Each Morning Brings New Horrors

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Our farm is under siege by one or more raccoons. At first, I suspect, they were just taking eggs, but yesterday morning, we lost four full grown chickens. One was eaten on site, two more were just killed, and one is missing, perhaps dragged off somewhere. We made sure that coop was doubly secure last night, and checked all the others. Not much to do about those pasture pens, though.

This morning, out there in that pasture, the nearest coop had damage to the door covering, like there had been a large weight on it. We couldn’t see any loss of life, though. A little farther along, we found a small dead chicken in front of the coop with the largest birds. At first, I thought the raccoon fished it out of the first pen and just ate it up here. But then, we got to the last coop, and the carnage was awful. We lost at least eight birds in an attack last night. They just kill for sport, these raccoons. They eat some, but others, they just maul and leave for dead.

Davey spent last night, till about 11:30, up on the roof, waiting for this monster to arrive, but I think they’re attacking in the early morning. I’m just sick over these attacks. Raccoons are not merciful, and we won’t be, either.

About Our Yogurt

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In anticipation of having three cows in milk this summer, and having no place to store that much milk, and having no particular talent or skill or desire for making cheese, we purchased a cream separator. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but somehow, it spins the full fat milk through a series of little cones, and cream comes out the top spout, while the skimmed milk comes out the bottom. The cream becomes butter, mostly, and we feed the skim milk to the pigs and chickens.

Interesting fact: Did you know skim milk was considered unfit for human consumption till around WWII? We still consider it unfit here at our house. :-)

Pigs and chickens are the most expensive animals to feed on the farm, relative to what they return in meat or eggs, so we were really looking forward to the skim milk for cutting feed costs. Pigs love it liquid, but chickens prefer their milk clabbered (semi-solid yogurt consistency) so I leave it out on the counter for 24 hours before feeding. On Day One, I sniffed it and noticed right away that it smelled quite pleasing. “You know,” I said to no one in particular, “this smells an awful lot like yogurt.” I got a spoon and pulled out a little sample. “This tastes an awful lot like yogurt!”

So my chickens have been dining on yogurt every afternoon, and it has done wonders for their health. This is the first year we are raising them like this and I was really worried about diseases just from overstocking. Our pens are 10′x10′, stocked at about 35-50 birds per pen. By comparison, Joel Salatin, who is generally credited with developing the pasture-based method for raising birds, stocks 100 Cornish cross (grocery) birds in 12′x12′ pens. I had planned from the start to stock them at half his rate for a few reasons:

a) By the time Cornish Cross birds reach slaughter age at 8 weeks, they can barely move. I have some personal experience with this, so it’s not just docu-drama hearsay. They are really too big to support themselves by then. Mine are active birds. I wanted them to have enough space to move in their pens.

b) My heritage birds are slower to grow out than Cornish Cross. Cornish birds might spend two weeks on pasture, by the time they leave the brooder. Mine won’t reach slaughter weight till 16-20 weeks, spending 10-14 weeks on pasture. Seems like an awful lot of time to be stuck in close quarters.

Even with only 40 in a pen, though, it seemed, by the smell of their manure, that they were too crowded. (You can tell a lot about a person by paying attention to their poop!) I was worried about taking losses from whatever was ailing them. However, shortly after we started feeding them our naturally cultured yogurt…no more smell! Not all of the chickens go for the yogurt right away, but several of them prefer it over the grain and I assume they know what they need better than I do.

As for us, we don’t eat the natural yogurt, because we eat the kefir, and there is only so much milk a person can consume in one day. Also, we don’t believe skim milk is fit for human consumption (or, at least, it tastes gross), and this natural yogurt culturing does not seem to happen with full fat or hand skimmed milk.

I was going to take some pictures for you this afternoon, but a sudden thunderstorm blew up and we had to hurry up to get the animals secured before it was too late. So, no time for pictures! Also, I gave up coffee cold-turkey this morning, and I’m just not in the mood. :-)

Meditations on the 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time

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“God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” Rom. 5:8

Davey has often told me that soldiers don’t fight for a country or for a cause; they fight for each other, and they die for each other. And I know that he served his tours in Iraq for me and for our children, not for some unreachable, noble theory like freedom or democracy or justice. And if he’d died, he would have died for us, and for his fellow soldiers, not for his nation.

