a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: April 2014

  • Living Green

    Just so you realize that a man and his hoe® is about more than just mother raised chicken and eggs, here are some pictures of some crops which are growing now. What you see here are shallots, raspberries, plums in bloom, onion, garlic, and arugula. Though chickens do a thorough job clearing out pests, they can destroy vegetable beds in no time. Often, they aren’t going after the vegetables. They usually destroy vegetable beds by tearing them apart in their search for earthworms and bugs.

    A terrific byproduct of vegetable and fruit production is mountains of compostable material. Every two to three months I start a new compost pile and keep adding to it until it is time to start another pile. Chickens are great compost workers, and every time I need to stir or break down and rebuild a compost pile, they swarm in to help. They can’t get enough of all the good worms and bugs they find in the pile. Their litter helps get the compost pile cooking, and when the pile is done, they do a great job breaking it down and spreading it over new vegetable beds.

    The great thing about growing crops and raising chickens is that you see up close what nature is. It is always changing and constantly recycling everything. There is no waste in nature. Everything is something’s or somebody’s food. And while this frenetic activity is going on, there is so much beauty to see, it takes your breath away.

    20140403Shallots
    20140403Raspberry
    20140403Plum
    20140403Onions
    20140403Garlic
    20140403Arugula

  • Egg Day

    Thursdays are when I deliver eggs to Tweets Cafe. They use most of the eggs for making their delicious meals, but they also have a few dozen available for you to buy. When I was making my delivery, David, the chief, promptly grabbed two dozen eggs to make a quiche. These are pictures of the cartons they will have available for you to buy if you are visiting them this weekend. Tweets is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

    EggCartons
    Eggs20140403A
    Eggs20140403B
    Eggs20140403C
    Eggs20140403D

  • Queen Imelda

    Queen Imelda cuts a regal pose as she spends part of the afternoon with Billy. Always calm and collected, she lays an impressive egg. Each chicken is unique. Each one has a distinct personality. Each one lays a slightly different egg. Each time they lay an egg it is slightly different.

    20140402Bstrip
    Imelda02
    Imelda01
    ImedlasEgg
    Billy07
    Billy06

    When you see the Certified Humane label on a carton of eggs, you may think that the hens which laid those eggs are running around on grass like Queen Imelda. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Certified Humane only requires hens to have 1 to 1.5 square feet per hen when laying hens are kept in laying houses. The requirement varies depending on whether the laying house has layers, perches, and roosts or not. You’ll find their space requirements on page 7 of Humane Farm Animal Care Animal Care Standards 2014 Standards for Egg Laying Hens.

    This means that in a 30 by 100 foot laying house, a farmer could keep from 2,000 to 3,000 hens and still meet the Certified Humane standards. What organizations like Certified Humane are trying to do is noble, but just because something has a label saying it was raised humanely, doesn’t mean that it meets your definition of what you consider to be humane treatment. Look behind the label and find out exactly what that means.

    I asked Certified Humane whether they allowed de-beaking and this is what they emailed me:

    De-beaking is prohibited by our program. Our laying hen standards allow beak trimming if it occurs before 10 days of age, and here is the reasoning behind that:
    In flocks of cage-free laying hens larger than 120 birds, there is a tendency towards feather pecking and cannibalism. Feather pecking is a natural behavior for birds (actually the source of the term “pecking order”), whereas cannibalism occurs when the birds attack another bird until it is dead. Most of the food production flocks are much larger than 120 birds, unless they are being raised by a backyard farmer or hobbyist.
    Beak trimming is performed on birds prior to 10 days of age. Our scientific committee developed this standard as a way to combat cannibalism in cage-free flocks while minimizing discomfort for the birds. There have been studies done which show that trimming just the tip of the beak at that age causes only momentary discomfort, with no long-term discomfort or ill effects. The birds are still able to use their beak in a full range of natural behaviors.

    In other words, they allow egg laying hens to be kept in flocks of such size and density, that the hens may cannibalize each other. So, in order to prevent this, they allow chicks up to 10 days old to have their beaks trimmed. In my view, a more humane method would be to research what maximum flock size and minimum housing density is required to keep cannibalization from happening in the first place. Of course, this would result in more expensive eggs, and so to keep the farmers happy and the consumers appeased with being able to purchase inexpensive eggs with “humanely raised” labels, the less expensive method has been approved.

