Side-by-Side Testing: This is the Age of Science!

You have to make a choice: Do you want the truth or your comfortable illusions?

Frankly, I think most people prefer illusions, because of their comfort value, but there’s a lot to be said for truth, especially when the future is riding on it! One of the most useful ways of getting at the truth is the side-by-side test, which has lots of applications in everyday life. I’ll talk about farm-related ones here.

I frequently tell people that I have “the best eggs ever.” Is this true? Well, so far it is! But I don’t just rest on my laurels. Once in a while, I go out and buy other people’s eggs, then cook them up in exactly the same way and do a taste test. Ideally, this would be literally a blind taste test, since my eggs tend to have very dark yolks compared to other people’s. In a blind test, you don’t know whose eggs you’re tasting, so your preconceptions and wishful thinking are kept in check.

So far, the results have been very encouraging — nobody’s eggs taste better than mine — though as a side effect I discovered that many of the bad things that people say about supermarket eggs just aren’t true. I’ve heard a lot of claims that supermarket eggs are old and have weak yolks, so I was surprised by the results of my first test, where the el cheapo eggs from the supermarket were just as fresh as mine and had really strong yolks, too. So don’t believe what you hear from others. Test, test, test!

With broilers, the results have been more mixed. Our non-irrigated pasture browns off in the late summer, and in one late-summer taste test, our broilers were not as good as another pastured poultry outfit’s, one which I suspect grows their birds on irrigated pasture. And some of the faux free-range chicken from California was surprisingly flavorful, considering that their “outdoor access” was more or less mythical. Normally I expect that it’s green pasture plants that give the chickens their flavor, but I suspect that there’s another way of doing it…

One interesting side-by-side experiment we made happened when Karen took a Poultry Science class at Oregon State University. One lab involved butchering chickens from the university’s broiler barn. Karen butchered the chicken using methods that were equivalent to what she uses at home, but this well-cared-for confinement broiler tasted far blander than a grass-fed broiler of the same age that we tested at the same time, and the confinement broiler had an unpleasant manure-y aftertaste that could only be blamed on growing conditions, not processing. Ewww!

The reason people don’t do more side-by-side testing is that it raises the possibility that their cherished beliefs will be proven false. Of course, this is exactly why you should do it! Great ideas only get you into the ballpark. You’re probably up in the bleachers somewhere, not on base at all. But it’s a start. You get on base when you get the details right and drop some of the baggage that we all bring to a new venture. You’re going to lose your illusions one way or another, either by refining your ideas until they actually work, or by failing. Using denial is the more natural and comfortable option, but it sends you straight down the road to failure. Testing and refining are less comfortable at first, but they reveal the path to success — reliable, ongoing success — the path that leads to a reality that’s far better than any illusion.

If you look around, you’ll see many opportunities to use side-by-side testing. The experiments are often very easy. For example, it took me less than half an hour to test half a dozen kinds of coffee, from which I discovered (to my surprise) that I don’t appreciate fresh-ground, gourmet coffee — something that has saved me a lot of money over the years.

Go forth and test! This is the Age of Science!

Off to the Big City I go

I’m spending about a week in California, on a visit to my day job, Citrix Systems. At one point I was flying to California every week (which was exhausting!) but tight budgets have kept me at home for nearly two years!

That’s left me more disconnected than is good for my work — I write the user documentation and kibitz on improvements in our super-spiffy network accelerator, Branch Repeater (and if you were wondering, no, I didn’t write the product description the link points to).

Actually, I’ve spent my whole career in something of a stealth mode — a computer engineer by training, technical writer (or writing manager) by job title, general guru and architect by inclination. When I was at Activision back during its glory days, my job was discovering all our game designers’ design secrets, duplicating them, and distributing what I’d learned to our other designers. Heaven! Pretty soon I wasn’t just writing up what had already happened, but was making things happen. And it’s been like that ever since.

(Trivia note: I wrote the last piece of code for the Atari 2600 game system ever shipped by Activision.)

Karen will be holding down the fort while I’m gone. I used to live in the Bay Area, where Citrix is, and I’m sure I’ll be hooking up with some old friends.

Raccoons Cause Trouble, For a While

If you’ve had chickens for a while, you loathe raccoons. If not, you will. Here’s why:

A while ago we started losing 1-3 chickens a night. Some were completely eaten, others barely touched. This is one of the more infuriating aspects of predators: they don’t have an “off” switch. Instead, they keep killing until they run out of targets.

In the wild, their prey scatters and the predators only get one or two victims. But a fox or a raccoon that squeezes into a closed henhouse will kill your entire flock.

That’s one reason I use open housing — no doors, and one side open — so the chickens can scatter. (Open-front housing has other advantages, which you’ll see when you read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses.)

How did the raccoon get in, in spite of my electric fence? Different ways, it appears. There was only one well-defined game trail, but when I adjusted the electric fence so that anything using it would surely get zapped, the losses continued. Raccoons have no fear. A dog or coyote that gets zapped by an electric fence will never come near it again, but raccoons will prowl it endlessly, looking for spots where it can squeeze under. They can squeeze pretty flat, and if you put the fence wire too low, it shorts out. Farming sounds so easy! But I’m sure  you agree that farming is no panacea.

When adjusting the fence didn’t work, I set snares. Snares are pretty easy to use, and by placing them only on game trails heading towards your all-night chicken buffet,  you can see how they can be very selective,  nabbing only the miscreants. After a few nights of nothing, we caught a single raccoon. And the losses stopped.

All that carnage from one smallish animal? Don’t tell me Nature is kind!

In the bad old days, there was a Federal bounty on just about anything that moved, including raccoons. And old-timer told me that the bounty and the price of pelts paid for his pack of coon hounds. One result was that chicken and sheep farmers had little to fear from predators.