For myself, I wondered in my early days of motherhood if my love for my child was strong enough to overcome my instincts for self preservation. Did I really love her enough to die for her? In a way, it was a sort of good fortune for me that, when we were visiting Davey’s parents, their house burned down. We were inside when the electrical fire started, and I knew then that I surely would have died trying to save Brenna. When I tell my children that I would die for them, they know it’s true.

It’s both reassuring and terrible to know that someone loves you enough to give up his or her own life for you. It’s reassuring in that a love that strong can stand any kind of disappointment or betrayal or even abandonment. It’s a love that can’t be broken, that won’t compromise, that never yields. It’s a love that forgives all things and then remembers them no more. But being the object of such love is a terrible thing, too, in that your life can no longer be yours alone. You owe a certain debt to the one who loves you.

God knows none of us deserves that kind of devotion, and yet there it is, like a man’s love for his bride, and a mother’s love for her child, unreasonable, fierce and protective, always seeking the good of the one who is loved. I read once (C.S. Lewis, maybe?) that Christ suffered not for the salvation of humanity in general, but for each one of us in particular. It was – is – personal for Him who knew us from the beginning of time. And that love would have compelled Jesus to the same action even if I was only person ever saved by it. To be loved like that, that has to change a person, doesn’t it?

I do it anyway – I can’t hardly help it – but I sure do hate to disappoint Him.

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Chickens On Pasture – An Update

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We’ve got 114 birds out on pasture right now, and I’m really, really happy with the amount of food they’re consuming and their rate of growth.  We’re feeding them a combination of grains and scratch feed (which is primarily corn, but also contains various seeds) along with about a half gallon of naturally occurring yogurt each day.  (More about that yogurt tomorrow!)  The yogurt has noticeably improved the health of the flock, so I’m really glad we have that surplus milk supply. They’re also doing a great job consuming the weeds which are choking out our forage grasses. I think the pasture should be much improved for having had chickens on it.

We plan to harvest the first of the birds in July, and I’m hoping that they’ll dress out to around 4 pounds each, but I think it’s more likely they’ll be between 3 and 3 1/2.  Because we’re aiming for a sustainable farm, we need to be able to produce our own birds year after year, so our biggest, bestest birds at slaughter time will be held as breeding stock for next spring.  Another hope: After a few years of breeding, we’ll have a homogenous hybrid flock of faster growing, well-fleshed, heritage birds.

The photo above is Pen #3 with the youngest birds, mostly Wyandotte-Brahma or Wyandotte-Faverolle crosses, with a few New Hampshire roosters thrown in for good luck.  In the background, you can see Pens #1 and #2.  The birds in #1 are nearly ready to harvest.  I’d hoped to process all 114 birds in one day, but there is such a difference in their sizes (though only about a month in ages) that I think it’s more likely we’ll have two.  We can currently process them at the rate of about two birds every six minutes, which isn’t too bad, actually.  However, with this volume of birds, that’ll take us too long on processing day, resulting in reduced morale and possible mutiny of our work force.  Which is why I plan to train two more children in the art of chicken gutting.  With four at the gutting station, we can double the speed of our line.  The kids are excited.

In Which I Blame Every Thing On My Sister

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So my little blog here used to be hosted by Yahoo, but there were really a lot of limitations and they charged me a whole lot of money each year to put up with them, and I was just all around sad about the whole website thing.  So when my annual renewal came due, I called my slightly more web-savvy sister and said, “Do I pay them for another year or jump ship?!”  She told me to jump ship, so I backed up my site, signed up with her recommended host, and told Yahoo I was leaving for good.

And then the whole world came crashing down on me.

Well, actually, they just gave me an unusable file of all my blog data and it’s all lost forever. Very dramatic.

I must tell you that I’m trying very hard to be reasonable about the loss.  It’s a blow, but I’m really trying to keep it all in perspective.  I mean, it’s only four years worth of stuff – the rest is still at Blogger.  And what’s four years of memories?  Nothing, really.  I mean, before I blogged, I just had to remember.  It wasn’t too bad, before blogging, was it?  That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

There’s a chance I can still recover it all, but in the meantime, I’m just moving on.  It’s summertime on the farm, after all, and there is only so much time available for messing around with lost blogs.

I hope the four of you who have been wondering where I went see this post.  I’m not entirely sure the feed will still work, but I miss you.  Catch up later?  Okay, then.

PS: I don’t really blame my sister.  :-)