Chicken Archives

January 1, 2014

Happy New Years

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It’s the start of another year. I woke up to a mild day with fog drifting through the tree branches. Now there is some sunlight filtering through the clouds. Not a bad way to begin the year.

A great way to start the year is by making tofu. It’s a simple process, and I find going through the steps very relaxing, especially squeezing the soy milk out of the crushed, cooked soybeans. The result is so fantastic that I haven’t bought tofu in many years. A dish of freshly made, still warm tofu is about the most delicious thing one could ever eat. But like so many things, if you want it, you’ve got to make it yourself.

A byproduct of making tofu is “okara” which is the leftover groundup soybeans after you’ve squeezed the soy milk out of them. Okara is delicious by itself or made into patties, or muffins or meatballs, but it’s also something the chickens and our dogs go nuts over.

The okara you buy in stores can be very dry, but when you hand squeeze soy milk, you leave enough of the moisture in the okara that it retains a lot of flavor.

According to research from 2004 where researchers compared chicken and human genomes, humans and chickens share 60 percent of the same genes. It’s believed that you need to go back 310 million years to get to a common ancestor between birds and mammals. It’s amazing that even after 310 million years, humans and chickens still share more than half of the same genetic material. It explains some deep-rooted behavior which we share.

Watching roosters jostle with each other, build up their harems, and try to outdo each other, reminds me of the way some men just can’t help themselves. They’ve got to be in control and take as much as they can. There has to be a genetic basis for this behavior. You see it in so many animals including humans.

Researchers often warn against projection our feelings into animals. This is true. You can’t even assume that other humans are feeling what you are feeling. And yet, since we share a common ancestor and share much of the same genetic material, I also believe that it’s just as naive to assume that animals aren’t like us in more ways than we imagine.

May 2014 be a wonderful year for us all.

December 31, 2013

Chickens on New Year’s Eve

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It’s a cool, drizzly New Year’s Eve. Some of the hens have a found a dry spot to rest up on the wood pile. The <a href=”http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org” title=”Global Animal Partnership” target=”_blank”>Global Animal Partnership</a> has developed a 5-Step system of standards for raising farm animals. Their highest level, Step-5, allows up to 5.5 pounds of chicken per square foot. This basically means that all a farmer has to do to meet this highest standard, is provide 1 square foot of space per chicken. It’s hard to grasp how anyone would even think of keeping chicken so close together.
I’m sure the Global Animal Partnership means well, but when you read through their standards, in many ways, it seems that they are going out of their way to give good marks to chicken raised in rather deplorable conditions. So when you go to a store like Whole Foods and purchase chicken which passes the highest conditions of the Global Animal Partnership standards, it really doesn’t mean much. You are still buying chicken which has been raised in very crowded conditions, in flocks numbering the thousands and tens of thousands, and which have had very short lives. You are not buying chicken which enjoy life like those pictured at A Man and His Hoe.
When you think of it, for a store like Whole Foods, which needs to sell tens of thousands of chickens weekly, at a price most people are willing to pay, the farmers who have to meet those conditions have no choice but to crowd their chickens together and get those chickens to market weight in as short as time as possible.
Having mother hens raise those chicks a handful at a time, giving them acres of grassland and woods to raise those chicks, and letting those chicks experience the full range of complex chicken behavior, well all of that is out of the question.
Reading through the <a href=”http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GAP-5-Step-Animal-Welfare-Standards-for-Chickens-Raised-for-Meat-v2.0.pdf” title=”GAP-5-Step-Animal-Welfare-Standards-for-Chickens-Raised-for-Meat-v2.0″ target=”_blank”>Global Animal Partnership’s 5‐Step® Animal Welfare Rating Standards for Chickens Raised for Meat</a>, you get a good idea of all of the problems regular chicken farmers face when raising chickens under crowded conditions. By reading all of the practices that are prohibited, you realize that many farmers use those prohibited practices.
For 2014, I wish that more people consider what it means that the meat they eat comes from animals which have had deplorable lives, and that they search out farmers like myself, who are committed to giving the chickens they raise, a most wonderful life.

December 28, 2013

Late December Notes

You never see such beautiful eggs from an industrial chicken farm.

It’s almost time to call it a day. These chickens are taking a break from a day of foraging for food. Soon they’ll be in the chicken yard, high up on their roosts, settling in for a long, winter night.

December 28, 2013

Nine Day Old Chicks

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At nine days, the chicks are already adept at scratching and preening. The great thing about having a mother, is that she is always nearby for a warm place to rest. It’s late December and hovering around 40 degrees F, but with a mother nearby, the cool weather is just fine for these lucky chicks.

December 27, 2013

Incredible Eggs

Until I started raising chickens I had no idea eggs could be so beautiful. The variety of shapes, sizes, and colors in endless. There are few things more magical than holding an egg that is so fresh it is still warm. Nothing compares to the taste of an egg that is minutes old.

The powers that be have decided that consumers don’t need to know how fantastic eggs can be. They want you to believe that an egg is an egg is an egg, and that it doesn’t matter how old it is. Nothing could be further from the truth. The eggs from chickens which run around and exercise all day are so rich you don’t need to salt them. Their yolks are so thick and golden, that they taste incredible even raw. And if you want to make a soufflé so fluffy it practically floats away, you need an egg laid that day.

But when you need to produce eggs by the millions and millions, and make them as cheap as possible, the only way to do it is to cut costs, streamline operations, and make everything the same. Any sign of uniqueness is erased. What ends up on the store shelves are endless cartons of nearly identical blandness.

When you go to the supermarket and shop for eggs, you encounter racks and racks of identical looking eggs. You’ll never see a date as to when the eggs were laid. You’ll never see the name of the hen which laid the egg. If they are USDA graded eggs, you will see a 3 digit number which tells the day of the year (January 15 is 015, February 20 is 051, etc.) the eggs were washed, graded, and placed in the carton, however this may not be the day the eggs were laid. So you really have no idea when that egg was laid. I’ve often wondered why the large egg producers don’t want customers to know when their eggs were laid. I’m baffled as to why consumers don’t demand to know when the eggs they are buying were laid.

All this mass production and efficiency obscures the incredible variety of eggs chickens lay. It takes the fun out of getting eggs. Every carton is the same as every other carton. When you open it up, there are no surprises, nothing to make you smile. You have no idea that even the same chicken will lay a slightly different day each time. The size, shape, and shade varies slightly. Gathering the eggs throughout the day is an adventure. What did Lucky lay today? Where did Happy lay her egg this morning? No wonder so many people are bored out of their minds.

Nadia Arumugam of Forbes wrote an interesting article Why American Eggs Would Be Illegal In A British Supermarket, And Vice Versa. It’s an interesting read and one wonders how standards in developed countries can be so different.

Another good read from Forbes, is Industry has sway over food safety system by Christopher Doering.

December 26, 2013

Seven Day Old Chicks

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The chicks are seven days old now. The mother has brought them out to feed with the other chickens. It’s a sunny, beautiful day today and she may take them outdoors today for the first time.

December 26, 2013

Six Day Old Chicks

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When a mother hen senses danger, she’ll spread her wings and puff up, doubling the size of her appearance. She starts showing this behavior even before her chicks hatch. While she is incubating her eggs, she’ll come off the next once a day to eat and drink. A brooding hen will often puff up around other chickens as if she is protecting a brood.