Now on one hand, I think that’s a good idea. There are many compelling reasons to keep chickens. First of all, industrial chicken and egg production is one of the filthiest, most inhumane, most grotesque industries of all time. You probably already know that the chickens are essentially tortured during their short lives, living in filth, crammed in tiny cages, etc… I won’t bother reiterating what we all already know, but if you buy eggs or chicken at the supermarket, you are, with your dollars, saying, “I’m ok with torturing animals and polluting the planet just so I can have meat and eggs.” Organics, industrial kosher and “free range” (which really doesn’t mean what you think it does) are marginally better, but much more like industrial production than not.

So what is a person who likes to eat eggs and the occasional bowl of chicken soup to do? If you raise four laying hens in your backyard, you will average 2 eggs per day – enough for a household of four to have an egg each every other day. 8 hens, which would fit comfortably in your average suburban backyard, will keep you in all the eggs you want much of the year. Eggs are a superb source of protein, and quite delicious. They enhance most baked goods.

In addition, you will get chicken manure (in industrial concentrated production, chicken manure is a problem – in your yard, it is a blessing on your garden), and when the hens get older, and stop laying so well, if you are brave about this sort of thing, you can make chicken and dumplings out of them. Or you can keep the hen as a pet. They are friendly things, make pleasant noises (you don’t need a rooster to get eggs, and in fact most people in close proximity to neighbors shouldn’t keep a rooster) , and good natured. Children can pet them, and there isn’t a child or adult in the world who doesn’t get excited when they find an egg. All my children have grown up with chickens, but the excitement has never waned.

Chickens will eat your food scraps, including meats and things you can’t put on the compost pile, and return you beautiful eggs. They will eat bugs, including japanese beetles, slugs and ticks that pester us. All they require is an area of grass to scratch on, the most basic housing (4 hens can live comfortably in a doghouse, but for gathering eggs and straw removal you might want something else).

Now some areas do not permit chickens, but surprisingly many do, and if they don’t, this is something to take up with your town board or whoever is in charge. Get your neighbors to help – promise them as many delicious, orange yolked, lovely eggs as they want if they will help you. Show them how cute the baby chicks are, and how sweet natured a Buff Orpington hen is when a five year old picks her up and carries her around. 6 hens make far less noise, mess and trouble than one Golden Retriever for neighbors, and are infinitely more useful.  Their manure is less dangerous than a dog’s poop, they carry fewer human-dangerous diseases.  Any society that permits household dogs can rationally accept household chickens, so do not let nonsense about salmonella and bird flu deter you or your city.  That does not mean it will always be easy, but it is well worth a try.

But – and I want everyone to pause at that but – it is worth thinking about how we’re going to feed these chickens. Because a lot of people get chickens and think their work on the path to sustainability is done. But if your chickens are eating a lot of grains, it would probably be more productive for you to simply eat the grains. And if those grains come from long distances, and are not organic, you’ve done something, but not enough. If you are feeding your chickens GM corn and Roundup-ready soybeans, then you will both get out of them what you put in, and are again, with your dollars, tacitly saying “these practices are ok.”

So how do we feed chickens so that they produce eggs and meat for us, but don’t require us to violate basic principles about raising things sustainably? Well, chickens are always going to need some grain, but they can get quite a lot of their food foraging in your yard for bugs, eating grass, and from your household scraps. Most American households could easily feed half a dozen chickens more than 80% of their diets from their own scraps, scraps obtained from their neighborhood (talk to neighbors, your local coffee shop, the market, etc…) lawn and bugs.

Lots of people raising poultry and feeding them mostly grains raises a major problem – among other difficulties, besides the fact that your eggs may or may not be any lower in environmental impact than the other eggs, when grain is fed to livestock in the industrial world, it raises grain prices in the Global south, where much of the grain is fed directly to humans.  Competitions between the livestock and pets of industrial people and the world’s poor are always a losing battle for the world’s poor – they can’t compete.  So finding ways to keep your chickens on homegrown feed or food scraps, as is done in much of the world, is essential.

Now back to the lawn.  Presumably, you didn’t want the bugs, mostly anyway. The lawn might bother you a bit – after all, if you live in a suburban neighborhood, you may have one of those lawns that looks like it was painted on, and the thought of chickens pooping on your lawn may be traumatic. But if you build a chicken tractor (that is, a small pen that can be moved easily), and put the chickens in a small spot on your lawn each day, you’ll fertilize that spot, won’t have excessive quantities of manure, and get your grass trimmed too. Or, you can build them a yard where they can poop their heart’s content, and you can bring them your weeds, lawn clippings, as well as the scraps from your garden, and keep them blissfully happy.  Generally speaking you’ll want breeds of hen that are good foragers – we’ve had great luck with Buff Orpingtons, Dark Cornish and Aracaunas.

For the other 20% of their diet you’ll need grains and a source of fairly intense protein, and maybe a source of calcium. If they have open ground, you won’t need to worry about grit too much.  Now we shouldn’t be trying to duplicate commercial diets – the idea is not to maximize meat or egg production, but to get the most out of the animals without either shortening their lives or making your own life stressful.

Locally produced staple grains can feed chickens – you can grow them in your garden if you have enough room. Dry corn, for example, is not hard to grow, and it wouldn’t take much space to grow a year’s supply for a small number of hens.  Wheat, oats or millet need not be threshed or anything. Just grow them (they grow like grass, because they are grasses), cut them down, and toss a bundle in with the hens now and then – the straw will make bedding for them and they’ll scratch out all the grain. Even potatoes can be used, and potatoes are the easiest staple starch to grow in cold, rocky areas like the Northeast. Potatoes must be cooked, but you could easily boil a big pot of potatoes every few days and toss the rest to them gradually. Or you can buy grains from a local small producer.

