while with the lid on. When it's no longer too hot to handle, get set up with another large pot and a strainer. Dump the contents of the dutch oven through a strainer into the pot. From there, you can pour it into jars to keep in the fridge about a week or the freezer for a couple months. I use straight-sided jars to freeze stock as it can crack narrow mouth jars as it freezes. If you do plan to freeze it, be sure to leave extra room for it to expand at the top and don't screw down the lid tight. I just barely turn the lid -- just enough to keep it on -- and then tighten them up once all the stock is frozen. Be sure to label and date your stock before you put it in the freezer, too.

Of course, this is also where you can make chicken soup! Chop celery, onion, carrots and any veggies of your choosing. Throw them all in a pre-heated pot and cook them together for a while, then add your stock and season to taste. You can add potatoes, noodles, rice... whatever suits you. I usually cook my noodles separately and place them into individual servings of soup so they stay nicely al dente. Shred or chop some of the remaining roasted chicken and place it in the soup, too.

Homemade chicken stock is great for any recipe that calls for chicken stock. I love it in risotto, or even just in making rice, you can substitute stock for water for a heartier dish.

DAY 6-7:
If you still have chicken remaining, make chicken tacos, enchiladas, even chicken salad or of course, the standby chicken sandwiches. It's the beauty of a roasted chicken -- it usually makes way more than one meal.

Happy cooking!

More reading and resources on chicken stock:
Cheeseslave's How To Make Homemade Chicken Stock
The Hungry Mouse: Homemade Chicken Stock (Great photographs!)
Weston A. Price Foundation: Broth Is Beautiful

A Little Experiment: Part 2

Here's a visual on the difference between White Cornish X and Red Cornish X chicks. They're about 5 days old in this photo.

This year's batch of chicks didn't arrive all on one day like last year's did. Last year, we ordered our chicks from Lazy 54 in Hubbard, Oregon. Although we wanted to raise Red Cornish X already last year, we also wanted to order our chicks from as close to home as possible. Although Hubbard isn't exactly "local", we felt mollified that we didn't order from somewhere in Iowa or Pennsylvania, or even Arizona. Anyway, Lazy 54 didn't carry Red Cornish X chicks, so we went with the traditional White Cornish X variety.

This year, we got all set to order again from Lazy 54, only to discover they had gone out of business! What a sad thing for anyone raising poultry in Oregon -- no more local source for chicks, ducklings or poults. Milan spent several evenings online looking at all our options, as not every hatchery has every type of bird or has the right number available at once, etc. We decided to order our chicks through Grange Coop, our local farm/garden/pet store. The way it worked out, not all the White Cornish X are even the same age, and the Red Cornish are nearly 5 days younger than the older Whites. It makes across-the-board weight gain and growth comparisons pretty impossible. But, even at this point, it seems pretty safe to say the Reds are generally smaller, slimmer and not as fast-growing as the Whites. They're more active and light on their feet, and as you can see from the photo, quite a bit more colorful.

A Little Experiment: Part 1

Those of you who followed our blog last spring -- our first "in the chicken business" -- might remember me bemoaning the weather (see our April 2010 archive ). I'm looking out the window watching it snow/slush/sleet (whatever it's doing) and praying we don't have a repeat performance of last year's chilly, snowy spring. Not lookin' so good, at the moment. My eager daphne, daffodils, crocus and violets are buried under wet, gloppy snow, with more continuing to fall. Sheesh!

Even as weather-focused as farmers are, I wouldn't bring it up if it were warm and sunny, but because we ordered the first batch of chicks yesterday, it's on my mind. We're much better-prepared this year, of course, with new tricks and all sorts of know-how under our belts to help mitigate the inconvenience and stress caused by frigid outdoor conditions. For those of you just tuning in, the reason this is a big deal for us is that we raise "pastured poultry". We're committed to getting the chicks out on pasture as early as possible (our mid-summer arriving batch goes outdoors at 3 days of age). That's essentially impossible when the grass is snow-covered or rain soaked. The chicks are much too fragile to handle such conditions until they're at least a good two weeks old, which is a lot of a life that only lasts 9-10 weeks. So, current conditions being what they are, we expect to keep them indoors for at least a week. Let's hope it warms up soon; I don't think anyone will dispute we've seen enough precipitation for the season.

Rain, sleet, snow or shine, the chicks will be here this coming Wednesday, March 23rd; 105 little cheeping balls of yellow fluff. Well, five will be a slightly different color of fluff. We ordered the usual 100 White Cornish X ("Cross"), which is the typical meat-bird breed. We then ordered five Red Cornish X, which is still a meat breed but more of a heritage type of meat chicken.

