The GRIT and MOTHER EARTH NEWS Community Chicken project came to closure last Sunday when 8 people gathered at my Osage County Kansas farm to kill and clean the commercial broilers we had been raising on range for the past 12 weeks or so. The event brought together a most unlikely group of editors, spouses, advertising sales people, teacher, librarian and medical intern. Most of these folks had never taken a vertebrate animal's life with their bare hands. Most had never felt the slickness of warm offal. Most had never been that up close and personal with the animals whose lives help sustain us.

MOTHER EARTH NEWS Sr. Associate Editor Troy Griepentrog and I took responsibility for raising the birds and supplemented their diet of bugs and clover with an antibiotic-free grower ration, which is part of the Homestead line offered by Hubbard Feeds. We kept the birds enclosed, and safe from predators with electric net fences and chargers supplied by Kencove and Premiere One. Feeders, knives, fowl catchers, waterers, chicks, hatching eggs and a vacuum sealer were all supplied by the various advertisers listed prominently on the Community Chickens website.

Killing any animal with your bare hands, is never easy – at least when you don’t do it every day. When I demonstrated a humane way to nick the birds’ jugular, using killing cones supplied by Featherman to restrain the birds, there was a hush among the group as folks reflected on what it means to take (and honor) a life and accept the animal’s gift of sustenance. When the blood flowed freely, some people turned away. My daughter, Alaina told me later she thought she was going to cry. To paraphrase Joel Salatin, it isn’t good to kill chickens too often, because you run the risk of becoming desensitized and of taking their lives for granted. That definitely was not the situation at the farm on Sunday.

Once their life blood ceased flowing, we dunked the birds in a beautifully constructed, thermostat-controlled, propane-fired scalder provided by the Featherman Equipment Co. We found that several brief dunks (5 – 15 seconds long depending on bird size) (each followed by a test pluck to see how easily we could remove tough flight or tail feathers) helped us get the scalding just right. From the approximately 150-degree water we placed two birds into the Featherman drum plucker for a 30 second ride that removed the feathers easily and virtually completely. The Featherman drum plucker is nothing short of phenomenal.

The next step in the process was to remove the birds’ feet, crops, heads and oil glands, which was followed by opening the abdominal cavity and removing the viscera. Check GRIT Assistant Editor Caleb Regan’s blog for more on that activity. Alaina kept the fresh water flowing throughout the process and gave the birds a final rinse before we placed them in an ice-water bath for rapid cooling. Beautiful broiling chickens were then packaged in plastic and packed in coolers for the rides home.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues Troy Griepentrog, Caleb Regan, Megan Phelps and Steve Sabran for their participation. I’d also like to thank Troy’s wife Sue and Megan’s husband Nate and my daughter Alaina for taking ownership of the process as well. I know I will kill chickens again next year and I hope that it will be in the company of such thoughtful and careful folks. I also hope to have access to the Featherman cones, scalder and plucker – they definitely made the entire process easier.

Photos courtesy Suzanne Griepentrog.

I just returned from an excellent couple of days exploring the innovative agricultural and marketing practices associated with Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, Virginia. I’ll have plenty to say about Ayrshire’s practices and gracious staff in another post, but today I want to report on the Chicken Choosin’ heritage chicken tasting event that was held there yesterday. I was among the privileged to receive an invitation and believe me, I feel privileged.

Sponsored by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, Humane Farm Animal Care, Slow Food U.S.A, Chefs Collaborative and Ayrshire Farm, this first-ever heritage Chicken Choosin’ was designed to highlight the culinary value of the chickens less processed in this country. And the people’s choice was hands down the Americanized version of the English Dorking, a chicken that’s historically associated with some of the best eating there is in Britain.

I found the organically raised Dorking to be lovely to look at with sumptuous flavor in both the light and dark meat. I also thought it had some of best textured breast and thigh muscling in the entire Chicken Choosin’ taste test. I selected the Dorking as my second choice, by only half a point behind … bird number 9.

Stay tuned as I unravel the rest of the Chicken Choosin’ in a future post and for much more about my Ayrshire Farm experience.

Time and time again I hear people complaining about the problems they think backyard chickens will bring if allowed into the backyards of their city. Some of the more common complaints that I hear are noise, smell, rodents, disease and property value. I would like to address each and every one of these complaints one by one.

I don’t think I've ever been to a meeting about keeping backyard chickens where the noise issue has not been brought up at least once. I often hear people complaining about the potential early morning crow of a nearby rooster. This is a very valid point, and I too would be complaining if a rooster were waking me up every morning at 4:30am, especially if I did not have to wake up until 7:00am or later. There are many advantages of keeping backyard chickens, but most urban chicken keepers want to keep backyard chickens for the benefits of having an endless supply of farm fresh eggs. Solution? You do not need a rooster to enjoy farm fresh eggs every morning. In fact, hens will lay better if there is no rooster around to disturb their routine. Roosters primarily have two jobs, which they do very well. They protect and fertilize. You only need a rooster if you want baby chicks running around in the backyard. I still hate to see cities ban roosters all together because there are ways to keep roosters in an urban area quietly and responsibly. I plan to share how this can be done at a later date.

