Chicken Herder

I am not saying that we should boycott Whole Foods. I shop at WF for things I cannot produce myself or find locally…but we need to be careful that we don’t just assume everything we find within its doors is good for us.

For the last several years my wife and I have been finding local farmers who raise natural or organic meat and produce. When we buy from a local farmer, we actually go to the farm and see how the food is being raised. When you, the consumer, do this, you become the inspector, and the farmer who has integrity is proud to show you around his or her place.

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I didn’t do a lot of cost research this time, but my guess is that it is about the same as onion in the store ($2-3).  I bought my garlic from Trader Joes in what were labled 3 ounce bags of organic garlic.  I bought four packs (at $1.8 each) and it turned out that they were actually 4 ounces , so I began with one pound of garlic.  After processing and drying I was left with 5.5 ounces.  This means that garlic is about 66% water, and that, in this case, I paid $1.3 per ounce for my final product.  This is higher than I had guessed, but not bad.  Again, I’m sure one can find less expensive organic garlic along the way.  In fact, last fall I took 16 square feet of my herb garden and commited it to garlic.  So right now I have 25 cloves of garlic just waiting for spring to usher them above ground.  If they all make it, that’s almost 140 ounces of garlic powder!

Farmers Note: This took way longer than the onions.  I thought I’d knock out the 8 heads in 10 or 15 minutes by myself, but after one, I begged the Farmer’s Wife to help.  Even with both of us working I think it took the better part of an hour to get them peeled, crushed and spread out in the dehydrator.  On the flip side, that gave us an hour to talk about our garden this summer.  Time well spent.

I love real food, both for flavor and for nutritional value.  Herbs and spices are among the most powerful and most tasty of all foods.  They are also among the most expensive by weight.  With these three statements in mind, I have begun to experiment, seeing how inexpensively I can make some of the things I would typically buy pre-made.  As I experiment, I will let you know what I find out, and offer any data or tips I think might help you on your way.

We did raise some herbs last summer, but I kept no records on those, so my first experiment for the blog was to make my own organic onion powder.  I went to Jewel and saw that their upper-shelf brand was about $3 per ounce.  Their cheapest one was about $1.4 per ounce.  Neither of these were organic, and I’ve not priced organic from Whole Foods or Trader Joes, but I assume it’s somewhere around the upper range.  So I scampered off to the produce section and found a 3 pound bag of organic onions for $3.5.  So, the pre-dried cost was about 7.3¢ per ounce. 

Apparently, onions are a lot of water held together by some very pungent fibers.  Before I dried them, I guessed that they were 90% water, and I was startlingly close, but I guessed low.  Each pound (16 ounces) yielded 1.5 ounces…so they’re actually about 91% water.  Anyway, that brought the dried cost to about 78¢.  In my book, that’s a victory.  Keep in mind that the onions were not on sale.  I’m sure I could find them cheaper, and over the summer I plan to grow my own.  If you planted just a small crop of onions, you could keep yourself in almost-free onion powder for the whole year. 

FarmersNote: It took very little time to process the onions; I peeled and quartered them, ran them through my food processor just a bit and then spread them out on parchment paper and put them in our dehydrator for 24 hours.  Once dry, I just cracked them off into a canning jar.  I haven’t actually whirred them up to make powder, as I’m only grinding it as we need it to keep it a peak freshness.  A quick tip is to wear safety glasses with the wrap-around sides when preparing the onions; they work wonders preventing teary-eye syndrome. 

Next up…garlic.  It is in the dehydrator as we speak.

The point of this series is to let you get some level of familiarity with the people who have made the FarmerSam experience a pleasurable reality.  I begin this series with Dave because I cannot imagine how I would have pulled this first year off if Dave had not been on board.

 Life is a triage.  That is one of Dave’s favorite sayings.  Well, I guess I don’t know if it is or not, but I’ve heard him say it several times, and it has stuck with me.  Triage is the part of the medical process where the cases are sorted according to urgency or survival odds, with the most urgent or promising cases being dealt with first.  It implies chaos and, to me, conjures up a battle-field setting.  Dave is very busy, and has a lot of important relationships that require his attention, but from my very first day here at the church, it has been clear that our family ranks high on whatever evaluative tool he has to determine where to invest his time.  I have often felt guilty for all that Dave does for me…but I know that’s not what he would want.

