All Creatures Great and Fabulous

I have recently realized that Farmhand (aged 9) has far more chores and responsibilities than I ever had as a child. Important work, too. If the work doesn’t get done, animals suffer and perhaps die or get killed.

I think that’s one of the most valuable aspects of living on a farm — something that’s missing from many children’s lives. I heard one parent say “Oh, I don’t bother giving my children chores.” At first that disturbed me. They went on to say they meant scheduled chores. They are required to do what they are asked when they are asked, say “clean up your room.” Ok — that makes sense. Many of farmhand’s non-farm chores are like that.

That got me thinking. In modern life there is very little critical sink-or-swim scale work for children to be involved in or even be aware of. Family income is usually just something that happens when the parents are not home. The rewards of school (e.g. getting a good job) is so far in the future it’s really an abstraction.

Then there’s the relatively new practice of having no winners or losers. All members on all sports teams get a trophy. At the arcade you get the same number of tickets whether you excel or fail.

Once you remove the reward for excellence and penalty for poor-performance what are you left with? Perhaps entitlement, ambivalence and complacency.

Maybe that explains the problem I see in young workers:  The nearly complete absence of willingness to step up to the plate and take ownership of a task or responsibility. They lack the desire to excel. They lack of ambition. They’ve simply had no exposure to these concepts.

Sure, Farmhand resisted and complained at first. One of his jobs is to date-stamp and label the egg cartons. He hates this job. He would always complain if we had a lot of eggs. Considering how much money we lost this year to predators it always irked me. Then I realized he had no tie in between work and reward. His work produced no personal benefit. Sure, he knew the price of failure, but not the benefit of success.

He was due for an allowance raise a few months ago. Rather than just giving him more each week I started giving him 5 percent of gross sales. Now he’s invested. He sees the relationship of work-to-reward and it brought about a quick change in attitude. No he looks for ways to improve the farm.

Some might object and say “When I was a kid I never got paid.” That’s true but it’s a much different world. TV and movies were filled with positive values. Our societal zeitgeist was “work hard and get ahead.” I don’t see that anymore. The farm is also not an income source, we still loose money (alas!). So it’s not like a good harvest or good season has meaning to him (until now).

I also constantly teach him, to the point of being a mantra, “bring me solutions, not problems.”

Today he asked me to teach him how to do laundry so he could wear his favorite clothes more often.

Way to go, Farmhand!

Friday morning I awoke to find several little itchy red spots on my arms and legs. I check farmhand and he has them too.

“Oh well,” I thought. Fleas. Six years ago when we had sheep we had a problem. I remember it as a very difficult month. As chance would have it we did just gain a new barn cat in the last two weeks so I thought, “ok, she must have fleas.”

Judging by the number of bites on my legs and arms there must be a swarm of fleas hereabouts. Donning my white socks I walk around the room. White socks are the best way to detect fleas. They flock to them. If you have an infestation your socks will be covered in seconds.

But not a one.

Next I check the bed. With that many bites they should be easy to see. But still not a one.

Hmm… Oh My God! Could it be bedbugs! We did spend the night at the YMCA last night for Farmhand’s fencing lesson. He did wear a fencing jacket that other people had worn. After my initial horror I think, wryly, that at least it’s a meme. Maybe not a hip one but it’s really in the news. It’s our chance to participate in contemporary culture. Zeus knows we don’t get many of them.

I grab the laptop and google furiously. Hmmm. No. Bedbugs are easily visible and we had quite a few welts. There would have been evidence if it were bedbugs.

Must be fleas. Nothing for it but to go into flea annihilation mode. All of the bedding goes in the wash, we vacuum all the carpets and spend $90 on Frontline for our new outside cats as well as our four inside cats (If they got us then they got them).

But as I’m Frontlineing “Seven” (the barn cat) I still see nothing. As I walk about her little room not a single black spot on my socks. I’m completely at a loss as to what caused these bites.

