Get them while they’re hot – off the press that is. Last December, while most folks were dreaming about Christmas and all the days off they were going to enjoy with family and loved ones, the GRIT crew was busy putting together our Guide to Backyard Chickens. This first special issue launches the magazine’s Country Skills Series, which will cover topics that you all help prioritize.

GRIT’s Guide to Backyard Chickens is a one-of-a-kind reference book that contains the latest and greatest information on how to get your backyard flock started and how to keep the eggs and meat coming. If you live in town, no worries, we have sections devoted to keeping smaller flocks inside the city limits and even included step by step instructions on how to approach your municipal government in towns where chicken keeping is not legal. So if you fancy yourself an urban farmer or city farmer, the Guide to Backyard Chickens has you covered. Likewise, if you live out where the pavement ends, and don’t have any legal issues to contend with, our Guide to Backyard Chickens takes you through the steps for incubating fertile eggs, receiving and brooding day old chicks, building chicken coops and so much more.

Worried about bird health and protection from predators? GRIT’s Guide to Backyard Chickens offers expert advice on how to keep diseases out of your flock and provides detailed information on how to keep predators of all kinds from picking off your poultry. If you wonder about how chickens might help control ticks and other pests and help build rich garden soil, then you will definitely want to read GRIT’s Guide to Backyard Chickens. This new book also includes 25 time-tested and delicious recipes covering everything from for using up excess eggs to creating mouthwatering chicken burgers.

GRIT’s Guide to Backyard Chickens goes on sale tomorrow at Tractor Supply stores, Sam’s Club and select bookstores nationwide. If you can’t find the title at your local book seller or newsstand, you can purchase it directly from us – right here.

In spite of what the Farmers’ Almanac and Punxsutawney Phil predicted about the rest of this winter, in my mind it’s time to start thinking about spring and all of the newborn animals scheduled to arrive at the farm. My four-legged moms are expecting baby pigs, calves, lambs, donkeys – and I am pretty close to setting the year’s first batch of fertile eggs in an incubator. The good folks at Manna Pro are also celebrating the season, (and giving away some substantial prizes) with the Baby Your Babies Photo Contest and accompanying educational webinar series.

Manna Pro produces high-quality animal nutrition and care products for a broad range of species – its product lines are perfect for smaller lifestyle farms and rural enthusiasts who raise their animals for reasons beyond just making a profit. I’ve used Manna Pro’s Calf Manna and various milk replacer products for several decades and they work.

“Our consumers consider their animals to be more like pets or family members than just livestock,” says Manna Pro Marketing Director Jennifer Hojnacki. “They want to know as much as possible about keeping their animals healthy, and they are like proud ‘parents’ when their animals have new babies. The Baby Your Babies promotion gives them a way to learn about important nutrition issues – and also a way to share their new arrivals with the larger farming community.”

The Manna Pro Baby Your Babies Photo Contest runs through May 31, 2010. The 3-part Baby Your Babies webinar series runs on consecutive Tuesdays beginning on February 9. Each webinar will be conducted by Manna Pro’s Vice President of Nutrition, Dr. Rob McCoy, PhD. The first Manna Pro Baby Your Babies webinar will cover Preparing for Newborn Animals. Subsequent Manna Pro Baby Your Babies webinar topics will be Feeding Milk Replacers… Why, When and How and Transitioning to Dry Feed.

 Each 30-minute Manna Pro Baby Your Babies webinar will begin at 4:30pm CST on the date it is held. People who wish to participate in any or all of the webinars may sign up online by visiting Manna Pro's Website, and clicking on the link for the webinar(s) they are interested in. Web site participants will receive a $5 coupon good for Manna Pro products for each webinar they attend and can sign up to receive a free issue of GRIT magazine.

There is a limit to the number of webinar participants, so get signed up soon if you plan to participate.

Rarely has a book so engaged me as Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which is a fresh look at the intrinsic value of work. When I first picked up the book, (hardcover $25.95 list; The Penguin Press 2009) I had hoped it might continue where Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Jerome’s Truck left off. What I found instead was a refreshingly accessible and beautifully composed, treatise on the philosophy, psychology and sociology of work – good, honest, real, physical work.

Crawford’s book takes a heartfelt, intelligent and authentic look at the true human cost of outsourcing manual labor and craft of all kinds, while dicing the remaining white collar toil into ever smaller cubes used to feed a new kind of assembly line. Carefully crafted arguments teased from masterful works of philosophy, sociology, psychology and economics provide a sound framework for Crawford’s artful and compelling narrative. The bottom line is that humans crave physical work and associated creative processes for a reason – and it has everything to do with human vitality.

