Predators Around Every Corner for Fowl and Farmer

As a full fledged farmer, I tend to fall into the same state of mind that the birds I raise do. Both birds and I can easily fall prey to predators, though in a different way. 

Birds are, by nature, prey animals. Every where you turn, everyone and everything is looking for a free chicken dinner. Predators such as fox, coyote, possum, raccoon, skunk, mink, hawk, bobcat, the stray dog, you name it - everything is out to chase those little feathered creatures until they stumble and become lunch or wait until the birds roost for the night and the sneaky possum, mink, raccoon or skunk enters the coop and either takes a whole bird or mortally wounds the bird beyond survival. 

Chickens don't move very quickly for these predators. The average chicken runs about 10 miles an hour whereas the average fox clocks in around 30 miles an hour. One can see how very quickly a romp in an open field can turn deadly for a unsuspecting chicken.  

Should a chicken be ill or otherwise weakened, that particular fowl will not let on at all that it is weak until it absolutely cannot continue. Predators are stronger, faster, and more cunning than the birds but if a hungry coyote can pick off an easy meal - the canine will go for it. Because of this reason, it's not usually known that a bird is sick until it's almost near death. Showing weakness means that particular creature is not long for the world. 

I've discovered this with the human side of farming as well. As farmers, we are often faced with surmountable obstacles; weather, finances, livestock issues, laws and regulations and even pressure from fellow farms and farmers to be the best at what we've chosen to produce. 

When it comes time to selling product, we have to be sure that ours is the shiniest, the best quality, the biggest, the most delicious, etc. Combine this pressure with the long hours it takes to care for animals and it is easy to see why farming is known as a very high stress profession. Additionally farmers also have some of the highest depression/suicide rates as well.

All this said though, farmers act like the chickens - rarely will you see a farmer admit that they're struggling emotionally or financially on the farm. To do so would show weakness in a competitive business where you know that the farm next door will certainly take over where your farm has fallen short. It's not due to viciousness, it's due to survival. 

This is why it is so important to support your local farms. Give those farmers that boost of hope that they need to carry through the next struggle they face. If you have a moment, stop and ask how the farm is going and truly listen to what they're saying. Oftentimes we don't need a solution - we just need to tell someone about the roof that's leaking, or the aggressive rooster that chases us when we go to collect eggs.  

Sometimes, you won't get anything out of a farmer how things are going and that's okay too. You've just stopped to allow us to bring you into our wonderful world of ups and downs, successes and failures. It just lets us know that you care.

Until next time...

Clever Birds Create Egg Hunt from Time to Time

All of the rain recently has made mowing the grass an almost twice a week chore. Mowing grass out at the farm isn't just a 15 minute job either - running the mower at high gear and not stopping at all, it still takes about three hours to get all of the weeds knocked down. 

When I first moved to the country, folks would tease me and say that I need to "get some goats" to handle mowing the grass. 

That seemed like a great idea except two things; 1. I didn't have fence and thus could not safely house goats, and 2. goats (apparently) aren't big grass eaters. So much for furry mowing machines. 

Since the day that I purchased my first chickens, I've discovered how quickly chickens can decimate an area of green grass if not giving enough room to roam. That first winter with the birds, at my former house in Columbus, I remember looking out back at my little 40' x 60' plot of grass and staring with both sadness and surprise that four little chickens had picked the ground clean of almost all of the grass - effectively turning what originally was a backyard oasis into barren ground filled with lots of mud. 

I've determined over the years that chickens seem very similar to hogs in that they love stomping around in mud and really don't care if they get it on their feathers - always looking for that next scrap of food. They seem to delight in getting white, fluffy feathers caked with dirt and muck and then, because they're just that crazy, they step into their nesting boxes, lay an egg and thus cause more work for me, the farmer, to have to do more cleaning on the eggs than is usually necessary. Is it so much to ask for them to wipe their feet, uh, claws, before stepping into the box?

The obvious solution to this predicament is to have fresh pasture for them to roam in and browse and, after some true trial and error, I believe that I finally found the proper ratio of chicken to grass to allow the fowl to browse through the field; looking for bugs and snipping little green tidbits off the tops of the blades of grass. Smacking their beaks with obvious enjoyment. 

It makes egg collecting so much more pleasant too - clean feathers and thus, clean nesting boxes. There is just one catch to allowing birds access to a large field. When it comes time to collecting eggs, not all eggs make it to the nesting box. 

A hen lays an egg when the urge happens and she doesn't always make it back to the nesting box in time if she's out in the field grazing for juicy insects. 

