Meadow Musings: Livestock

Hi everyone.  Meet Boot:

 

Her head is not always upside-down like that.  It's just that she likes to keep very clean, and she was preening during the whole photoshoot.  That first picture, of course, is from when she was a wee beepy thing, in a season we like to call "Spring".  Look how green it was!

Here are some important things for you to know about Boot:

1. She is an Indian Runner.  Sometimes these ducks are called "bottle ducks" or "bowling pin ducks" because they stand up so straight and tall (like in that baby picture).  They don't really waddle; instead they jog along quite smoothly.  She does not stand up as straight as some runners, because A) she was raised with normal ducks instead of straight-up ducks (peer pressure, dontcha know), and B) she is pretty chill.  She'll stand up right straight when she's scared, but usually she's pretty happy and stands only part-straight-up.  
   
2. She is missing the webbing on one foot.  She was actually named Boot before this happened, but at some point in her teen months, she managed to get the webbing sliced through on her left foot.  She never limped, and so we didn't even notice until it had already completely healed.  She doesn't seem to care, and as far we know the other ducks don't give her grief about it.
3. When Indian Runners are excited (like lettuce is being handed out!  Or we're filling up a fresh wading pool!), they stand in place and hop back-and-forth on their two feet.  It's awesome.
   
   
   
   
4. Boot is the most adventurous of all our ducks.  She only weighs 1.5 lbs (2 lbs in the middle of laying season), but she is always the first to venture through the snow, or up onto the porch, or through the woods to the stream.
5. Even though she is so small, she lays 3oz eggs (that's 150% the size of your average chicken eggs) just like the bigger ducks.
6. She thinks you are a sucker.  She will take none of your guff.
   
   
   
   

Over at Pentagram, DJ Stout has redesigned Dairy Today (an industry magazine).  The old magazine looked like... well, it looked like every other trade magazine.  The new one does not.  It's enough to make you want to subscribe.

Along with the great new typography and candy-colored backgrounds, every cover has a cow glamour-shot.   It's so great.  Click through to the original post -- there's a hilarious video of the crew trying to art-direct the cows for the photoshoot.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:  Adventure Chicken! 

Notice the chicken in the bottom right of that picture.  What is she doing there?  What compelled her to walk all the way up the path from her house, and then turn down the side path towards the propane tank?   Chickens don't even like snow, or being apart from their flock.  Those paths have 18" walls -- she couldn't see over them (and even if she could, it's all just snow).  She found her way home eventually, but that is truly one adventurous chicken.

Our good friend Kath asked a few chicken questions over here on this post about the plucker, and that reminded me:  Hey!  I wanted to write about the chickens!  So here we are, talking about chickens. 

1. How hard is it to raise chickens?
   For us, raising chickens was pretty much no work at all.  Because we already have ducks, we had a place for the chickens to live (and keep them safe at night), and it was already part of our daily routine to go out each morning and let everyone out for the day, fill up clean water, refill food, etc.  I would guess that it added 5 minutes a day (so, 20 minutes instead of 15) to add 17 chickens to our flock.  Obviously, if you didn't already have livestock, it would change your life a bit more. 
   
   In general, though, once you have a safe house for them, the rest is pretty easy.  All those chicken books make it sound like chickens are these delicate little flowers, apt to catch colds and faint at the drop of a hat.  Well, no.  They're big funny (relatively) hardy birds.  Don't let a fox get them, and they'll be fine.  (If anyone wants to know more about poultry housing, just ask!  I could go on all day.)
   
   
2. Cost Breakdown 
   We were keeping pretty close track of our chicken expenses for a while, but then we stopped caring.  So this is a guess on costs, but I think it's fairly accurate.   The chicks themselves (15 + shipping -- they sent us 2 extra, so we started with 17 birds) were $40, food averaged about $10/week, and bedding (shavings/straw/etc) totaled maybe $15.   We slaughtered the first batch at around 12 weeks (strictly speaking, these birds were full-grown at 9-10 weeks).  So if we add in a few extra dollars for intangibles (running a heat lamp, etc), let's say that's $200 total.   That's $12.50 / chicken.
   