If you ever feel compelled to repair your own tractors, or wonder about that compulsion to keep an old pickup truck on the road. Or if you wonder why it is that you rush home after a grueling day on the line or in the cubicle to build some fences and tend to your garden and livestock. Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft will help you understand why. If you have never thought about work as play or as inner fulfillment, now’s the time to take the plunge.

I try to read a few books each month. I naturally gravitate to titles relating to animal husbandry, farm and ranch management and the care and feeding of old agricultural machinery. Sometimes it’s a novel that catches my eye. I am not generally prone to reading sociology or philosophy, but like some instantaneous addiction, after the first sentence of Shop Class as Soulcraft I only hungered for more. Matthew Crawford is every bit a masterful wordsmith as he is a mechanic – exercise caution while opening his book because once you pick it up you will mourn having to put it down.

When keeping a backyard chicken flock makes the news in publications like the New York Times, you know a fowl movement is afoot. When cities that promote sustainability such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, include raising pet chickens for eggs and pleasure as part of the process, you know the birds have moved beyond fad status. But when organizations like Chickens In The Yard , individuals like Andy Schneider, aka the Chicken Whisperer , and magazines like GRIT and Mother Earth News take up the feathered cause and facilitate folks by the hundreds of thousands, you know there’s a real revolution under way. I am proud to be part of it.

As an adult, I’ve been without my own flock only during brief bouts of city living – in the early 1980s, I inquired about the legality of keeping a few hens within the city limits of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The answer I received was murky enough and my way-too-near neighbors were just nosey enough that I decided not to take the chance of getting an uninvited visit from animal control. Once I got back to the farm I made up for it by raising chickens by the thousands – not to mention turkeys, geese, ducks and guinea fowl. I’ve scaled back a bit these days, but we still raise chickens and turkeys and try to keep guineas at my Osage County, Kansas farm.

If you find yourself in the situation I was in back in the 1980s, don’t despair, you may not have to move or break the law to keep a couple of hens. According to Barbara Palermo, founder of Chickens In The Yard, changing your municipal code isn’t always impossible. Barbara believes so strongly in your right to raise backyard poultry that she produced a documentary, The Chicken Revolution that chronicles the entire process, using the Salem, Oregon city council as a case study.

I watched the DVD with eager anticipation and wound up on the edge of my seat wondering whether the city council members would ever be able to take a stand – and come to the only logical conclusion. I mean, if you can keep a 100 pound pot-bellied pig in your Salem yard, why not three hens? The topic turned out to be so controversial that some council members changed their positions no fewer than three times –an avid supporter was later turned against the chicken advocates because her husband made some offhand crack about avian influenza!  I’m not going to tell you how this saga turned out, but I will tell you that Barbara’s organization has helped chicken enthusiasts in several municipalities obtain the legal right to fund their own flocks. To learn more about legalizing backyard chickens, get your copy of the Chicken Revolution DVD here.

Rice is among my favorite starches. I’d rank it well ahead of potatoes, except perhaps waxy new potatoes dug fresh from the garden. Until last weekend when I tried some Ifugao Diket Sticky Rice sourced from Eighth Wonder, Inc. (a purveyor of heirloom rice grown in the Philippines) I thought brown rice was pretty exotic and about as tasty as that grain gets. When given the choice between brown rice and pasta, I probably pick pasta about 65 percent of the time. With this beautifully pigmented and nutty-flavored Eighth Wonder Heirloom Rice added to the mix, the pasta vs. rice decision just got a lot tougher for me.

Last weekend after a day of hanging, taping and mudding sheetrock in my slow-but-sure mudroom repair project (hoping for no more frozen pipes) I felt like dinking around in the kitchen with a partner in culinary crime who tolerates my experiments incredibly graciously. And since I had this package of Ifugao Diket Sticky Rice from Eighth Wonder Heirloom Rice, and a freezer full of grass-fed lamb sourced from GRIT publisher Bryan Welch’s farm, I had a plan.

I followed the directions on the back of the Ifugao Diket Sticky Rice from Eighth Wonder Heirloom Rice package to the letter. The rice cooked up plump, maroon and sticky. I had to sample it as it was – it tasted nutty and had a nice tooth – not mushy at all. As the rice was resting, I heated up my favorite 12-inch, cast-iron skillet with a tablespoon of olive oil in it. When that was good and hot, I added about a pound of ground lamb along with a diced onion and sliced jalapeño – I stripped the seeds and then rubbed my eye and did some other things that made me remember why I like to just leave the jalapeño seeds alone. I browned the works. Actually I just browned the lamb and by then the veggies were just right.