When the bounty dried up in the Seventies, so did the hunting and trapping, and the raccoons, bobcats, and coyotes became an ever-increasing threat. Even since I started raising chickens in 1996, things have gotten much worse. Benton County keeps cutting the amount they’re willing to chip in as matching funds for the Federal predator control program — which only targets animals that are actively killing livestock — with predictable results: If you don’t learn all about electric fences and snares,  your chickens are goners. It’s almost as bad in town as it is in the country!

Rats on the Pasture!

Karen and Dan were moving a batch of pullets from the brooder house onto the pasture one evening, and saw three rats scurrying around. You know what that means: if you see three in the open, there must be thirty in hiding somewhere!

We usually don’t have much trouble with rats on the pasture. Our chicken feed is in big galvanized range feeders outdoors, and we move the feeders each time we refill them. Any rats who take up residence in tunnels under the feeders have their tunnels exposed when the feeders are moved. Something — probably owls — takes care of the rest.

Only it’s not working right now. Natural pest control is great when it works, but when it doesn’t, now what? That’s the problem with farming. You do the same thing over and over, but the results are different every time!

Well, whatever you believe about “live and let live,” you have to draw the line at a rat population explosion. Their population can balloon really fast, and you can’t have them overflowing from the pasture into the house! So it was time to take steps.

The simplest method of dealing with rats on a pasture occupied by hens (barring the use of a sniper rifle and a night-vision scope), is to use rat poison in tamper-proof bait stations. Now, I don’t like using poison any more than you do, but this is a good example of Plamondon’s Law: “The alternatives are even worse.”

Bait stations are basically plastic boxes that creatures larger than a rat can’t get into. On the better bait stations, the bait is secured one way or another to prevent the rats from carrying it off and possibly leaving it somewhere inappropriate. They have to eat it right there in the bait station, where any crumbs won’t cause trouble.

(I also looked up the poison in question, and it’s a lot more toxic to rats than it is to chickens, not that the chickens will get any exposure to it with the spiffy bait stations I use.)

I have some J. T. Eaton 903CL Rat Fortress bait stations, which I like very much. They have a clear lid so you can see if the bait needs to be replaced, which works okay for a year or two, then the lid becomes clouded. Their T-shaped top-loader bait station is also good.


I use the Tomcat brand bait blocks, which are weatherproof one-ounce cubes with a hole in the middle, so you can thread them onto a retaining wire that keeps the rats from walking off with them.


I put three bait stations on the pasture four nights ago, each next to a feeder. I didn’t expect much activity, since the feeders were full, but I figured that when the feeders went empty, the rats would switch to the bait. The next morning, though, all the bait had been eaten! The rats preferred it to chicken feed and whole corn, apparently. The next night, almost all the bait had vanished again (one bait station was relatively unvisited). The next night, the same. Last night, some bait was left in all of the stations. [Update: The bait is no longer being eaten at all.]

I think this means that the rat population is starting to dwindle. In the past, I’ve used bait stations around the house, brooder houses, and barn, and the pattern was the same: initial interest in the bait, followed by lessened activity and a distinct absence of rodents that sometimes lasted as long as a year.

(By the way, if you are of the opinion that “rats are something that happen to other people,” you will eventually be proven wrong. Sadly, they’re likely to strike your brooder house first, and kill a lot of baby chicks. You don’t want that! I recommend using bait stations or snap traps in your brooder house when it’s not in use, or bait stations outside it all the time. Having your helpless baby chicks killed by rats is just too heartbreaking.)

You want to get the good bait stations. I just bought some cheap ones, and I regret it now. Too flimsy and insecure. I’m probably going to throw them away and buy some of the ones above.

What Kind of Grass is Best for Chickens?

If you’re wondering what kind of grass is best for grass-fed chickens, the answer is, “green grass.”

What I mean is, lush green grass is loaded with vitamins and is has lots of available nutrients, but as it fades to brown, it becomes more and more useless to chickens. Chickens aren’t ruminants and can’t digest cellulose, so it’s the soft, green, palatable grasses that count.

Lush spring pasture is the best, of course, and that’s easy enough. The trick is providing green grass year-round, or close to it. Cool-season grasses will stay green all winter in mild climates, and warm-season grasses will stay green all summer when the cool-season grasses have all browned off.

Wheat and oats make great pasture for poultry until they die in the summer. Perennial fescues aren’t my favorite grasses, but they hold up well year-round, and (as it turns out) poultry don’t mind endophytes the way cattle do, so the biggest black mark against fescues simply isn’t relevant with poultry.

I’ve even heard good things said about crabgrass as a poultry grass!

And let’s not forget clovers. In a lot of climates, Ladino clover is considered the best, partly because it provides good nutrition (vitamins and protein, but few calories, just like grasses), and partly because its season is later than most grasses, giving lots of summer greenery when the grasses have faded.

So, remember, focus on stuff that stays green first, and worry about the details later, if at all. Most henyards will require a mix of species for long-season greenery.

And for the complete word on green feed for chickens, you’ll want to read Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser. Heuser was a poultry science professor at Cornell University, and he wrote this poultry nutrition book right at the tipping point — just after poultry nutrition became fully understood (with the discovery of vitamin B12), but just before the move to factory farms. So the book has a small-flock, traditional mindset that matches the mindset of today’s dedicated hobbyists and farmers like us, while still being modern and trustworthy. And it has a whole chapter on green feed! It’s a big book, very detailed and thorough, and (unlike more recent books) was written with the intelligent layman in mind. This book can open up new horizons, while saving you from the many feeding blunders that people make.