    I understand why Certified Humane has gone this way. At the same time, I feel you have a right to know what it is you are buying when you purchase eggs with their label on them.

  • Billy and the Plum Tree

    Billy, the rooster who along with Madeleine, started my education into mother-raised chicken. He’s five years old and no longer the top rooster. But he’s settled into a quiet spot in the backyard where he spends much of the day. Numerous hens come and visit him so he’s a long way from not enjoying life. This week he’s devouring the plumb blossoms as they drift off the plum tree. Not a bad life for an old rooster.

  • Book Review – The Soil Will Save Us

    TheSoilWillSaveUsx150x230In her recent book, the soil will save us, Kristin Ohlson points out that agricultural practices, particularly plowing and tilling, release vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Estimates are that heavily farmed areas have lost from 50 to 80 percent of the carbon in the soil with much of it going into the atmosphere.

    “Altogether, the world’s soils have lost up to 80 billion tons of carbon. Not all of it heads skyward—erosion has washed some of it into our waterways—but even now, land misuse accounts for 30 percent of the carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.”

    However, Ms. Ohlson writes that by changing agricultural practices to those that restore the ecology of soils, enough CO2 could be pulled from the atmosphere and stored in the soil to lower the CO2 levels in the atmosphere by at least 3 parts per million annually, maybe even much more.

    The way this process works is that plants use photosynthesis to extract carbon dioxide out of the air and then use the carbon to build their leaves, their stems, and their roots. Plants also transfer some of this carbon through their roots to microorganisms in the soil. The microorganisms use this carbon to thrive, and in return, provide the plants with minerals the plants need. Through this exchange, carbon is pulled out of the atmosphere and stored in the ground. Other organisms, such as earthworms, also help store carbon in the soil by feeding on plants and depositing the carbon underground. According to Rattan Lal, Professor of Soil Science at Ohio State University, “An earthworm can drag a leaf down more than three feet into the soil.”

    In her book, Ms. Ohlson describes numerous examples of farmers working with nature to restore the vitality of their soils without resorting to synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. In the process, they are discovering that their soils produce greater yields and remain productive under adverse conditions better than neighboring farms which rely on synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. At the same time, they are extracting vast quantities of carbon out of the atmosphere and creating carbon rich soils.

    Unfortunately, there isn’t much research being conducted into changing agricultural practices to use the soil as a way to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The main reason is that there is little money to be made going this route. There are no expensive, complicated machines to create. There is a lot of research going into reducing society’s use of energy.

    “However, none of these will actually reduce the legacy load of CO2 already in the atmosphere. There are schemes afloat for doing that, but they’re expensive—consider the EPA’s plan to capture and inject atmospheric carbon into deep wells at a cost of $600 to $800 per ton. Not as sexy to policy makers, but free of cost, is Mother Nature’s low-tech approach: photosynthesis and the buildup of carbon in the soil that naturally follows.”

    It reminds me of the medical care I received eight years ago when I was having recurring ear infections. I went a number of times to a clinic and the doctor who saw me there gave me an antibiotic to use for several weeks. It was a new antibiotic cost nearly two hundred dollars per treatment. It would work for a while, but a month or two later the ear infection would come back, sending me back to the clinic.

    When the expensive antibiotic failed to work, I gave up on the clinic and went to an ear doctor. After cleaning out my ear he prescribed a simple solution that surprised me. “All you need is to mix a solution of one part vinegar and one part rubbing alcohol. Put the solution in a dropper and squeeze a few drops in your ear. The vinegar will raise the PH in your ear so no bacteria can survive. And the rubbing alcohol will dry out your ear canal.” The solution, which cost next to nothing, worked far better than the expensive antibiotic some pharmaceutical company had developed at great expense. After using the vinegar and rubbing alcohol solution for a short time, my recurring ear infection went away for good.

    The many examples Ms. Ohlson describes in her book sound promising, and give one a reason to hope that agriculture is on a path to greater sustainability. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just released a report titled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability which describes the rather dire impacts we are already seeing from Climate Change and what we can expect to face in the future. We must all work to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. At the same time, according to Kristin Ohlson, the scientists and farmers she discusses in her book, we can also reduce the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by making sure the food we eat comes from farmers who practice methods which replenish the soil with carbon.