Smell is another complaint that is often brought up when discussing chickens. Yes, chickens can smell just like dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, gerbils and even people, if not taken care of properly. We are not talking about a 300-foot commercial chicken house with 30,000 chickens next door. We are talking about six to twelve laying hens in a backyard setting. There are many ways to reduce the smell of your chicken coop and I will share how this can be done at a later date.

If you don’t think that you have mice and rats outside your home right now, you are living in a fantasy world. Many claim that keeping chickens will attract mice and rats and think they don’t exist until the chickens arrive. One client of mine who is entertaining the idea of getting some backyard chickens lives in the most affluent city in Georgia. She told me that her cat leaves her little "presents" at the back door almost every day. These "presents" just happen to be mice and rats. She also said that she has seen mice and rats run across her backyard and up a honeysuckle vine to get over the fence and into her neighbor’s yard. Yes, if you have chickens there will be another food source in your backyard, but there are ways to keep the chicken feed put away in mice and rat proof containers. I will share how this can be done at a later date.

About three years ago many were asking questions about the risks of avian influenza and keeping backyard chickens. I would always refer them to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website where it addresses this issue. On the Q&A page the following is posted. Question: We have a small flock of chickens. Is it safe to keep them? Answer: In the United States there is no need at present to remove a flock of chickens because of concerns regarding avian influenza. The U.S. Department of Agriculture monitors potential infection of poultry and poultry products by avian influenza viruses and other infectious disease agents. Enough said!

Many people who oppose the keeping of backyard chickens often sound off during meetings about decreased property values if the city allows the keeping of backyard chickens. All I can say is show me the proof. No one has ever shown up at a backyard chicken meeting that I have ever attended with any valid proof that someone got $10,000 less for their home because a resident in their city keeps backyard chickens.

To put backyard chickens into perspective I often tell people the following. On any given day I have more dog poop in my front yard from other neighbor’s dogs then they have chicken poop in their front yard from my chickens. I have more cat prints on my car from other neighbor’s cats then they have chicken prints on their car from my chickens. And I’m awakened at 2:00am more from other neighbor’s dogs barking then they have ever been awakened at 2:00am from my sleeping hens.

Keeping backyard chickens can be a fun and rewarding experience. If you would like to learn more about keeping backyard poultry I invite you to listen to the Backyard Poultry with the Chicken Whisperer radio show Monday through Friday at 12:00pm Eastern at www.blogtalkradio.com/backyardpoultry and on Saturday at 9:00am EST at www.americaswebradio.com.

I blame it on my friend Bryan when asked why on earth I decided to start a sheep project at the farm. As a once diehard cattle person, it is a little hard for me to believe, but I have all of this grass and nowhere near enough animals to eat it yet – and since this is hopefully the last farm I start from scratch, I want to try a bunch of stuff that I have never tried before. Years ago when I had a large herd of purebred Angus cattle, my friend Mark almost had me talked into running sheep with the cow herd, but then I was forced to move to California and sold out before giving it a try.

One aspect of sheep husbandry that totally turned me off was the need to shear them every year. Mark sometimes had trouble scheduling the roving sheep shearer and at least back then, the fleece was pretty much worthless, thanks to a global glut of wool. So in comes Bryan with a herd of lovely Katahdin hair sheep that require no shearing. Huh? Yes, that’s right. These cool looking grass munching machines are about as easy to keep as cattle – possibly easier once you have some experience with them. So my mind turned once again to building a small herd … or is that flock … of the bleating critters.

Having been overheard talking about sheep at the office at some point, coworker Lisa emailed me one day to note that her mom, Claire, had a breeding-quality brown ewe and a black ewe lamb she needed to sell to keep her numbers right. I say sure, I want those animals, having recently claimed one of Bryan’s proven rams. Well, those two females arrived on Saturday. I had only just completed their temporary quarter acre (and coyote proof) pen. Turns out that the black lamb still wants a bottle in the morning and Claire was kind enough to leave me with a quart of goat’s milk to mix with the Manna Pro milk replacer I bought. The last time I fed any little creature a bottle was more years ago than my daughters would like me to report in public, I suspect. But let me say that rather than find bottle feeding to be another pesky chore, I find that it is a very calming way to start the day.

I would like to add another couple of females to the group this year, but I need to stretch more wire around some of the pastures first. So far the coyotes and I have coexisted fairly peaceably, but if they go after the sheep, I will not be so tolerant. Stay tuned.