What happens then? She finds a secret spot in the field and lays her egg right there. That means that egg collecting sometimes turns into a real life Easter egg hunt. 

Time reasons during the week don't allow me to search every day for these wayward eggs, but at least twice a week I'll walk the pasture - checking the bigger tufts of grass to see if these hold a secret stash of eggs, the hen deciding to keep them from my collecting hands. 

I believe the largest clutch of eggs I ever found on one of my hunting escapades was 24. How the hen managed to hide these eggs from me for so long was a mystery but when I found the eggs I couldn't use them, not knowing how old they were, so the creatures of the field got a great snack that night of fresh eggs. 

I still marvel at the cleverness of these birds - learning so much more about them than just a tasty meal and thinking from time to time how these fowl are related to the tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur. Welcome to Jurassic Farm. 

Until next time...

A Little Chicken Talk for the Week

This week, I allowed one of the original flock hens, Gertrude, to speak from her perspective in this article on seeing me around more often and the constant quest of the chickens' search for food.  

BA-GAWK! We've noticed that the lady that gives us food has been coming down to our barn more often and NOT bringing treats every time. She's concerned herself with cleaning our living quarters (why she doesn't like the "art" that we've worked so hard to create on the perches is beyond us) and we've noticed that our food container is almost always filled to the brim these days. We've also noticed that we don't see her carrying the big water container up the hill anymore. That being said, she still manages to fill it and very quickly now - something about water being hooked up now in the barn. 

That must be a good thing because she's not as grouchy when carrying the container back into our living quarters. 

We can't help ourselves and gather around her while she's trying to work, oftentimes being nudged out of the way by her big black boots. The other day one of us got in the way and she stepped on the toes of one of my fellow coop mates. There was a lot of squawking that occurred and I noticed that the lady almost fell trying to maneuver herself out of the way. She thinks that our little cluckings and coos mean that we love her, but really they mean that we're looking for some kind of magical treats to fall from her pockets. After all, she's always carrying big bags of food into the barn so there must be some kind of secret stash on the other side of the coop door. 

When she's collecting eggs each day, occasionally she'll leave the coop door open that leads into the rest of the barn. A couple of times a few of us have tried to step into the big room to see what's there, but we're quickly shooed back into our coop. Something about making a mess and not being protected. What's a gal to do when you want to see what's happening on the other side? 

The lady carries a thing called a cell phone with her when she's in our coop and she's always taking pictures of us with it. Sometimes she does what we've learned is called a Facebook Live and she tracks us with the phone as we move about our home. I'd like to say that we're famous, but we don't see any of the royalties from such fame. How about some extra mealworms? Is that too much to ask?

Apparently all of this extra attention is due to something called a pandemic and it's why the lady is around more often. I don't know what a pandemic is, but if it's not something I or the others can eat we're really not interested. 

Somehow I think if we try to trip her up again the next time she's filling our feeder or our water container, the treats that I know she's hiding will fall from her pockets by the mounds. I just have to plot how to do that and one thing us chickens definitely have is time. Just wait until the next time she comes to fill our feeders. BA-GAWK! 

Mother's Day is the Time to Plant - Right?