With the flame turned down low, I added a couple of cups of cooked Ifugao Diket Sticky Rice from Eighth Wonder Heirloom Rice and tossed it around until the rice grains were more or less unstuck. A little sea salt and Northwoods Fire Seasoning (daughter Alaina gave it to me for Christmas) later, I had a delicious dish on my hands. Supper that night also included some awesome simmered carrots with a dill gravy on them and a heavenly, crunchy-crusted, no-knead rye bread – both compliments of my partner in culinary crime (she had a second helping of my lamb and Ifugao Diket Sticky Rice dish, which I take as a good sign).

Not one to let leftovers go to waste, I ate the rest of the Ifugao Diket Sticky Rice from Eighth Wonder Heirloom Rice for breakfast the next morning – it was delicious reheated with a pat of butter and drizzle of homemade cane syrup. I have a couple of other varieties of heirloom rice from Eighth Wonder yet to try. I can’t wait.

It looks like the Farmers’ Almanac was right on the money with its prediction of an ice-cold winter in the middle of the country. On my farm in Osage County, we’ve not experienced temperatures above freezing for a couple of weeks running. And today, the high is predicted to be around 6 degrees. Brrr … this North Dakota boy isn’t used to that kind of cold down here in Kansas. Neither is the plumbing in the barn. I have my fingers crossed that the frozen pipe in question won’t actually burst – it is PEX after all.

What’s amazing about this cold day in Kansas is that our animals take it in stride. From the Mulefoot pigs snuggled in their huts or buried in their haystacks, to the Katahdin sheep boldly bedded down in the open (but out of the wind), to the chickens and goats hanging together in the old Butler grain bin, to the Highland cattle who prefer the woods, these barnyard animals have the metabolic and physiological wherewithal to handle cold days – and nights – without a pellet stove glowing in the corner. Wow! Impressive isn’t it? All they require is a bit more feed and hay and they are good to go.

The folks who grew up around here tell me that this is one of the longest cold spells they can remember. I believe them. I have a vested interest in believing them. As much as I like snow, I don’t like bitter cold. I had my fill of frostbitten cheeks as a kid in North Dakota and struggled with sufficient icy implements as an adult in South Dakota. So, I eagerly await the end to this cold day in Kansas, and the one predicted for tomorrow. With any luck, daytime temperatures will be back above freezing sometime next week. In the meantime, I’ve got my Dickies insulated coveralls and silk long johns with the camo pattern handy.

Photos courtesy Karen Keb.

When it comes to work clothing, I look for items that are comfortable, perform well and offer good value to boot. When it comes to cold-weather-work, my Dickies model TV239 insulated cotton duck coveralls get the most use. I’ve worn Dickies insulated coveralls for everything from building a mudroom to haying the critters to loading sheep to cutting holes in the pond-ice so the cattle can drink; the coveralls kept me warm and offered protection from close encounters with manure, muck and hog slobber.

Over the years, I’ve worn out coveralls from plenty of different makers. Some sets of coveralls have been heavier-duty than others – some were insulated and some were not. I find that the 10-ounce high-performance 100 percent cotton duck used to create the outer shell on the Dickies insulated coveralls offers excellent abrasion- and snag resistance, while remaining sufficiently flexible to not be cumbersome. The polyester-fill/nylon-taffeta lining keeps me warm and makes the insulated coveralls easy to slide into and out of. This lining is sufficiently well attached to the shell that it tends not to catch the heel of my boots when I put the coveralls on without unzipping the legs. Of course, the entire operation of pulling the coveralls on is made much easier when I stop and open the legs up clear to my waist.

The Dickies insulated coveralls also seem to have a pocket wherever I need one – and they don’t require any sleight of hand to get my hands into even with gloves or mittens on. The coveralls are also available in my tall and rather large size. In fact, I can zip the Dickies coveralls over a sweatshirt or hooded chore jacket when it’s really cold.

At less than $60 for the pair (in my super-sized size – less than $50 in standard sizes), the Dickies insulated coveralls are less than half the price of some brands with similar quality. Do I expect my Dickies coveralls to be the last pair I’ll ever own? No. Do I expect them to last for years – I sure do. Check them out here.

Photos courtesy Karen Keb.