As for protein, if you have enough land, you could use extra milk from goats or cows (chickens will also happily drink milk you let sour in the fridge.) If you can find enough scraps to support them and the chickens, you could raise either earth or meal worms in your house, and use them as a supplementary source of protein. Or, of course, there’s soybeans, if you can buy them locally. Your own meat scraps will provide some. If you have spare eggs, you can even cook them and feed them back to the hens (you don’t want to teach them to eat raw eggs, trust me). In any case, any shells you don’t need should be cooked, crushed and fed back to the chickens for calcium supplementation. With that, you’ll need only a little oyster shell or other source of calcium.

At most, you should be bringing in a small percentage of the hens’ total diet, if you are working towards sustainability – because those sacks of feed will probably not be available forever.  Might as well make good eggs now!

Sharon

 1. This Saturday, if you live near Beverly, MA and want to learn more about urban poultry keeping, my Mom and Step-Mom are holding an open house to encourage more people in the area to get chickens (I gather there are only six permits in the town of Beverly).  You can tour the coop, meet the girls, check out the new babies (six peeps, two of which are staying and four of which are moving in with my sister who already has three others), eat a chicken shaped cookie and vote for the best names for the peeps.  If things work out right, one of my sons will be dressed as a giant chicken as well (What?  You don’t have a chicken costume?).   Learn more about why you personally need chickens.  Or more chickens.  Because you know you do.

The address is 10 Harrison Ave, Beverly, MA 01915.  Questions?  Email sue.lupo@verizon.net.  More details here.

2. I’ve been getting a ton of requests lately to run the food storage and preservation class again, and after sitting down over our spring/summer schedule, I’ve figured out I can, if in a slightly different format.  I’m glad to be able to do so, with a heavy emphasis on preservation techniques, because this means that people who take it should be ready for the summer preserving season.

The class will be run online over six weeks, with new material going up on Tuesdays from mid-May to the end of June.  You don’t need a fast connection – dial up is sufficient.   The first class is Tuesday, May 19 and it will run until Tuesday June 23.  This class does *not* have to be run in real time – that is, you can follow along any day or time you want, asking questions, but Tuesdays are the days that I’m wholly available to you, and new class material and assignments will go up. 

I’ll post a syllabus later this week.  I’m hoping the new schedule will make the class more relaxing for most people, who often feel compelled to absorb a ton of material in my classes in a very short time.  We’ll cover the major methods of food preservation and what works best for each food (or each household).  We’ll also go over both beginner and advanced food storage and management – how to build up a pantry, what foods to store and for how long, where to keep them, how to find money in the budget, as well as water, medicines, special diets and non-food storage items. 

I do have a few spaces for low-income participants who can’t afford the class.  Email me if you’d like a scholarship spot (I have a few of them reserved for people who didn’t fit into other classes before, so if I promised you one the next time I ran the class, remind me).  These spots are for people who really can’t afford to take the class – because that number rises rapidly, I ask that people ask only if they really need them.  Every once in a while someone is kind enough to donate a spot for someone else – if you’d like to do so, bless you and email me to make arrangements. 

Cost of the class is $150.  You reserve a space by sending an email to me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com (please don’t use my yahoo address, simply because I am easily confused – I try to keep all the class materials in one place ) – I’ll send you a confirmation email within a few days with all the details. 

Cheers,

 Sharon

I’m going to try and keep the focus here not one whether vegetarianism/veganism is the ideal choice, but on how to make good choices. I’d be grateful if people in the comments would try and keep the focus too.

For me this comes down to a fairly simple set of principles, but ones that aren’t always self-evident, particularly if you don’t think much about where your animal products come from.

1. First and foremost, given a world-wide food crisis, and a rapidly increasing number of starving people in the world, all animal products we consume should come from animals that are not or are minimally competing with human beings for food – that is the primary food source of our meat, egg and milk producing animals should be plant materials that humans can’t eat in perennial pasturage that preserves soil, sequesters carbon and supports wildlife - not grain products that feed human beings.

This, I think is the most central point – if we are going to eat animal products, our animal products should put us in competition with starving people who eat grain as their primary food source as little as humanly possible.  If at all possible, this should go double for our pets.

2. No industrial animal products.  I realize this is a tough one – for low income people, this often means giving up meat and dairy.  But with the exception of low income diabetics, who may require protein dense meats, I’d say that this one should be an absolute policy – industrial meat is bad in so many ways that it should be the first thing we give up.  There are inexpensive options for animal products that are humanely raised – local chicken producers will sell just about all the chicken feet you could possible eat, giving you an unending supply of chicken soup (best chicken soup out there, too) for very little.  Most producers have trouble selling organ meats and other unusual parts. 

 I generally try very hard not to set rich folks and poor ones up against each other, and I know this does – rich people can buy all the grassfed beef they want (well, not quite, see #3), while low income people are probably thinking “great, she wants me to eat liver…” but the economic, ecologic and other costs of industrial meat are so severe that I can’t justify industrial meat in any way.  We’ve just got to stop eating it – and it isn’t good for us either.