Allow me to switch gears just a bit this week from talking about chickens (though my "meat seeds" are enjoying their time outside). On the farm, I not only raise chickens but also attempt to grow some sort of edible produce each year. The garden is set in an open field that, just a few years back, was a corn/soybean field.
That being said, I have tried each year to enrich the soil to make it a more hospitable place for vegetable plants. The extra spent brewer's grain that doesn't go into the dog treats or to the chickens, vegetable peelings, and the ever prevalent offerings of the chickens are put onto the soil each fall and are then worked into the ground in the spring to make the soil as rich as possible.
The first year that I moved to the farm I tried desperately to grow every type of vegetable I could lay my hands on.
Of course, this was absolutely a disaster because the ground had recently been a field of soybeans and, no surprise that first season, volunteer soybeans continued to pop up between the tomatoes, peppers, melons, corn and broccoli.
Not deterred, I planted a smaller amount of vegetables the next summer and saw fewer soybean plants. However, the ground decided to rebel and the weeds took over - choking out the tomatoes, peppers and covering the watermelons and pumpkins.
So much for opening a small roadside stand to sell official Jackson County melons. If my memory serves me I at least had a tiny harvest that season; 4 pumpkins and 2 watermelons.
YouTube has a host of videos from other people that are trying their hand at the "homesteading" thing and I began to glean every bit of information from these videos on how to prevent weeds. What I discovered was a plastic woven cloth that is fastened to the ground with landscaping staples or sandbags and blocks the ground from sunlight, effectively preventing any undesirable plants from growing. Genius!
I purchased the woven cloth last spring and put it on the ground. All I had to do was burn small holes to put the plants that I wanted into the ground. Enter the propane torch which I failed at - how was I to know that the flame was so sensitive to the ever present wind that blows on the hill?
Frustrated about the inability to even burn a small hole, the chickens took over my focus and there was not a garden last year at all.
The only way to "win" at this farming thing is to make sure that there are multiple sources of income coming in and, after attending a small farms conference this February, I decided to try again. This time, I didn't burn holes in the plastic but cut them. The ground below the plastic is wonderfully weed-free and the earthworms love the protection and warmth that it gives. I planted 6 tomato plants and a variety of radishes, lettuces and rainbow carrots. I've already gotten a small harvest of radishes. So far, I'm winning.
There's an old saying that if you plant after Mother's Day any threat of frost should be past, but this year is a little bizarre in so many ways. It appears that any of us who decided to put plants into the ground a bit before this date will need to tuck in the sensitive plants from threat of frost this weekend.
It is Indiana after all and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't get small flurries on top of everything else.
My moniker on the street is Mutha Clucker amongst friends and this weekend gives me a moment to realize how much mothers near and far give to make sure that things grow and flourish. It doesn't matter whether you're a mother to adorable little humans, fur/finned/feathered babies, or plants. Anything that grows, grows because someone cared. A large wish of thanks to all of the mothers out there this weekend and stay warm!

A Very Meaty Subject

We are watching with anticipation the plight of farmers across our nation. We see scenes of dairy farmers having to toss out millions of gallons of milk because the demand is not there, people are concerned that there will not be enough meat for people to eat because of outbreaks of the Covid-19 virus at meat processing plants, the concerns go on and on.
That being said, I've also noticed that people in our small community have stepped forward as much as they can to purchase their needed foods from our community's local farms. I've also noticed that gardens are popping up where they may not have before and the sale and demand to own chickens is astronomical. People are realizing that they need to return to a time where we grew our own food or depended on the local farm to provide the needed daily sustenance.
As many of you know, I've had egg laying chickens for over 5 years now and I think of the countless number of eggs that these birds have provided to me and to those who have purchased from me over the years. I've enjoyed gathering the eggs each day and the thought of someday being brave enough to raise chickens for meat just seemed a foreign and scary thing.
All of that changed this week on Wednesday when a box of 50 peeping cornish cross chicks arrived at our local post office.
These chicks were ordered far in advance of the pandemic so I had no problem with supply at the hatchery and I split the cost with a friend who also wanted to raise meat birds (insider tip - it's cheaper (cheeper? lol) to purchase in larger amounts.
I've never ordered that many chicks at one time so the noise on the way home was crazy loud as the chicks were chirping. Chicks can survive after hatching for a max of 3 days with no food or water, but after that amount of time, they really start complaining. A strange side effect is that I literally feel pain when I hear their distressed chirps. I can't explain it except to say that it must be like a human mother hearing her child cry when it is hungry, etc.
I arrived home with my share of the chicks (20 to be exact with an extra 2 tossed in by the hatchery to make sure that I received what I ordered alive), set up their brooder with heat lamp, water and food and gently removed them from their shipping box into their new home for the next couple of weeks.
I'm happy to say that they instantly calmed their loud chirping and immediately noticed the food and water. The noise was reduced to gentle purring (yes, chickens purr) and soft contented peeps.
The birds are adorable right now, little portly fluffy yellow bodies and the thought of turning them into meat in 8 short weeks seems a bit terrifying but I also know that the meat from a local farmer or the store has to come from somewhere. I also understand that these birds will quickly grow from cute and fluffy to smelly and feathery.
As our environment changes with the search for sources of meat and other produce, I encourage all of us to consider raising our own food or searching out one of the many farms in our community who sell all different types of meat and produce. We are in the heart of melon country after all. Stay well my friends.