It seems like a no-brainer and revolutionary grassfarmer Joel Salatin has been saying it for decades … it’s official now though, diversity in the pasture matrix is good for grazing animals.

According to a fantastic article in the current issue of Rangelands, which is published by the Society for Range Management, as higher costs and environmental concerns about fossil fuels push more people to buy locally produced food, demand for livestock raised on pastures and rangelands—rather than in feed lots—is spurring a return to greater reliance on native rangelands and cultivated pastures.

“By focusing on a few species, people transformed the diverse world of plants into a manageable domain that generally meets energy and protein needs and limits  intake of toxins,” writes Frederick D. Provenza and his coauthors in the article, “Value of Plant Diversity for Diet Mixing and Sequencing in Herbivores.”

But this practice limits genetic plant diversity and health benefits to livestock from combinations of available plants nutrients, while threatening ecosystems reliant on biodiversity to avoid catastrophe. The researchers suggest a new alternative for livestock grazing that calls for having animals eat a variety of complementary plants. They suggest that these varied plants would provide a range of primary and secondary nutritional compounds, along with greater health and nutritional benefits. No surprise there, but good for the SRM researchers for taking a stand.

The article, “Value of Plant Diversity for Diet Mixing and Sequencing in Herbivores,” is available in its entirety, here.

In my last post, I talked about getting started with raising backyard chickens. I left off with the little ladies in the brooder box that I had made out of an old Dell computer box, so I'll pick up from that point. 

One of the wonderful things about old boxes is that with the help of a little duct tape and some “outside the box” thinking, you can make just about anything you could need! In this case, as the girls got a little bigger and started needing a little more room, I basically just added an addition to their little home, and what I like to call the "chicken condo" was born. There was enough space with this little setup for the chicks to get old enough that they were nearly all feathered out, and I had enough time to build a better coop. Now I could hang their food and water on one half of the box and their light, which they still needed, on the other. The tower attachment allowed me to control the height and thus the intensity of the lighting that they got. 

You may have noticed that our chicks are still in the house at this point. That's because we ordered them online from IDEAL poultry in early February last year and received them on February 19th. We did this so that while the chicks were young and required additional heat and light anyway, we could keep them in the house and get some growing time on them while the winter was idling by outside. Typical hens won't start laying until sometime around 20 weeks and then will often taper off in egg production through the cold, low, light winter months. We wanted our hens to start "earning their keep" as soon as possible and doing this really helped. By the time the weather was nice, they were ready to go outside and be on their own.

But I digress. My point in explaining their living indoors was to make the greater point that smell and sanitation was very important to us since they were in close proximity. To control odor what I did was make a habit of lightly turning the coarse sawdust bedding every time I fed or watered them. This helped to keep any fresh manure under the bedding and the odors were able to absorb. Every couple of days, I also added a light covering of the sawdust with a layer of new bedding.  I could generally go 1.5 to 2 weeks this way before I had to pull out the bedding and replace it. I have no complaints about this method at all.

As I said in my previous post, raising chickens is not, in my opinion, the hardest thing in the world. There are, however, a few things that need to be watched for and treated immediately if found. One very common problem that young chickens have is called “pasting up”, and can kill them if you’re not careful in watching for it. What it is, is when the vent of the chicken (the vent is the technical term for the part of the chicken where the manure and the eggs come out.) gets essentially clogged up with dried and hardened manure. Here’s a photo of what it looks like.

What happens with the chicks is that when the vent becomes clogged or blocked, the chicken cannot evacuate as it needs to. Because of this the chicken remains “full” and will stop eating or drinking.

The treatment for pasting up isn’t the most fun thing in the world to do, but I found that a clean paper towel soaked in warm water does the trick wonderfully. All you need to do is clean off the blockage, and make sure the chick has access to fresh water all the time. (Basically she needs her bum wiped.)

The chick will protest loudly against this, but it’s for its own good.

Now then, once the chicks are fully feathered out, and no longer need to be kept under lights and given supplemental heat, they’re ready to be moved outside. The chicken condo won’t do for this however. In fact it’s more than likely that it’s going to be barely holding its self up at this point, which means it’s time to build a chicken coop.

Building a coop is a project with so many varied outcomes that it’s hard to pin down just one or two ways to do it. There are certain things though that every coop should have and as long as they’re covered you should be good. For instance, chickens can’t stand having wet feet, at least not for long. Scratching around in the snow or rain puddles for worms is one thing but not having a dry place that’s up off the ground when they need it could mean sickness or death. Also, even if you decide to free range your hens, they’ll need a safe place where they can roost up at night and rest peacefully when most of the predators in nature are out looking for dinner, even in the suburbs. I have a neighbor who was a bit lackadaisical about this and lost all his birds to a neighbor’s dog. 