For low income pet owners, this is a tough conundrum.  Industrial culled meat has made pet ownership widely possible, even cheap.  It also makes feedlots profitable – 1 in 7 feedlot cows is deemed unfit for human consumption.  If those animals were unsalable, it is likely that industrial meat production would be a lot less economic, but because these products (and euthanized pets) can be incorporated for very low cost into industrial pet food, it makes industrial meat producers more profitable.  This is extremely problematic – but so is suggesting that low income people who love and care for their animals stop feeding them, or bankrupt themselves with expensive food.  It is one thing to suggest that omnivorous people go vegetarian, another that obligate carnivores like cats or even meat-eating omnivores like dogs that are more difficult to raise on a vegetarian diet be forced to adapt.  The only answer I have is to trust that my readers will be as ethical as they possibly can, and make the best choices they can.  If you can afford to feed your pets decent food, please, please do so. 

3.  A truly local animal based diet, aware of seasons, land use and carrying capacity.  What does this mean?  Well, in the future, if we are to raise animals ethically, we’re all going to have to eat a lot less meat.  And I’m tempted to write here that we should probably all consume meat like that right now – but I know that many small scale animal food producers depend on a loyal base of customers who now are probably eating more chicken and lamb than they will be in the future.  I don’t want to undermine the systems we need to feed us.  So I guess what I’m saying is that eating animal products produced sustainably should begin with the recognition that in truly sustainable societies, meat, milk and eggs are seasonal products.  It should also include no waste – that is, if you are going to buy an animal, you should eat all of it, not just the best parts, and make broth from bones, etc… and also we should be learning to cook and eat with fewer of these products.  A study at Cornell a few years ago found that a sustainable diet that maximized the number of people who could be fed in New York State included about 2 oz total of animal products per person, per day.  In much of the world, people eat much less than that.

4. Eat animal products that support methods of husbandry and slaughter that are ethical – they are humane, they minimize chemical usage, and they allow animals to live as natural a lifestyle to the species as possible.  Humane slaughter issues apply equally to the production of milk and eggs as to meat – that is, there is no retirement home for hens past their laying years, nor for male calves borne to lactating cows, etc…  All animal products involve slaughter at some level – so find out how they do it, or investigate veganism.

What does this actually mean in practical terms?  Why did I put not eating grain ahead of humane slaughter on the priority list?  How does that actually play out in terms of different foods?

Well, in practical terms, I think this means thinking hard about where our animal foods come from.  At the root of it, we are morally and personally responsible for the way animals live their lives and die in our interest.  Disinterested eater is not an ethical position.  I know some people would much rather not know all the details – IMHO, this is one of those “tough patooties” things – the huge impact of meat, the clearing of land for growing grain for livestock, rising grain prices for the poor and their hunger - all those things are issues that animal product eaters are responsible for.  We cannot become less responsible by refusing to think about them - period.  If you don’t want to think about it, go vegan. 

I put not eating grain at the head of this list because personally, I believe that human beings outrank animals in the hierarchy of priorities.  I realize some animal lovers will order things differently, even think I’m deeply wrong for being willing to slaughter animals (this is not hypothetical for us – we eat home-raised meat).  I can accept that worldview, although I don’t share it.  But I believe right now we are facing a very, very dire situation – one that could lead to the deaths of many, many human beings, and that in such a urgent crisis (the food situation may have slipped off the papers, but it has only gotten worse), the biggest obligation we have is to keep human beings alive and allow them to have enough to eat. 

Forty percent of the world’s grain gets fed to livestock.  Aaron and I spent two years researching _A Nation of Farmers_ and everything we found led us to the conclusion that we are very rapidly approaching a bottleneck in our ability to raise food production to meet rising demand for food.  That’s a recipe for starvation, all over the world.  It is already happening – more than 125 million new seriously hungry people were created in the last year.  Many of the gains that were lifting people out of poverty have been lost, and we are expecting to have to feed half again as many people, with big appetites for grain in the form of meat, dairy and eggs.  Climate change is the big wildcard in this situation – if, as seems likely, climate change accellerates past natural tipping points, we are likely to struggle to feed our population.

The only way we are likely to avoid massive world hunger in the coming decades is to cease having human beings, their pets and their cars compete with the world’s poor for human food – more than half the world’s population mostly eats grains in their most basic form.  The same half of the world’s population spends 50-90% of their income on food – so while increased demand for meat or biofuels may merely inconvenience, as the price of food goes up, for other people it is the difference between life and death.  And human life is not something you play games with.  As much as we like meat, eating meat that has eaten 8lbs of human-edible grain and helped increase the price is not ok.  Milk and eggs raise the same difficulties.

But that doesn’t mean that none of us should eat animal products – in fact, animals can enable us to feed more people, if they are used wisely and carefully.  Animals can be raised on land that is too steep, rocky, wet or dry to grow grain or vegetables on.  Animals can make use of weedy plant materials that need to be removed, or of food scraps and food waste that human beings will not eat, and can be carefully used to reduce the need for fossil fueled tillage.  Moreover, as we transition towards a local agriculture, animals can make it possible for small farmers to produce their own fertility and make better use of their land than they could otherwise.   