Today is Sunday and as I sit here I remember fondly how last Wednesday we spent the day harvesting cranberries in the Pine Barrens. A day spent wading through waist high berry bushes. In sandy soil. Next to a lake. In short, and area ideal and well known for chiggers.

If you have not had the pleasure, chiggers are wee little tick-like bugs that give a bit of a bite, eat a few skins cells and drop off. They leave little itchy welts that resemble more the bite of a flea than a mosquito. Happily they don’t carry disease but, for all that, they are not the type of insect one would prefer to have around for tea.

So half a day of work lost to laundry and vacuuming and $90 spent for no tangible benefit other than “I probably shoulda done it anyway.”

Oh, yeah… And wait till it turns cold to harvest wild cranberries.

Predator kills this years have been epic. Most decapitations which are usually done by Racoons, Possums, or Weasels.

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvjtoCSKuI4

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Our short (6 min) video on Chicken breeds focusing on hybrids vs. pure breeds.

It took us years to understand the pros and cons of different breeds. In our latest webcast we discuss and show some of the differences between breeds and how best to select what’s right for you.

You can also watch a larger version on Blip.tv or
download it as a podcast in iTunes

In this eposide we cover:

• What breeds are good for what climates
• Behavior differences between breeds
• Hybrids vs. pure breeds

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Range Coop

Two years ago we built a second coop to try and meet demand for our eggs. It’s a range coop with a covered run that can be moved to all four sides and the whole coop itself can be moved (with a really big tractor). The idea is to have grass fed eggs but still protect them from predators.

Once completed we didn’t have time to raise a new brood so we bought adult hens from a local farm. They were about 18 months old and fully into lay.

These hens were well taken care of and fed the same feed from the same local Agway. They were, however, never ranged and raised “cage free.”

This was the perfect opportunity to really test if there was a difference in egg quality since the rest of our flock is on the pasture each and every day, so we did side by side comparisons.

On day one, the contrast was startling. Our grass fed eggs were much richer in color, stood higher and tasted better. By day seven there was less of a difference but it was still noticeable. By day fourteen they was little or no discernible difference.

This is what I expected, and hoped, to see. Dietary or environmental changes take 10 to 14 days to manifest. So case closed. Grass fed is better. Plain and simple. EMDW (Elementary my dear Watson).

As time passed we discovered a problem with our range coop design. It was really heavy and hard to move. During a period of rain it got stuck. We broke two steel cables and a heavy chain trying to move it. All in all it took us nearly two months to shift it.

What luck, my coop is stuck.

After the first two weeks there was no grassleft to be had. They did get to spend each and every day outside in the run. I saw another perfect opportunity for a test. How would this effect egg quality?

Well, it didn’t. At least not to any degree we could detect.

What is our conclusion? It’s clearly not just grass that makes a difference. It’s exposure to a natural environment. Being outside, digging in dirt, feeling the sun. Or as we say “Happy chickens make better eggs.”

Since then we do fully range the birds from this coop and only keep them in the run if we have a fox rampage going on (happens every now and then). Though we limit this as much as possible. Once they get a taste for the outside chickens loathe any sort of confinement to the point, I believe, it will make the stressed and ill.

Dealing with predators is on of the most difficult parts of running a poultry farm. In this episode we discuss how to identify which predators are getting your birds and tips how to reduce your predator risk.

Some of the tips we discussed:

• From October – March keep your birds under a run until Noon-ish. Hawk attacks are much more likely in the morning.
• Fox hunt the most heavily around March, when they are feeding pups, and late fall when newly mature fox are setting up new hunting ranges. During these time the deadly hours are dawn and dusk. So don’t let your chickens out too early and close up your coops as early as possible in the evening.
• Trapping an releasing small mammals (raccoon, possum and such) seems to keep them away. My belief is that a trapped animal is likely to leave scent markers (pheromones) warning other animals to keep away.
• Predator urine seems to help too. You can purchase some or just pee along your fencelines (or in a bucket if modesty is required).