We decided to get the five Red Cornish X birds as kind of an experiment. "Heritage" meat is really gaining attention within foodie circles, but the average palate doesn't always appreciate the more richly flavored, darker meat. These birds also have smaller breasts and overall darker meat. Our plan is to see how these five Red Cornish X chickens ultimately compare to the White Cornish X. We will compare feed conversion, weight gain, dressed weight at 9-10 weeks (when we butcher the whole batch), appearance of the dressed bird (these don't have the white skin people are used to seeing on the typical broiler/roaster), and of course, flavor.

We'll keep you all posted on how it goes, starting off with some photos of the chicks when they arrive.

Graduating

I'm a little behind in my blogging. We went on a road trip and I wrote, but couldn't post, while we were gone. This entry would be dated May 9th.

It's that time of year. Graduation cards are filling up card aisles at local stores. Yes, we're going to a couple graduation celebrations this year, but the most recent one here was anything but academic. The 6-week old chicks "graduated" to new quarters, specifically, we split the bunch into two, nearly-identical runs ("nearly", because Milan made several improvements to the design in building the second one).

You can see in the first image that the quarters were getting rather cozy. Chickens need each other, especially as chicks, to keep warm and for general camaraderie. But, they don't need this many friends all at once! Like all of us, they like to hang out in the sunshine (and sure wish we had more of it, lately!), so the "porch", seen here, is always the most crowded. When the runs are moved morning and evening, you can always tell where the sunny spots were: they're the thickest in chicken dung. This photo was also taken just before being fed, so they're crowding up to the front, eager for dinner.


The new run spot is down in what we call "The Girls' Field", as its where our two mares lived for quite a while. It's the field closest to the house that's not "lawn" or landscaping (... kind of. Those categories all seem to blur together here, depending on what's going on. For example, this Spring we paddocked the horses on the "lawn", moving the paddock every one or two days, because that's where the best feed was with the least likelihood of damaging the incoming grass crop). The chickens had to be moved down the lane, across a small bridge, and out a ways into the field, as the ground along the fence was too bumpy. The run needs flat, smooth ground. This allows it to sit pretty snugly on the ground and keep out small critters (mostly weasels). Milan got the new run all set up before starting to catch chickens out of the old run, including running 500+ feet of white poly hose from the nearest underground water box. The hose is white (poly hose is often black) to keep it from heating up the water, which flows into the automatic watering system.

The new run also has a system of removable plexi-glass panels for rain, snow and wind protection. You can see it also only has the one, long feed trough. The trough is set up to be raised and lowered according to the birds' height (see the photo with Jack grabbing at a wire with stoppers on it). It's made out of a 4" PVC pipe with 90-degree cut out from center (so cut at about 3/4 instead of in half) to hold as much feed as possible while still giving the chickens ample access. The 10-minute criterion (mentioned in "The Feeding Frenzy") still applies.




Next up, move the chickens! Milan caught up 23 at a time out of the run while I opened and closed the door on our large dog kennel and made sure Jack didn't get into trouble (I spend a lot of time doing the latter!). It was just the two of us, so we didn't get pictures of the actual carrying -- Milan on one side of the kennel with Jack on his shoulders, and me on the other, hauling the white birds down the hill. I was surprised at how heavy 23 of them are in one place!


And as usual, Jack wanted to be in the thick of everything.

It took some doing getting the second run, which still had 46 chickens in it, down the hill. It was quite a long walk for the birds, not to mention quite a job for Milan, who provided all the muscle in the operation. I was in charge of keeping the birds moving so that none of them would slip out the back or taken out by the moving run. We took lots of breaks and only moved a few feet at a time, for both the birds and Milan, but what we didn't think of animals' fear of weird, new surfaces, like gravel or a wooden bridge! The chickens have grown up on grass, so when we had to pull the run off the lawn and onto the drive, they all bunched up and tried to stay on the grass. Convincing them they could walk on the gravel just fine was a little comical and frustrating. Same deal with the transition from gravel to wooden bridge! Ah, the things we're learning!

We did finally get the second run in place next to the first. Milan connected the watering systems, which most of the slightly stressed and thirsty birds immediately appreciated, and gave them a little extra helping of food for the energy expended in the whole affair (also appreciated!).

Cash, our big, white Pyrenees cross, will be staked out at night with the chickens to keep any wild creatures from getting too curious.