And appropriate breeds for appropriate conditions (not just climate, but economic and social conditions) can make more animal protein available.  We’ve tended to have an industrial view of the world, in which maximal production is always what is most wanted.  But maximized production can actually reduce available food – for example, in _Becoming Native to this Place_ Wes Jackson discusses a study done in Germany, where local breeds of goats that gave very small amounts of milk were crossbred with high producing Saanen goats.  What happened is that the goats produced a lot more milk – but it became much harder to keep them – the original goats had only produced a few pints of milk a day, but had done so on minimal pasture, hay and scraps, and had done well in the climate.  The new cross-breeds needed better housing, better quality hay, and grain – which meant that in two villages, one where cross breeds had been introduced and one where they had not, in the one where they had not, almost all households had goats and milk, while in the one where the crossbreeds were introduced, only the fairly affluent members of the community had goats, while most farm households had no milk at all.  Helena Norberg-Hodge documents much the same thing with the replacement of the high-glacier adapted Dzo with Jersey cows.  As often is the case, industrial production means more total food production, but far less food access.   So one of the major projects we’re going to have to engage in is finding locally appropriate breeds of animals that meet our real needs.

For those who want to include animal products in your diet, there are some really good options out there.  But you have to know something about how they are produced.  So let’s take a look at that.

1. Eggs – I won’t bother going over the horrors of industrial egg production, including the debeaking, the millions of dead chickens, the manure… etc… let’s just leave it at “don’t buy your eggs from industrial producers if you can avoid it.”  But even good egg producers have some issues – while it is possible to raise most entirely grass fed meat, and some grass fed dairy, it is harder (although not impossible, but tough on a very large scale) to raise eggs on a diet that doesn’t include some kind of grain.

Aaron does it – he has an arrangement with a couple of local food producers to save kitchen scraps for him, and his chickens are raised almost entirely on the pasture in their yard and local restaurant scraps.  On a very small scale this isn’t that hard at all, particularly if you have any access at all to food waste.  We have experimented with a similar relationship to a friend who produces food, but we simply don’t travel the distance to her store often enough to avoid mold and other things we don’t want to feed the chickens, and other rural dwellers may have the same issues.

Some breeds of chickens, particularly landrace breeds from countries that are still poor, like the Egyptian Fayoumi and the Black Java have reportedly done very well at foraging entirely for themselves – they are traditionally raised in countries where no one actually feeds the chickens.  Their yield is lower than other breeds, but if you live in an appropriate climate (they would find our cold weather tough, I’m told) and can live with more moderate egg production, that’s one possible answer for home scale production. 

During the spring and summer, our hens get fairly minimal quantities of organic feed – for 25 hens, we are using less than two cups of feed a day.  I would like to get this lower, and indeed, have been steadily reducing it over the last year.  One thing that has really helped is to make sure that *every* single bite of human food not eaten goes to the poultry – down to making sure the water that the pan with the burned rice or bit of oatmeal in it goes in the pan for the chickens.  In the winter, however, they are eating more, since there is no foraging area, and we are trying to compensate for that by feeding more of our own production.  This isn’t perfect – a lot of what we’re growing could be eaten by people too, if anyone wanted to buy our amaranth or worms, which thus far, they don’t seem to, but my long term goal is to barter eggs for food scraps with my neighbors. 

Most commercial egg producers use a fair bit more grain than we do, as far as I can tell, and in cold climates, winter feeding requires a fair bit.  One strategy for minimizing that competition is to buy your eggs during spring and summer when they are flush, when hens are producing the maximum number of eggs with the minimum number of inputs, and either make egg season your primary egg-eating time, or preserve some eggs for winter.  Another good choice is to do your own experimentation with reducing grain in your own chickens.  Eggs, at this point, are the food for which there is the least-good solution, but they also convert less grain to higher quality protein than meat or milk.  So it is a mixed bag.

2. Milk – this varies a lot by the practice of husbandry.  Your local milk may be pastured, or it may not, and how much of the year, how much grain they feed, and what other practices they use vary an awful lot.  In this case, you really need to get to know your dairy person.  Unfortunately, laws about dairy also vary a lot from state to state – in some places, someone practicing very small scale husbandry, even experimenting with primarily grass fed dairy (and there are some grass-fed dairy producers out there who use no grain at all), can sell their milk, in some places (like New York) they can’t – they can’t even give it away.  What is available in your area is going to vary an awful lot.

Now here’s one place that I’m a little ambivalent about “no industrial” – industrial dairy farming is often not good, but with the exception of the really huge operations, dairy farming tends not to be quite as awful as confinement egg or meat production, or feedlots.  Most dairy farmers can’t afford a lot of extra inputs, so they aren’t going to feed any more grain than they absolutely have to, and a lot of them pasture their animals and don’t spray their pastures simply because that’s the cheap way to raise milk.  The same reasons often apply to why they don’t use BGH – the cheap way is also the good way.  So I don’t insist on no commercial milk – in fact, there’s a real chance that your local convenience store dairy is the most ethical milk you can get, if there’s no one selling direct, particularly in areas where there are a lot of Amish dairies.  But you should do your research.

And again, with milk (cow, goat, or sheep) or its products (butter, cheese, etc…) you want as much of the food value to come from grass as possible.  Permanent pasturage is an ecological good – it supports more wildlife than anything but a forest, and lots of manuring can mean that the organic matter in the pastures sequesters as much carbon as a forest.  There are areas of the world (grassland plains) that *should not be tilled* and until we develop perennial grain species really ready for prime-time, pasturing animals is one of the best options we have for marginal, eroded, steep, etc… land.  If you can find a grass-only dairy, or one that is conscious of this issue and produces its milk with as few concentrates a possible, great.  If you raise dairy animals, before you try this, do a lot of research into animal nutrition – milk production in animals (including humans) requires some calorically dense material – light graining is often necessary.  Farms that grow their own are another possibility.