   
3. How does that compare to other happy tasty chickens?
   A) In our area, an H.T.Chicken runs about $15.  BUT!  That's $15 for a 3.5lb bird.  Our smallest hens dressed out at 5lbs, and the roosters (we ended up with 12 roosters of the 16 birds) are 6-7lbs.  So price-per-pound is almost half of a store-bought H.T.Chicken.  That price even makes our own pretty competitive with industrially-raised chickens, though obviously that's not really the point.  The size is actually kind of comical -- we cooked two thighs-n-legs last night, and they weighed in at 1 full pound each.  That's alot of food.
   
   B) These birds taste good.  Really good.  I've never had a chicken that tastes like this, honestly.  Some people say they taste more "chickeny", and they do.  It's almost like eating turkey.  In fact, the only bird I've had that compares is the turkey we had for Thanksgiving, which was a heritage breed raised by one of our dinner guests.
   
   
4. Did any birds get sick?
   You might notice that my bird numbers vary between 16 and 17, depending on what time period I'm talking about.  We had one bird get sick in some vague "medicine isn't helping" kind of way.  We killed it.  It was awful, because we hadn't, at that point, learned how to slaughter properly.  Let's just say:  try to avoid that. 
   
   In general, I wouldn't have any problems giving medicine to birds you want to eat -- Terramycin, which is a farm-brand-name for oxytetracycline, is available at most feed stores, and has info right on the package about how long it stays in the body of different types of animals.  It's not very long -- something like a 3 day waiting period for poultry.  Treating a sick chicken is not at all the same thing as giving all your birds preventative blanket-antibiotics.  Terramycin totally saved Guillermo's (one of the Cayuga ducks) life after she was attacked by a bobcat, so I have a fondness for the stuff.  Also, it is mad cheap.  Like $4 for a year's supply.
   
   
5. Did you give them organic feed?
   Our birds got plain old feed.  We have two really good feed mills nearby -- sometimes the birds got Poulin Grains, but mostly we gave them Morrison Feed.  The Morrisons have a family-run feed mill about 15 miles from us, and their feed is really beautiful -- full of big chunks of grain and it smells really sweet, like good fresh flour.  The birds like it.  The Morrisons also sell organic feed (all of Pete & Gerry's hens -- also a close neighbor -- eat it), but we figured that: Hey, we know that they're eating good food, and they're roaming around the yard eating bugs and grass and stuff.  Organic wasn't as important to us as the proverbial 'happy'.
   
   
6. What about the part where you have to kill them?
   Well, yeah.  That part is not great.  Honestly, it was not as bad as I (a surburb-raised gal) thought it would be.  I'm pretty squeamish around blood, and was frankly expecting to spend most of the day lying down with the vapors.  But the very first thing you do after killing the bird* is to remove its feathers, and then it stops looking like a animal-chicken and looks instead like a meat-chicken.  Then you take out the guts and stuff, which is icky but not awful.  If you've ever butchered (as in:  cut up into pieces) a chicken, it's not that different.  The lungs are crazy looking.
   
   * I did not help with this part.  Aaron and our friend Clarke (who has been raising animals since he was a kid on his family's farm) did that part.  It's gross, but the birds really do die right away.  And then they really do flap around for a while even though they have no head.  It's odd.
   
   If you plan on raising chickens for meat, definitely find someone who is a good slaughterer to teach you the ropes (so to speak).  It makes all the difference.  I honestly don't know how you'd go about slaughter in a non-rural area...  There's a bunch of blood, and a whole bucket ("the gut bucket") of chicken insides that I carted out into the woods for disposal, and the plucker throws feathers everywhere.  It's a messy business.
   
   ** Special Note!  I am perhaps the only person you have ever heard of who made the chicken stock from The French Laundry Cookbook with the optional chicken feet!  I did not, however, cut my pounds of onions and carrots into mirepoix, because that's loony.  Who do you think you are, Thomas Keller?  Honestly.  It's STOCK. 
   P.S. Tommy K doesn't tell you this, but if you're starting from actual-live-chicken for this stock, you need to peel the feet first.  FYI.

So that's chickens.  We'll definitely raise them again.  We're excited about trying different breeds, and also establishing some breeding stock -- it seems silly to buy chicks every year, when chickens can make more chickens with relative ease.