Dave is a master carpenter (at least that’s what I think of him as…you should see the kitchen cabinets he made for the parsonage).  As such, he is highly skilled with his hands and with the tools & supplies of his trade, and is generous with the use of all of them.  He made my killing cones, dropped off several piles of wood and fasteners, has been attempting to innovate a new tool for pulling my pens around, has spent serious hours keeping his tractors (and their various implements) in working order, taught me to use the bush hog, has talked through numerous design issues I’ve had, helped me solve my “I have my hens, but no hen house, and it’s getting cold” problem, and figured out how to use the tractor to dig the ditch for the electric cable which will power palace.  Dave has saved me so much time and money, it really is incalculable (by my means at least).  More importantly, Dave has supported me.  He has taken me and my endeavor seriously, and has spent a lot of himself on me.  He’s an amazing example of selflessness, and FarmerSam would definitely not be where he is without him.

Life is a triage, and more often than not, Dave is the medic.

Today I found a record dozen eggs in the palace.  It is definitely taking longer for them to hit their stride than I thought it would (ie. this is a learning process).  Even so, we should soon start averaging a dozen per day, which means the selling can commence!

Today I collected eight eggs, bringing my grand total to 30 so far. Each day more and more hens are reaching maturity, meaning that we are now outstripping our family’s ability to consume them. I am going to be e-mailing those who have requested eggs in the order they have contacted me. If you want eggs, but haven’t reserved your share, now’s the time.

I’m the sort of person who always assumes the best, but is painfully aware of the possibility of the worst.  For the last couple months I’ve had this niggling voice saying things like, “Your hens probably won’t lay any eggs.”  Once the eggs starting coming it changed to, “They probably won’t use the nesting boxes.”  I know, it’s a stupid voice, but it’s mine.  Anyway, I am glad to let you know that every egg that my lovely hens have brought into the world since the boxes went up has been laid in said boxes.  Today I had three more, two of which (a brown and a blue) were together in the same bay (#2).  It’s nice to see them sharing so nicely.

This Sunday evening, one week ahead of schedule, I found three eggs lying on the palace floor.  There they were, one blue and two brown, in danger every minute from the sharp talons of the swarming chickens.  (Do the chickens have sharp talons?  Let’s play name that movie.)  I picked them up, and yes, two were already cracked.  As nice as the chicken palace is, its floor is no place to lay eggs.  I built nesting boxes before Christmas, but had not yet installed them.  From what I’ve read, the hens would not show due reverence for the boxes until they started laying eggs, and would likely have thought of them as convenient little bathrooms.  Anyway, the coming of the eggs meant it was time to get the boxes in, so yesterday afternoon I hung a vast bank of nesting boxes along one wall of the palace.  Tonight I found the first nesting-box egg in bay 15.  Tomorrow I plan to get lights in the palace to encourage the hens to lay more frequently (like more than one a day per 75 chickens, please… after the unexpected bounty of that first day, production has dropped to one egg a day).  Assuming that the exciting new lights and boxes will work their magic, I should have eggs to sell within two or three weeks.

As to the eggs themselves, they are small, as are all eggs from newly laying chickens, but will increase in size as the chickens grow older.  They have very hard shells and wonderful dark yellow yolks.  I am now feeding the hens an organic ration, but legally cannot call them organic eggs.  My plan is to charge $4 per dozen.  This is less than the average going price for store-bought organic eggs, which, while much better than non-organic eggs, pale in comparison to these.

I enlisted the help of my daughter and her friend to move the hens into their winter residence, the Chicken Palace.  The hope was that the pens would fit through the palace doors.  If they would, I could just roll each one in, open the lid, let the chickens come out at their own pace, and then roll the pen back out.  The hope was not the reality.  The reality was that the pens were about 9 inches too wide.  Plan B was to roll the pen up to the door, prop it open and herd the chickens through the open doors.  Plan B didn’t work much better than Plan A.  The chickens really didn’t want to leave their summer homes.  This meant that I got to crawl into the pens and pull them out four at a time and manually toss them through the palace doors.

The first pen went in fairly easily, all things considering.  The second one was quite leaky, leaving a trail of hens as we went.  As mentioned earlier, the hens don’t like leaving the safety of their pen, but once they are out, they really don’t like to be caught.  This gave me some quality time chasing them back and forth around Dave’s tractors.

In the end, we finally got them all in the palace and bedded down for the winter.  In a future post I will give details on the palace and my plans for improving it.