Most of all, remembering that milk is also seasonal is important – if you are going to make cheese and butter, or eat a lot of trifle (and probably none of us should eat a lot of trifle ) and custard, do when the grass is lush and plentiful in your area, rather than when the pastures are dry or the snow is three feet deep.  Remember, this is normal – food is seasonal, eggs and milk and meat too.  It was not usual for most people to have ample milk in February, or tons of eggs in November.

Meat: There are a lot of ways to look at the animal slaughter question, even among people who worry about slaughter.  Some people eat milk and eggs, and either ignore the slaughter involved in these, or accept that they are doing what they can and reducing overall animal slaughter.  Some people differentiate between kinds of animals, rejecting mammals, but eating poultry and/or fish (my friend Jesse calls this “beady-eye vegetarianism” – ie, he’ll eat any animal with beady eyes, but if it has big brown cute eyes, he won’t) for various reason.  Other people, particularly in non-vegetarian Buddhist cultures, actually make the opposite distinction – they argue if you are going to take a life, you should take as few lives as possible to feed as many as possible, and would thus say that killing a cow is more ethical than killing 50 fish.  I’m going to leave fish off the table here, and I’m also going to refrain from choosing between these viewpoints.  I think that every person who consciously tries to minimize their impact, even if the conclusions they come to are different, deserves respect.  What I’m going to focus on is the impact of different meats.

Ruminant animals – sheep, goats, cows, buffalo etc…  can generally be raised entirely on pasture and hay to butchering weight, and in fact, until not really that long ago, that was how all animals were raised.  In many countries, they still are.  IMHO, there is really no reason for feeding grain to these animals at all.  That, of course, means that we’ll all be eating less beef, but in the rich world, that would only be good for all of us.  For these animals, raising them entirely on pasture is simply the way to go.  Ideally, you want them to be raised on land that wouldn’t otherwise be used for other kinds of agriculture – which means that people living on the prairies would be producing a lot of beef, lamb or buffalo again, while the rest of us would probably have less. 

Cull animals – these are the side products of egg, milk and breeding production, and they are an inevitable consequence of these practices.  If you are drinking milk, that means that the cows are having calves, or the goats kids.  Half of these babies will be male, and since any given herd only needs a couple of males (and may not need any on site with Artificial insemination), most of those will be killed, as will some of the female kids/calves that are not well suited to becoming future dairy animals.  While some very small producers can create markets for neutered animals, and while we may see some return to draft (which also creates markets for neutered animals) oxen or goats, this will probably be true for a long time.  The other category of cull animals are those adult animals that are either no longer suited for breeding, or past the age of production – old hens, rabbits that eat their litters, goats that throw a defect, sheep that don’t mother well.

And the thing about these cull animals is that culling (assuming that you don’t think the whole project of livestock is wrong, which some people do) is necessary.  That is, the breeds of animals that can live on what is available and thrive, while also producing human food in local circumstances are the product of vigorous culling – of human breeding of animals for their locality.  If we want to keep appropriate livestock at all, we’re going to be culling animals.  Some animals can simply be relocated, but really responsible breeders sometimes are going to say that this animal simply can’t improve the breed, and should be removed.

Most of us do not eat older animals, which many culls are – this involves different techniques (old hens are perfect for stewing or coq au vin, older ruminants also need long periods of wet cooking to tenderize, and can be helped with marinades), but this kind of meat eating is one of the more ethical options.  These are also good choices for feeding to pets – some high quality pet foods rely primarily on these older, organically raised animals, or you can buy the meat directly sometimes. 

Poultry and pigs are not ruminant animals – they are omnivores that should be raised on minimal grain, but will often be raised using some grain or legume foods.  Both, however, can forage and can be fed on human scraps (remember, you want good food scraps – if you pork is raised on twinkies, its value will be lot less than if it is raised on past-prime produce).  So ideally, you want your chickens or your pork to come from a producer who is getting as much food as possible from woodland (pigs can be raised on acorns and in the days of chestnuts were often raised on chestnut mast), food scraps and/or pasture, and feeds grain minimally.

 Geese are a major exception to the poultry rule – they can live in fairly cold climates on pretty much forage alone.  One of ours escaped some years ago and lived several years (before she was caught by another creature) on our local pond, surviving quite happily.  Geese are the one really grass-fed bird, and if raised that way, are a great option. 

Rabbits (though sadly not kosher) are also a great option – in many places, rabbits are raised entirely on garden scraps and marginal weeds that are cut, and can be dried as hay.  Most people use pellets for convenience, and you’ll get higher production that way (and while not perfect, alfalfa pellets are considerably better than grain, if the alfalfa doesn’t come from irrigated pastures, which can be tough to find out – actually, rabbit pellets aren’t a terrible feed supplement for many animals, instead of grain, again, assuming it isn’t California irrigated or something), and probably will want to choose animals well adapted to that form of production, but rabbit is also a meat that people and animals can eat pretty sustainably.  Rabbit can’t provide all the fat in a human or animal diet – it is too lean, but it can provide much of the meat for many people.  The problem is finding a producer, and one who uses sustainable methods – this is a potential backyard food niche, if you can build a clientele.