Raising chickens is pretty cool, and I think it's more do-able for most people than they realize.  If you have any questions or comments, ask away!

Let this serve as notice that we have completed a second wiring project, one that you will not see any pictures of.  "Oh man," you say, "why no pictures?".  Well, my friends, today we re-wired a Schweiss Chicken Plucker.  A friend loaned us his, which he bought off eBay a few months ago.  It works great -- though who knows who the crazy person was who came up with the idea of using rubber fingers in a chicken plucker -- but the motor is old and the wiring was plain-old scary.  As in, exposed wired and bits falling off, and no switch, so you have to plug-and-unplug every time (in the snow, covered with chicken bits).  As a thank-you to the person we borrowed it from, we re-wired it, added a switch, etc.

Let this also serve as notice that we are down to 5 chickens; the other 11 are in the freezers in bags.  The last 5 will be dispatched (some people use the term "harvested", but that sounds a little too soylent green for me) as soon as they run out of food.  The birds are huge -- 7 pounds on average -- and totally delicious. 

Today the chickens are 4 weeks old.  They are mostly-feathered, and spend their days either huddled inside (if it's raining) or wandering outside (if it's clear).  About 10 feet away from their house is a pine tree, from here forward known as 'the chicken tree'.

We have no idea what it is the chickens love so much about this particular tree, but love it they do.  When they hop out of the house in the morning, they'll eat a little grass and then they'll notice the tree, and SQUEE they all run over to it yelling and chirping and flapping.  Then they spend all day hanging out in the tree.

Notice the sneaky chicken feet in the left of that picture.  (Which, by the way, are freakishly large.   Somewhere around week 3 a chick's feet get huge.)  Sometimes they'll try to hop up on one of the lowest branches, which will of course make that branch bend right down to the ground.    Most of the time they lounge, and take dustbaths.  Question:  How does rubbing dirt all over yourself result in any sort of cleanliness?

Getting the chicks to leave the tree at the end of the day involves a broom handle (to herd them out of the area under the branches) and lots of yelling "Chickens!  Stop that!" as they try to sneak back.  You can't really herd them properly, because they are missing both the "stay close to my fellow chickens" gene and also the "don't let humans touch you" gene.  They just wander all willy-nilly around the yard until you've picked each one up by hand and plopped them in the house.  

I don't have any weight reports, because I don't think the chickens will stand for being stuck on the scale anymore.  Since these are meat chickens, I can say:  about Cornish Game Hen sized!

In their official 14 days of life, the chickens have grown 800%.  They're huge!

They are probably not going to become enemies of Godzilla going from 1.25oz to 10.5oz, and we still move them from the poultry house, where they sleep, to their outside feeding space with a Rubbermaid container, so perhaps huge is relative.

They've also started chest-butting each other, flapping their wings while running, and scratching the ground for food with their feet -- in other words, they've begun to be chicken-y.  Chest-butting, in particular, is a bit odd, like watching teenage boys celebrate a touchdown constantly for an hour.

Their wing feathers are coming in, and their combs are getting bigger.  If you've ever wondered about that whole "birds evolved from the dinosaurs" theory, feel free to come over and check out their feet, because they are truly freaky. 

Since moving in to the poultry house about 4 days ago, the ducks have been totally incredulous that all these weird peepy things have to sleep in the same space.  In fact, they pretty much look askance at the chicks all day long.

Readers, meet some baby birds:

This is a new foray for us: raising our own meat. We've been raising ducks (for eggs) for a few years now, and we thought it was time to branch out. Since chickens and ducks have pretty similar housing requirements, we figured it made sense to start with them (rather than, say, beefalo).

We know that we shouldn't get attached to them, so we have named all of the yellow ones Pot Pie. All of the black ones are named Marsala. The yellows are Cornish cross, which is the uber-generic meat bird in the US today. The black ones are some sort of hybrid called "Kosher King", which I think is a hysterical name for a bird breed.

They came to us through the USPS, and spent their first day recovering from their arduous journey. They have a wake:sleep cycle of about 4:2 minutes, and they'll just stop and fall asleep wherever they're standing. Even if it's in the food.