Do I have the book for you!
Get a copy of the “Home permaculture garden” by
Linda Woodrow.(published by Penguin Books Australia 1996) Its all about how to raise chooks ( chickens) in a small area AND have them do all your gardening work for you AND grow all their food onsite – Its a fabulous book and you can take her method of crop & chook rotation and do it in a very simple easy to manage way OR go hard and have an extremely complex and beautiful mandala system providing all the meat and eggs vegies & fruit your family needs. Diana is famous in the permaculture world for her techniques – not quite as wild and chaotic as a standard permie food forest- but great for those with small space, or a case of OCD as its very neat and controlled. Cant help you with the butchering difficulties as I’m in the same boat there … going to give it a go though, some day. Good luck!

We have a small herd of Highland Cattle, and about 50 assorted chickens a few of which are unwanted roosters. I’d ignore the roosters and let them be pets , but they usually don’t cooperate and attack us, each other or overly mate the hens sooo the get sold or eaten. I have two now for which no tear will be shed, nasty creatures.
I take them to someone else for processing, for now that works it may not if transport becomes a problem but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Possibly some bartering of talents as we recently did with a highland (I’ll write about that in animals bigger than a breadbox).

Beth in Massachusetts getting a few more eggs each day

We used to raise peacocks. We never butchered them but I used to threaten them when they hung around the porch too much. They are not destructive in the garden like chickens. And they LOVE Japanese beetles. They will hop to get the big ones on top of the rose bushes.

1. You probably can’t feed them entirely by yourself – you can get closer and closer to it over time, by growing some feed for them in the garden, perhaps by raising meal worms or red worms to supplement scraps, etc…, and perhaps by developing relationships with local restaurants and using their feed.

But you could get 75% of their feed locally – and even the best organic eggs you can buy wouldn’t be produced on anything like 75% food scraps, garden wastes and forage. So you’d be getting the most sustainable eggs you could – but not the perfect solution. For me, that’s sufficient – as long as I’m going to eat eggs, I want them to be the best possible, most ethical eggs, even if not perfect. But it may not be for you.

2. Biologically, males are more expendable to any population of animals (including humans) than females are. In domestic animals, this is particularly acute – and it won’t go away, because, as you know, there’s no retirement home for extra males. I don’t deny that this may well reinforce our attitudes about males – or the biological fact that we’re programmed for survival may actually be what shapes our “dirty jobs for men” reality, and acknowledging this may not be the problem. It is an ethical dilemma, and a fascinating question, and one unlikely to be resolved. But I sould simply point out that your present egg suppliers already are faced with this issue – that is, it cannot be erased from the culture by not facing it, assuming, again, that we’re going to eat eggs.

3. Well, depending on your attitude towards other people’s meat eating, you could find a local farmer or just someone with chickens who *does* eat meat – they wouldn’t be forced into slaughtering the roosters, they would choose to do so for the meat. Your purchase of their surplus females (and if you have a breeding flock that happens too) could be just the right symmetry. I’m not sure whether this actually helps or makes it worse.

4. I would think it would depend on your relationship to the “no killing” thing – that is, maybe it is better to not do it yourself, or maybe it isn’t, but it is unfortunately, one of those things that one has to figure out for oneself – the meaning of one’s vows when they get complicated is tough territory to navigate, and your dilemma genuinely has my sympathies.

For us, Applejack Creek’s point is similar to our reasoning – I want my animals to eat as little human-grain as possible. I want them to be raised as ethically as possible. I want there lives to be as good as possible. I want their deaths to be as quick and pain free as possible. And because the only way I can control those things is to raise them, I do. But that doesn’t mean it is the right decision for you.

Sharon

I was vegetarian for a number of years … mostly because I had been eating very poorly and by focusing on meat-free meals, I became more conscious of my eating habits and ate MUCH better. My health improved. Then, after about five years of this, I started thinking meat might be good again. I had to do some hard thinking, though, because I don’t want to be wasteful of lives and of resources, and we’ve all heard how eating meat is hard on the global food distribution system.

So, I did some thinking and a lot of reading. See, I also want to eat locally – I figure that the very best way to reduce my footprint is to eat stuff grown nearby. Well, I live in Alberta – it would be extraordinarily difficult to have a balanced, seasonal, local vegetarian diet. Most fruit trees won’t produce well here (some apples, yes, maybe plums and cherries, but forget citrus or pears); you can have berries (raspberries, blueberries, currants); grain definitely grows here, and beans, but no rice. Come winter, that’s not going to be a very varied diet … and getting enough protein is going to be hard, even with dairy and eggs. And, as you say, with both dairy and eggs, the males go onto someone’s plate at some point in the cycle.

The land that I live on and most of what surrounds me is great pasture land. It will readily support sheep and cows, but growing food? Not without lots of hard work and inputs. I do have a good garden, but the most efficient way to get human nutrition from *this* land is with meat. That also, handilly enough, provides me with the rich inputs my garden needs (you should see the manure pile that ten sheep and two cows creates over the course of one winter!)

So, I decided to raise my own meat, and only eat animals I know. I do make some exceptions, because it’s not a religious thing for me, but in general, the meat on my plate was raised in my yard or a neighbour’s yard, I know they were cared for well, fed nothing but grass or appropriate feeds for that breed (no commercial feed), and that they were dispatched quickly and humanely.

The highest honour I can do these animals is to eat them and live well, I figure. If I lived in Hawaii, I could consider being vegetarian. Here? A sustainable diet where I live needs meat in it. So … I choose to eat meat *mindfully*, rather than not at all. For me, that’s how it worked out.

Just something you may wish to add to your considerations. Depending where you live, some of the issues may be different, of course, but it’s another perpsective for you, anyway.

Read the documents-the real folks behind this awful monster are the big ag companies. Small farmers who can not afford the electronic tagging devices and cost to implement the system will be pushed out of business.

The actual number of people who have died from bird flu is so small it is almost not a blimp on the radar. This is fear mongering. There is another reason the government wants to track all of your animals.

1. I haven’t read anything yet that suggests how I can feed them completely off what I produce. Buying-in food defeats the purpose of being as self-sufficient as possible. I don’t think I can easily find organic feed around here, and I don’t want to enrich big corporations selling non-organic feed that includes GE ingredients, or force the animals to eat the GE food, or eat the products made from GE food.

2. If I don’t have males, I won’t get more animals after the first ones die. If I do have males and breed the animals, I’ll get some male offspring. Traditionally most of the males are eaten, the rest become the next breeding stock. I can see the sense in that. Philosophically, however, it suggests to me a particular attitude about males: that they are expendable. I keep wondering if this practice doesn’t have something to do with our willingness to send young men off to war (yes, I know we’re sending young women to war now too, but we sell military service more heavily to our sons), or to mining jobs or any of the other horrid practices that men have gotten stuck with.

3. If I don’t breed more animals myself, someone else has to do it. That means I’m pushing the job of slaughtering the excess males off onto them. See point 2, but it’s worse because now I’m making someone else do it on my behalf.

4. I practice Zen Buddhism and took a vow not to kill … but I still eat eggs, cheese, butter, and yogurt. Sigh … making someone else kill on my behalf is probably worse than killing the animal myself. See points 2 and 3.

Any comments on the above?

Bees and worms seem to be about all that is left. I have a worm bin in the basement. I use the castings to make the mix I start my seeds in; it’s the best stuff, no fertilization needed because the castings do that. I’m thinking about bees but have to get over my fear of being stung.