Hunted/snared wild meat – like eating more meat than you might eventually because you are supporting local producers and there is more local meat than beans, or because you live on a farm and have more eggs than you can donate to the food pantry, this is one of those “doesn’t necessarily work if everyone does it, but isn’t a bad idea now” things – in many cases, highly edible animals are overpopulating local areas or are a major pest problem, but because of our prejudices against eating certain foods

Remember, also that meat is seasonal (does it feel like I’m repeating myself?).  Other than very small lambs and broiler chickens in late spring early summer, in much of the country, there isn’t much meat in the spring and summer in the natural order of things?  Why?  Because sustainable meat producers mostly reduced their costs and the number of animals they had to carry through on stored food in the fall.  The ones they kept were breeders, and the babies born haven’t had time to eat enough to be eaten (this is somewhat different in hot, dry places).  Meat is most abundant in the late fall and winter, when the animals have put all the weight they can on by eating their pastures or foraging.  If the situation is different with your producer, ask why – for example, older hens may be culled in the spring or summer.  But mostly seasonal eating means not a lot of meat in spring and summer, but lots of eggs and milk, while the eggs and milk taper out in the fall and winter.  This is a natural cycle, it is normal, and it is worth being aware of if you are trying to eat sustainably.

While I consider it essential, I should add that I’m really reluctant to put the “no grain” policy in truly absolute terms, because so many small, otherwise sustainable producers are using as little grain as they can.  We are among them – we use a small amount of commercial feed for our goats and poultry.  And I’d get rid of both animals, if I didn’t think that modelling and developing both breeds and practices for low-grain, or eventually no-grain husbandry was so important.  If you know farmers making the transition, or working on finding a balance here, support them.  The reality is that deindustrializing agriculture is a big project, and all the people involved in it deserve your assistance.

 Cheers,

 Sharon

I think it is because the barn in winter is one of the loveliest imaginable places.  The animals huddle together as well on the coldest days, and they are delighted to see us as we come and bring treats, replace frozen water with fresh and make sure all is well .  During the warm months, the animals are often busy doing their things – they are hunting bugs and grazing, and while they stop a moment and interact with us, they, like us, are attempting to get the most out of the time they have on those lush, sunny days.  And then suddenly winter comes, and the animals have time and so do we.  Shut up inside (not always, but on the coldest and stormiest days), all of us, we have a shared sense of endurance and the knowledge that friendliness passes the time and warms us up.

Thus, the angora bunnies come hopping up to be held.  They are as soft as anything you can imagine, and surprisingly small – their halos of fluff make them look far bigger than they are.  In summer, I pick them up, and they tolerate my strokings, but are clearly thinking of the green grass underneath their bunny tractor.  Today, they nuzzle against my jacket and nibble slices of pear from my fingers.

The chickens make soft winter noises as they roost around the barn.  They call softly to one another, and allow me to stroke their feathery heads.  There are only a few eggs since it is the darkest season, and hens lay by light, but what there are must be collected regularly, lest they freeze, and the cochin must have her eggs taken away, for we want no hatches in this bitter season.  She pecks at me, but gently, displeased but no where near as protective as she will be in the springtime, the right season for raising babies. I bring the scraps from the house early, since it is too cold for them to be out hunting for bugs.  The duck who thinks he is a chicken, and the two hens who reside with the goats will even come out for cabbage leaves and plate scrapings.

The goats, of course, think they are people.  Their preference would be to spend these days in the house with us, alternating between sitting on our laps and climbing on the furniture.  Since we are so cruel as to deny them our company there, they are thrilled by it when we come out to milk or bring them a handful of sunflower seeds or a slice of apple.  They eat hay from my hands, and rest their bodies against mine, warming me and themselves.  At milking time they bounce and leap, shaking out the energy that they can’t burn in the pasture on this icy, snowy, frigid day. 

Zucchini, our barn/house cat has taken a break from the space behind the cookstove, where he absorbs heat, to come radiate it in the barn and keep an eye out for mice.  He hangs out on a bale of hay, leaping off occasionally to chase a hen, pouncing at her and enjoying the sudden outraged clucks of a chicken confronting a half-hearted predator no larger than herself.  He does them no harm, and the chickens probably know this deep in some small segment of their none-too-large brains, but just as my 5 year old can’t resist rising to the bait when his toddler brother teases him, the chickens never fail to give a satisfying bit of panic to a bored cat.  Angus, who is mostly a house cat but occasionally joins Zucchini in the barn no longer plays this game, since a particularly assertive hen he annoyed suddenly noticed that she was as large as he was, turned around, and began chasing him around the yard this fall.  It took weeks before poor Angus, who is about as fierce as your average marshmallow, could get near a chicken. 

All this life together is surprisingly warm – the barn isn’t very tight – it is better for their health that they have more air circulation and less warmth actually.  But the combination of creatures all lending their body heat – and I mine – mean that the barn is surprisingly pleasant.  Nor does it smell bad, if your nose is accustomed to animal smells.  The shavings and bedding absorb much of the manure smell, and it is earthy, rather than unpleasant, at least to me. 

Sometimes the children come out and nestle down in the new bedding with the goats, or settle on a bale of hay, and wait for a hen to come and sit next to them, so they can feel the feathers under their hands.  Somehow, we fellow creatures, we animals all, human, hen, cat, goat, duck, rabbit – we are all quietly settled, waiting for spring, and in the meantime, taking comfort in fellowship.  And so do I find myself strangely drawn to the quiet – and the noise, the cold and the warmth, all the pleasures and contradictions of the barn in winter.