Building Our Pastured Poultry Runs

Milan's busy today putting the finishing touches on our second run. When we move the old run this evening, we'll split the batch between the two runs to give everyone more space and room at the feed trough. These are some pictures from earlier; the run's nearly completed at this point. The third photo is the top of the hover, which we use for the first 3-4 weeks of the chicks life to keep them warm. The little white rectangles are heaters. More on our run and hover design another day...

Another Snowy Morning

Some of you may notice that a recurring theme around here is the weather. My sister recently forwarded me an email from Coon Rock Farm, the CSA from which she orders produce in North Carolina. Here's what they had to say about it:

"I (like most farmers) have a fascination with the weather. It’s really the one thing that we have no control over on the farm and it is also the thing that probably has the most impact on whether we can produce a crop or not."

Well said. This is why, when I woke up to a snowy landscape this morning, a sight I usually enjoy, my heart filled with dread. How did the chickens fare through yet another unseasonably cold and wet night? How would they do once again moving them to now-not-just-wet, but snowy new pasture? Weather-wise, we wish several times a week we had waited to start this venture until May. Then again, who knows?! We have no control over it! The weather has been pretty wild this winter/spring, so what's to say we won't have a really bizarre summer, too?

This time, they all made it, and with an extra heat lamp (something we thought we had dispensed with after nearly a week of nice, warm, sunny weather), they're even surviving the wet grass. Whew!

Just A Fun Photo

Couldn't resist posting this one. Milan took this while inside the run the other day. Jack knows exactly what we're talking about when we say "chicken". Gee, wonder why! More photos of chickens and the farm (and Jack) in our Facebook albums.

Water, Water, Water!

Water is the basis of life, right? Making sure the chicks (which really, are now more like chickens as they're almost 5 weeks old) have 24/7 access to an ample and clean water supply is critical. We started off the day-old chicks with the classic, inverted-Mason-jar style waterers. Even the first few days, we changed the water 4 times a day, as they would kick shavings into it, poop in it, and backwash in it.

Around 2 weeks of age, Milan installed special, automatic cup-type waterers. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of them, because they were only in the run a couple days: long enough for us to be 100% sure they were not working, or rather, the chickens didn't figure them out. The waterer had a little ball in it that we were told the chicks would peck at out of curiosity, and voila: water would automatically refill the little cup. That didn't happen. They would drink all the water out of the little cup without touching the ball, so the cups were never triggered to refill. Of course, we left the trusty Mason jars in place to make sure the chickens were still getting plenty of water.

Milan finally got a different automatic system going which is working great. It's a bowl-style waterer that hangs and automatically refills itself at a certain point.

You can see from the photos the working conditions for installing the waterers weren't the roomiest. Chickens are also pretty curious creatures. We have layers on the property here too, which are pretty skittish compared to these guys, who see us at least three times a day, usually more. They especially like Milan, as he's the guy with the food!

Here you can see the four-and-a-half week olds around the Mason jar waterer.









Even though Milan got in the run right after moving it to new pasture, it was pretty messy back there. When we move the run, the chickens go hog wild all over it for about the first half hour, pecking the clover and catching worms and bugs before settling into the sunshine near the front of the run. So, even though we had just moved it, Milan was still rolling around in chicken manure back there. Yuck! Talk about dirty work. And cramped! But Milan gets it done, usually with good humor.

Did you see the chicken on his leg? At one point, he was using rubber bands to hold something in place. One of the chickens discovered one that had fallen into the grass and thought it was a worm. The chicken made some sound that must have announced his discovery to the entire flock, because they basically converged right in Milan's face, squawking and bawking and flapping around trying to get the "worm". Milan managed to break up the party and successfully extricate the rubber band from the instigator.

It sure is a relief to not have to refill Mason jars 4 or more times a day. These little bowls are convenient and sanitary and they WORK!

Realities

This being our first farming venture, we definitely went into it romanticizing the lifestyle. In reality, the novelty wears off in a hurry. The chores are, well, chores, but the worst is losing chicks to causes we can only really guess at. We lost another one today, bringing the total number of losses to six.