Things Have Gotten a bit Ducky Around Here

Quarantine has been very interesting to say the least. I've found my days checking work email, collecting eggs, staying on top of the farm chores during breaks, returning work phone calls, delivering supplies to friends and family in need, working odd hours, it's definitely been an adjustment as I know it has been for so many of you.
With Easter on the horizon, and today being the Christian holiday of Good Friday, I thought it only fitting to bring to you the successful story of the four ducks that recently hatched on the farm.
If you have followed the Purple Shamrock Farm Facebook (or Instagram) page, you know that I have tried unsuccessfully three times this year to hatch duck eggs. Several of the eggs almost made it to hatch and, for whatever reason, just did not survive to come out of the egg.
I was about to give up when I decided to try once more. As it stood, I put these duck eggs into the incubator on March 10th, a few days in advance of the stay at home order. On March 13th, when we knew that we would not be working in our office any longer, I held out hope that maybe, just maybe these eggs would bring some hope in the days following.
As an unexpected blessing, from having to work from home, I was able to stay on top of the humidity this time and after candling the eggs after a week, I discovered that all four of the eggs had development in them. I knew the chances of all four making it weren't great, but I was very hopeful that at least one of the eggs may make it to hatching.
Fast forward to two and a half weeks into their incubation period and I candled the eggs again to find that all four were still very much alive and developing. They were going to make it to the famous "lock down" period. I knew it was selfish of me to want all four to hatch, but I also knew how much I needed (and those following the journey through social media) needed the joy that would come with four little ducklings making their way into the world.
Ducks usually take 28 days to hatch (give or take a day just like any baby delivery) and on the 26th day I noticed that all four eggs had little "pips" in them. I was beyond overjoyed.
I also learned during their hatching process that ducks take a lot longer to come out of their shells because it was 48 hours later that the first duck emerged from its shell.
The "parents" of these eggs were supposed to be Rouen ducks which are a breed of domesticated Mallard duck. Imagine my surprise when the duckling which emerged was not the traditional black and cream color but yellow!
Intrigued, I reached out to my fellow poultry enthusiasts who said that the parents could have looked purebred, but that there were genes recessed that brought some unusual ducklings to the mix.
After the 29th day, the final duckling of the four eggs emerged and I was thrilled to have two Rouen colored ducklings (the black and cream color) and two yellow ducklings (most likely will be white).
The shells now lay empty as the ducklings happily enjoy their hatch mates and will be experiencing their first swim in a week or so.
I think we can all be reminded that even in the midst of uncertainty and fear that there is new life happening all around us. Be sure to find some of that joy as we go through this time together. A very Happy Easter to all of you.

Quarantine on the Farm

No surprise that we all have been a bit "cooped up" recently with the novel coronavirus, Covid-19. Though it has made commerce interesting when headed into town, I've decided to look at it as an opportunity to grow and learn some new things.
I've also been validated in having a farm, and knowing some of the lost arts; sewing, canning, growing your own food, baking and cooking have their definite perks in a stay-at-home period of time.
Shortly after the local stores were wiped out from toilet paper, you guys, I still don't understand that one, people next turned to emptying the shelves of milk, eggs and bread as well as fresh fruits and vegetables.
It didn't take long before I began being contacted by people, who I hadn't heard from in years, asking the popular question, "do you have any eggs?"
Once again, the mighty chicken shines through.
If there has to be a time of the year where there has been a run on eggs in the stores and they are out, spring and early summer is the prime time for laying hens in the flock.
I've been fortunate that there have been over 20 eggs collected every day the past few days and I've been able to fill most orders within a few days. That being said, the eggs in my henhouse are disappearing almost as fast as they can be washed and packed into cartons.
I've also discovered something else in this whole time of sparsity. The hatcheries that usually send chicks out to a few folks every spring and fall season are now running low on their supplies of laying hens and chickens. It appears that we are returning to a time that used to exist in the past. People are turning back to being self-sufficient and learning how to grow their own food again.
I'm fortunate to be able to speak to my mom and dad every few days and as I was talking to my mom the other day I mentioned that I believe that people will be growing more gardens this year than they ever have. Perhaps because they have extra time from being quarantined at home, but maybe perhaps that they realize that they could provide for their own families and themselves by growing the food right in their backyards.
Back in 1917, growing gardens and keeping chickens was considered patriotic. Times were tough, the economy was suffering and people were encouraged to grow their own food.
Fast forward to 2020 and I believe that we are about to enter another era of people realizing that we can't "always get what we want" (to quote a Rolling Stones song) and we can fix this by growing a small garden or keeping a few hens around to provide fresh eggs.
None of us know when this whole event will truly be finished, but I believe that if we use this time to better ourselves and our community - we will make it through this. The experts say that it takes 21 days to keep a habit and I know that we will have this amount of time in this event if not more.
Me, I plan on growing more chickens and adding to my flock this year. You might even find me with a successful garden this season. Stay Strong Seymour - we can do this!