Sharon

I personally think that there is insufficient time to remake our world dramatically.  Now there are people who would argue with me about this – and they may even have a case.  But I think there are compelling reasons to believe that we may not have enough time to take a world created for cheap energy and transform it into one that can handle expensive energy and replace much of that with renewable power.  The idea that we will be able to make a massive societal retrofit occur rapidly depends in large part on, I think, the idea that the current economic crisis is just an unpleasant coincidence that happens to be occurring just as peak oil and climate change are really hitting us.  This, I think is a radical error in reasoning – in fact, as nearly every serious analyst who really grasps peak oil gets, the economic limitations are part and parcel of our present crisis.  That is, our ability to do new things is going to be more and more constrained over time.

Which means that most of us aren’t going to be living in new urbanist walkable communities or in perfect ecovillages - we’re going to be living where we are.  Some projects will be done – but the idea that we’re going to do a full-scale overhaul of our society seems deeply wrong.  Which means that most of us are going to be limited to what we can accomplish ourselves, using our personal resources, what resources are available through family, friends, community and governments of various levels.  Much of our way of life may have been, as Kunstler refers to suburbia, the greatest-misallocation of resources in history, but is how we allocated the resources – we’ve done this build out, and we’re going to be living with the results.

While the current situation has created mobility for some people – those who have already lost jobs and homes, those who know they are in a situation that can’t possibly improve -on the other hand, for many people, the current situation works to keep them in place.  Nothing is selling in their area – so they can’t sell their house and move to another.  Or they are afraid to change jobs, because the loss of seniority would lead to making them easy targets for layoffs in this economy.  It may not be possible any longer to get back what they owe on their house – but it may still make sense to keep paying the mortgage, because they expect extended family to move in, or because they can grow food on the land.  They may be tied down by elderly or disabled family members who can’t be easily moved, by a shared custody agreement, or by need to access to certain kinds of medical care.  Family – biological or chosen – may tie them to an area, as may familiarity with the climate and region.  We may decide that strong community ties make an imperfect area (and all areas are imperfect) enough to keep us there.  Or we may lack the resources to move.

And staying in place isn’t always the best of a bad lot of options – sometimes it is simply the best option.  There’s been a tendency to rhetorically abandon areas we don’t know what to do with – inner cities, exurbs, suburbia – all of these are dismissed sometimes, as though this will magically vacate them.  The fact is that 300 million people in the US or 60 million in Britain cannot simply all go out to the countryside to their own bunkers, unless we wish to create a new suburbia, with barbed-wire, each bunker lined up in the countryside next to its neighbors .  Nor can we move everyone into cities – there aren’t jobs enough, nor room enough to grow food.  Food alone will mean that the countryside and suburbs (near the city markets, often built on good farmland) will have to be populated – and the cities were usually cities for reasons long before oil – those reasons won’t go away.

More and more, I am advising people to stay put, or at most move to a place fairly near and like the one they live in now.  I don’t think there’s enough time to adapt to new climates and environmental conditions, to retrofit new homes and build communities – now that doesn’t mean some people won’t have to move.  But if you can stay put, I think there are some real advantages for most people – it takes *time* to build community, to build soil, to learn the bus lines, to get into the carpools, to find the cheap produce, to learn about pests and diseases and how to keep cool or warm.  Right now, I think time is in short supply.

That last, I think is the biggest reason I wanted to do this class – because even those who hadn’t planned to face hard times where they are may find themselves stuck there.  And there are a huge number of ways we can adapt and mitigate our situation – but it will be much easier to begin now.

 Sharon

It was a lovely and productive few days, which is to say, I’ve got an unbelievable amount of stuff that needs to be done ahead of me to get the house and garden back to normal, but progress is steadily being made. 

 The sheep and Xote, the donkey returned to their pasture.  They then promptly broke out of the pasture again, and went back to the front yard, where they ate 12 newly planted tomatoes.  They were put back into the pasture with some additional layers of electric fencing, and if they stay there until Friday, I’ll actually risk planting in my main garden.  The nice thing is that today is pleasantly cool and rainy, and a good day to can rhubarb sauce.  We need the rain, especially if the predicted 90 degree temperatures arise later in the week (it is really far to early for that here, and so I’d be delighted to send the expected hot weather down to you southerners, who like that sort of thing – we usually leave our sweaters out until mid-June).

This morning began with the arrival of 60 peeps (chicks).  If you haven’t done this, you can’t imagine how exciting it is to get a phone call from the post office at 6 in the morning (yes, I know that sounds crazy, but it really is).  The chicks include 50 Delawares, who will mostly be raised for meat (I’ll keep a few of the hens to add to my flock which is now mostly Buff Orpington, Black Australorpe and Dominique, with a couple of Aracauna’s thrown in, and 10 silver laced black cochins, whose purpose will be partly to lay eggs, but mostly to set on them, so I can stop ordering chicks.  Our Orps are supposed to be good setters, but we’ve only had a few hatchings.

The one fly in the ointment was that our brooder light turned out to be broken, and of course, we didn’t check this until last night.  Since the daytime temps are 60ish today, and the babies need 85-90, this was a problem.  And no one in our country towns sells brooder bulbs at 9 pm, oddly enough.  But fortunately, a couple of mason jars of boiling water, wrapped in the cut off legs of some old toddler sweatpants that were ready for the rag jars do a pretty solid job of keeping the babies warm.  Eric can pick up a bulb this afternoon, and it is supposed to be so hot we won’t need it anyway.

 The turkey poults should arrive tomorrow.  And that *should* be it for us, but there’s talk of some ducklings, since my BIL lost his to a predator.  I’m all about that – we could use the slug control.