We noticed this one when we moved the run, which we do about 2pm every day. I take up the rear while Milan hoists the front of the run with a handle. He pulls, and my job is to make sure the chicks move along as they should. I usually take a stick and wave it alongside the outside of the run to scatter them forward. I tell Milan what's going on, saying things like, "Slow down," "Okay, wait a minute", etc. This time, I hollered, "Stop!" At first, I thought I had missed seeing that one wasn't clearing out of the way and that we had dinged it. A second look, however, clearly indicated the bird hadn't moved for a while and wasn't in the mood to do so now. Milan then remembered having seen a bird under the hover at morning feeding (about 7am). He thought at the time, "Huh, that's one of the smaller ones," but didn't worry about it as the bird eyed him steadily and looked like any of the others do when they're resting.

By two o'clock, however, the bird was clearly weak and listless. Milan and I both felt a familiar sinking feeling. Having already lost 5, two that we force fed and spent the better part of the day trying to rehabilitate, we both dreaded finding that lifeless heap of feathers. We had to do all we could; we had to try to keep that little guy alive, even if we didn't think there was much hope.

I got out my coffee grinder and we powdered up some of the chicken feed. I made a slurry with warm water, and stole Jack's Motrin syringe. Milan dug through his hydroponic supplies (from his years in Palo Alto when the only "garden" he had was indoors or on the balcony!) and found some tubing. Off we went to force feed another little chick, hoping this time he would make it.

We both knew our jobs. Milan held the chick and gently pressed on the sides of his beak. I pried his beak open with my fingernail. Once open, I used a twig to hold it open while I got the tube in position. Thanks to the Rebecca and Meadow at Wildlife Images (our local wildlife rehabilitation and education center) for the instructions on how to force feed birds! The tube must go down the right side of the bird's throat (our left, if you're facing the bird). We fed about 2ml (or 2cc's) at a time, and did this at 3pm, 5pm and 7pm.

We also separated him from the other birds while the weather was good and the rest of the flock was scratching, pecking and relaxing in the sunshine. I can't really comment on what chickens are thinking, but by all I've observed, they certainly don't respect their sick siblings. They step on him, sit on him, jostle him, and make the possibility of convalescence pretty remote. Yet, chicks need each other, too. When we previously nursed a sick one here in the house, he perked up considerably when we brought in a couple friends.

With three successful feedings behind us, we optimistically marked the sick chick's head with a green marker: We hoped he would soon join his peers, where we wouldn't be able to recognize him without it. He couldn't stay separated at night; he had to go back under the hover. Milan placed him in a less-trafficked corner. We would be back again at 9pm for another feeding.

At 9 o'clock, Milan peered under the hover, saying, "Okay, which one of you has a green head?" I was ready, with syringe and warm gruel in hand.

"Oh, no," Milan said, and I knew: the chick had died.

People say, "It's just a chicken!" or tell us that up to 10% loss (over the course of time of raising them from chicks to slaughter) is "normal", but right at that moment, it doesn't feel like it's "normal", or "just a chicken". This was a life, a tiny, possibly-insignificant life, but it still had breath and blood and motion and senses. Now, it was a heap of flesh and feathers. It causes me to ask again, what is life, anyway? We believe that God gives it, but what IS it? Physiologically? Cosmologically? I don't know that I'll ever get a good answer.

Of course, my thoughts and perplexity may seem a little ironic in view of the fact that we're raising these birds specifically to be slaughtered. The difference in my own mind is that, when their time comes, it will be a humane, quick and purposeful death, not a random, unexplained, untimely, slow and probably painful demise.

No doubt, we're being initiated to the harsher realities of farming. Animals die, and sometimes you have no idea why. Did he not eat enough? Drink enough? Was there something else wrong with him that predisposed him to become weak? I felt when I first saw him at 2 o'clock that he wasn't going to make it. We've been told that by the time a bird looks sick, he's pretty far gone, because they disguise it until they just can't anymore (an instinct to keep predators away). Also, I have in my head that a "real" farmer has to make decisions based more on the bottom line than we do at this point. It certainly doesn't make economic sense to spend hours of our time trying to rehabilitate one chicken that's unlikely to make it anyway. But, in our situation, we can "afford" it, and so we do it, because of who we are and what we believe about life: it's precious; we have to try to hold onto it; once gone, it's never coming back.

The Ugly "Chickling" Phase

I have always heard of "The Ugly Duckling". It's a literary fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen. I'm vaguely familiar with the story, but the expression it coined has made its way into our vernacular. Most people have heard the term, even if they don't know where it originated.

The chickens are now three and-a-half weeks old, and now I know why they call it "the ugly duckling" (or "chickling", in this case) phase. Boy, are they ugly little guys (and gals)! They're half skin and half feathers, with some baby fluff still in there in spots. I can't wait for this stage to pass!