Links from the show:

http://www.predatorpee.com/

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Click above to play or watch a
larger version on: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5615242

Please leave a comment to let us know what you thought of our webcast or suggest subjects for upcoming episodes!

A quick recap of what we’ve learned:

• Always put down rat poison in the barn before bringing in a new brood (rats ate 28 chicks)
• Do NOT introduce pullets into a weather stressed coop.
• DO turn off your winter laying lights before bringing new pullets in (this is REALLY important).
• We’re not sure yet on this one but it may be very important to introduce your pullets during the brief time when they are full pullet size but still chirping like chicks.

EDIT: One our twitter followers suggested feeding hens pinto beans or tofu before introducing pullets as the attacks might have been partly motivated by protein deficiency.  Although our feed is supposed to have the right amount of protein these birds have been off grass for months due to record snows. It’s more than worth a try!

Links from the show:

http://www.animalwelfareapproved.org/

http://www.fernbrookfarmcsa.com/

http://www.idealpoultry.com/

http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/

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Playing around with the new camera today. Pretty nifty little thing

Old Cranberry Bog

It’s possibly one of the loneliest places in the world. Sandy soil, an endless expanse of pitch pine and only the very occasional bird call.  There’s a quiet that so serene it’s slightly menacing.

It’s made even more lonely by a setting sun… by the mere proposition of being stranded in NJ’s Pine Barrens after dark. The old stories of the Jersey Devil and murderous albino tribes filter through my memory from childhood. Chills run up my spine.

It was a late Saturday afternoon in March. A renewed spring found it’s way to farmhand’s (age 7) step with the promise of a cheeseburger dinner. It try to focus on that rather than the rapidly setting sun.

All-in-all it was a successful day. I had a bag full of freshly harvested wintergreen leaves but, more importantly, we finally found the abandoned cranberry bogs I had been seeking for some time.

I have a thing for old places. I like walking through a place and imagining what used to happen on that particular patch of dirt.  I don’t mean battlefields or places where world shaping events took place. I mean places where people just lived. Even more I like walking on such a patch of ground when I’m pretty sure that very few have walked upon it for a very long time. To me it still seems to echo with activity past.

Satellite Photo of Colliers Mills area

One such place we’ve been exploring lately is the Collier’s Mills Wildlife Management Area (WMA). I really like WMA’s because they are public land but not parks. There are a few dirt access roads here and there but they are pretty much just wilderness. No rangers, trail markers, well worn footpaths or other people around. Looking across the forest you realize how different life was. Going a mile in those woods, through the endless sea of bramble, could take hours.

At Collier’s Mill there was a thriving industrial base at one time. Several saw mills and grist mills, worker’s housing, and warehouses, though artifacts have been very elusive.

There are several bodies of water — one is a huge lake. South of that are a series of smaller ponds. We once set our canoe in one of these only to discover it was only a foot deep. Thinking this odd I poured over the satellite images and noticed that there was an unatural shape and structure to this pond and I began to suspect they were, at one time, cranberry bogs.

I love archeological mysteries and now I had one right in my lap. We made a few trips exploring and found this body of water to be much larger than we thought, but still very shallow. However we could not establish the bog theory

Bog Floodgate

On this Saturday past we found a path we had not seen before. After climbing through some woods we finally found it: the evidence we’ve been looking for. A man made dike with the remains of a wooden floodgate.

After more exploring we found two more. We also observed that beavers love these bogs and appear to have been maintaining them — one of the dykes had been breached and the beavers had patched it up quite nicely. There were also numerous freshly chewed trees so it’s clearly a work in progress.

On top of the beaver dam

Looking at the satellite photos we have more bogs to explore PLUS another mystery on our hands.

Look at the photos and you’ll see a very geometric cross-hatching within the bogs. From the ground nothing can be seen. Some even appear to extend on to land but what could possibly cause that? Stay tuned

Busy Beavers

Satellite Photo (click to enlarge)