Then there’s the longer-term critter project, the goats, who arrive sometime in July.  They currently live with our wonderful friends, Jamey and Carol, but are headed our way when their babies are old enough for the move.  Check out our future girls:

http://www.littlemilkers.com/nigerian_dwarf_goat_pedigrees/does/selene.htm 

http://www.littlemilkers.com/nigerian_dwarf_goat_pedigrees/does/maia.htm 

I’m so excited!

A quick skim over the computer tells me there’s all sorts of news on the energy, oil, food and financial fronts, but I have to do some reading before I can absorb it and pass it along.  So no bad news today – only new life, small, warm, fuzzy and cute.

 Cheers,

 Sharon

 It started with my mother and step-mother.  My mother was at first grossed out by the idea of us eating eggs that came out of the chicken’s butt (I’m not clear on where she thought the supermarket eggs came from – I think the part that she liked about them was that they didn’t make her think about it at all), but eventually had to admit that my chickens were kind cute.  But Susie, my step-Mom, well, she really liked them.  So much so that she started working on my Mom to let her get chickens.  Eventually, Mom caved.

 Well, last spring, when I ordered chicks, we got some for Susie.  She built a coop that my mother grumbles cost more than their house (she exaggerates, but it is one heck of a nice coop ;-)), and reared her four “girls” (one of them had a little gender issue, and had to be replaced, but I’ll save that story for Susie) and now my mother likes their backyard chickens just fine, happily eat the eggs - and Susie loves them.  She says they changed everything – got the neighbors engaged, gave her a new passion, was a source of just endless pleasure.   Last week my Mom was on her way out, when a little girl she’d never seen before rang the bell, and said, “I saw the chickens before – can I go show them to my Mom?”  My Mom went out, the little girl and her Mom went back into the yard, and the beginnings of a new relationship were formed! 

After the chickens came, a neighbor girl started visiting regularly to help with the hens.  She even came down to the garden with my step-Mom, ate strawberries and began to learn about gardening – all because of the chickens.  The girls have made such a difference that Susie has now taken on the project of helping other people become backyard chicken raisers.  She’s got a blog - she’s new to it, and there’s only one post yet, but I thought a few comments might encourage her to write more .  Now she has a mission – changing people’s lives, one hen at a time!

But it doesn’t end there.  Due to that little bit of chicken gender trouble, one of the babies came to live at my farm (once called “Cora” now “Cory” rules our flock with an iron hand), and had to be replaced.  So Susie and my Mom went off to a poultry auction last fall, and brought my brother in law, Billy along.  Now my sister Vicky (married to Billy) doesn’t like birds.  Billy does.  I’d offered them some chicks, mostly in the spirit of affectionate driving one’s sister crazy, but they’d never quite taken me up on it.  But off to the poultry auction Billy went, and home he came with 9 chicks and two ducks.  A coop was constructed, and my sister has almost forgiven my brother in law for the incident where the poor ducks got cold and Billy put them in the bathtub.  Unfortunately, 7 of the 9 chicks turned out to be roosters, and thus my farm becomes the home for unwelcome roosters, but that’s what pesky big sisters with farms are for.  And there’s talk of their raising more chicks this spring…

Now my other sister, Rachael doesn’t have chickens…yet.  She wants the Polish kind, the ones that look like they are wearing hats.  Not this year – they have to build a coop, and she and her husband aren’t the haphazard sort.  They are going to do things in the right order.   But they are coming.  In the meantime, my mother tells me that Rachael is going on a “Coop Loop”-  a walk to visit all the chickens in a suburban neighborhood near her. 

It doesn’t end there.  One of my best friends from college called me up last week saying they are going to get their chickens, and asking what kind to get!  Guess who’ll be ordering them and taking back any roosters ?  And then there’s the friend in a neighborhood of Boston who is checking with his zoning committee, and the grad school girlfriend who is building a coop in a mid-sized city in Indiana. 

All of which suggests to me the simple truth that chickens are contagious.  And it is one heck of a good disease to get – because the answer to factory farming is not just to buy sustainable eggs.  Oh, that’s good, and some of us can’t keep chickens.   But the reality is that if small organic chicken farms get too big, they’ll stop being able to give the chickens what they really need – enough air, pasture, light and nature – and those compromises are bad for chickens and bad for the environment.  Some more farms will be created by demand, but one way to balance supply and demand with ecological concerns is to bring chickens into our yards.  We don’t want monocultured chicken farms that raise only poultry – monoculture is never a good thing.  We want diversity – of crops, of livestock, of chicken breeds. 

Which means that the best way to stop factory egg farming is this – for people to raise a few chickens in their backyards whenever possible.  3 chickens create less mess and trouble than a dog, eat your pests, create manure for your garden, keep wastes out of the garbage stream, provide you with rich, healthy eggs and enormous pleasure.  3 million chickens in an egg farm are an ecological disaster, a health hazard, a risk for avian flu and an animal lover’s nightmare.  3 million of the same kind of chickens together means the potential extinction of valuable genes designed for backyard flocks. 

The chicken pax is the answer to a host of horrors – if you can keep chickens, and you like them and eat eggs, you probably should.  After all, they change everything.

 BTW, in July we’re planning to add Nigerian Dwarf milk goats, courtesy of our wonderful friends Jamey and Carol.  Among the reasons we picked this breed is that they are the perfect sized milk goat for suburban lots – and we plan to help get them there.  Don’t tell my Mom, but I’m pretty sure that cute little milk goats may be highly contagious too !

Sharon