It’s generally recommended that you allow for at least 4 square feet of space for each bird. This will allow them enough space to spread their wings and will help to keep them from picking at each other. You’ll also need to add a nesting box or two. Generally about one per five hens or so is enough. If you don’t give them proper nesting area, it’s possible that the eggs will get broken or eaten or both. The coop I came up with for my 9 hens allowed for all of this as well as being (relatively) pleasant to look at. That, more than almost any feature of your coop may end up being the biggest part of how well your chickens are received by neighbors if you keep them in a residential area like mine.

Remember, chickens are a great addition to any home. They’re great fun to watch, they’re superb composters and they provide a healthy consistent protein source for your family; all this while providing excellent fertilizing for your garden, too. If you’ve been debating making them an addition to your home, I encourage you to make the leap. Give it careful thought of course, but don’t feel intimidated at all.

All the best to you …

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse 

After having a couple of donkeys around for a few months, I have to admit that they are great companions. In fact, they are almost as fun to be around as the dogs … and it is because donkeys like people. 

 

I was cool with the whole donkey addition because we planned to bring sheep to the farm in 2008, and I wasn’t too keen on the idea of leaving them to fend off the coyotes on their own. Well, we got the donkeys, but not the sheep. Actually, we have a ram, but he still lives at my friend Bryan’s farm. I just didn’t get our fence upgrade completed in time … in fact it still isn’t completed. Oh, did I mention that it was Bryan that convinced me that donkeys would be fun? He was right.

Our male (jack) donkey, Jack is said to be at least 7 years old (the previous owners weren’t for sure). Our female, Valentine, is not quite a year. After keeping them separated for months, we finally turned them both in with the cattle and after a bit of chasing around, they have become fast companions. In fact they pretty much ignore the cattle and have formed their own little mini-herd.

Now, whenever we walk the pastures, Jack and Valentine come running. They heel better than any of our dogs and are tall enough that we don’t have to bend over to chuck them under the chin. Of course, the donkeys are really more interested in the all-natural, hormone-free range cubes or  in my coat pocket than they are in being  my companion, but I will take their affection, and gladly rub them here and there, either way.

Some folks won’t have an intact jack donkey around their place, but so far, Jack hasn’t been any hassle at all. We used to keep anywhere from 15 to 25 Angus bulls around (breeding stock was part of our business), so handling large rambunctious boys is nothing new. And Jack is far from rambunctious.

In time, we will rely on Jack and Valentine to keep the flock safe. In the meantime, they are great companions, and that is just fine with us.
 

I was a little disheartened Thursday when I learned that Contagious Equine Metritis (CEM) has made its way into the United States and has infected several horses at one farm out East. This is especially surprising because the United States was declared to be CEM free as late as 1998.

Growing up, my family had six horses – one for each member of the family and an old Shetland pony we rode as young boys. We even traded a colt from our best Missouri Fox Trotter for my older brother’s first truck.

Horses were a big part of our family when and where I grew up. Evenings were often spent riding through an area my dad called “the motherland,” in search of deer and other wildlife and always culminating with watching the sun set from the same ridge we’d been to a hundred times before.

Once it was dark, we turned the horses back, and ran them fairly hard back through the motherland towards home, them knowing they were headed for oats and water. I unsaddled many more horses in the dark than during the day, I know that for sure.

For my three brothers and I, horses played a prominent role in our entertainment on the farm, our bond with each other and our bond with our parents.

We had very good luck with horse health, and it seemed our friends did too. No one really had to be concerned with diseases like CEM.

TheHorse.com reports that CEM, a highly contagious venereal infection, causes short-term infertility in broodmares. Foals born to infected mares can also become infected while in the uterus. The danger, to me, seems to be the ease with which the infection can spread, either through natural breeding or by artificial insemination. Since there are no visible or behavioral symptoms, the likelihood of a widespread outbreak is even higher.

Stallions, too, can become carriers of the infection, and harbor the organism (Taylorella equigenitalis) externally on genitals and can spread CEM to mares and farm equipment. It can also be spread by farm hands, handlers, breeders or grooms who don’t maintain proper hygiene while handling horses.

The scary thing, for people like myself (though I don’t currently own horses), is that this infection surfaced at a prestigious farm, and mares bred at this farm now may have been sent back to their home farms and further spread the infection. At that point, CEM would seem to me to become very difficult to track. The surfacing of the infection could also affect equine transport.

Again according to TheHorse.com, currently, no known vaccination will prevent the infection. Treatment involves strict cleansing and applying chlorhexidine, and then nitrofurazone ointment once the chlorhexidine dries.

Hopefully, these animals can be quarantined and the infection can once again be eradicated from the United States. Get the most current information at www.TheHorse.com.

Anybody else out there heard more about this issue?

Photo courtesy TheHorse.com.