Karen sold so many turkeys this year that she left the van behind because only the pickup was big enough to take all those coolers full of fresh turkey to the farmer's market! This has never happened before. Everyone who had pre-ordered a turkey showed up, and that took care of every single turkey, so that went off splendidly.

We (and when I say "we," I mean Karen) raise old-fashioned Bourbon Red turkeys on pasture. The turkeys are in floorless pens that get moved to a fresh patch of grass twice a day. This gives the effect of free range without having the turkeys fly away into the woods, where they provide an early Thanksgiving for coyotes. I'm all for wildlife, but I think they should pay $6.00 a pound like everyone else.

A few potential problems loomed like storm clouds on the horizon, but then blew away. Our ice machine gave Karen some trouble a couple of times but not enough to interfere with production. A few turkeys got out of their pasture pens (yipe!) and needed to be herded back. Our water tank from our very slow wells got low as turkey butchering proceeded but we ended with a couple of hundred gallons to spare.

Customers were enthusiastic, and rightly so -- Karen's turkeys are the best! Because we sold every turkey we butchered, Karen found a 2009-vintage turkey at the bottom of the freezer and that's what we had. Delicious!

My November poultry newsletter tells you how to sell eggs to grocery stores, how to keep mud at bay during the wet season, and more!

There's a stage in every company's development when the smart people leave and the company runs on autopilot from then on, in a zombie-like half-life. It happened to Hewlett-Packard when Dr. Hewlett and Dr. Packard passed on; it happened to Apple when Steve Jobs left the first time, and it happened to eBay and PayPal ages ago (as anyone who has ever tried to find an actual human being to help them with a problem knows to their sorrow).

Now I'm wondering if it's happening to Google. Their "new look" for Gmail is a train wreck. Where did all the emphasis on tiny, faint gray text come from? Is everyone over thirty supposed to find a new mail provider right now?

Some mail threads are extended by adding comments to the top of the existing material, so there needs to be a "Reply" button at the top of the message as well as the bottom. Where did it go?

I've found no advantage in the new look, and, so far, I've heard of no one else who does so, either? So why is Google riling us all up by telling us that the old look will soon go away forever? It's not as if they don't have hundreds of thousands of servers! They can keep the old version, the one their smart people designed before they all left, as a sort of shrine to the company they used to be.

In one of its more typical fits of bowing to popular prejudice, the EU is banning farm preventative antibiotic use, with the alleged purpose of reducing the threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, though probably they're mostly just caving into pressure from the "drugs = bad" lobby.

It has always seemed to me that these arguments ignore a basic fact: antibiotics have overused in agriculture for well over 60 years. Starting in the Forties, poultry magazines showed farmers striding manfully towards the poultry house, carrying a five-gallon bucket of antibiotics. Modern technology can do much, but it can never restore the virginity of these aged drugs!

As it turns out, the older antibiotics are still the ones most commonly used in agriculture, even as human medicine is moving on to newer ones. So it seems like bowing to reality is in order, and exempting these elderly antibiotics.

Of course, the anti-medication lobby doesn't like this. They're sort of stuck, though, since to have any public support at all, they need meat and eggs to remain cheap, and this requires high-density confinement techniques -- and all the horrific threats of contagion that such crowding implies. At the same time, they really hate many aspects of high-density confinement. Their usual solution is to embrace the delusion that farmers are nothing but a bunch of morons, and the techniques they use are nothing but a bunch of enormous blunders. The non-farmers can wave their magic wand and it'll be nothing but rainbows and unicorns from here on in.

My experience is that farmers running on razor-thin profit margins don't spend money unnecessarily or use techniques that don't work -- they can't, or they'll go broke in a heartbeat.

And it's not like anyone has ever gotten rich running a commodity egg farm under the conditions proposed by animal welfarists. "If you're so right, why ain't you rich?" There's nothing like someone becoming a millionaire to spark a new trend in agriculture. Hal Schudel, who revolutionized Christmas tree farming in Oregon and used to live up the road from me, did exactly that, and the Starker family, which revolutionized sustainable logging and whose holdings border on my property on two sides, did the same, and so have many others.

It's true that antibiotics are more or less irrelevant in the kind of low-density, free-range farming I do, and if everyone were willing to pay $10 a dozen, the problem would be solved! ($10 a dozen is what my eggs would have to sell for in the big city, to provide a reasonable markup for the retailer and distributor.)

As long as most consumers insist on cheap eggs, most eggs will be produced using cheap methods. That's why going after lawmakers and producers is not only undemocratic, it's ineffective -- it ignores what the people are actually willing to buy and do.

My 17-year-old autistic son Karl was hospitalized with Type 1 diabetes in July, and I've started a blog about what we're doing about it.

Karen and I are both engineers and are relentless about doing our research, so this ought to be worth following if you or a loved one are diabetic, and especially if it's a diabetic child or someone in the autistic spectrum.

We'll be talking about how we adjust Karl's diet -- in spite of his very strong food preferences -- and monitor and manage his insulin. We are adjusting his dosage ourselves to keep things under better control than if we waited for a regular doctor's visit.

So take a look at Karl's Diabetes Blog.

Winter is right around the corner, and what does this mean for your chickens?

For me, in the mild Pacific Nortwest climate, only 40 miles from the ocean, winter is not that big a deal, all things considered. The waterers freeze sometimes, and we get snow once or twice a year, but weather that actually bothers the hens? Doesn't happen.

The rule of thumb is that chickens that can keep dry will keep producing and be in fine health so long as the daytime highs are mostly above freezing, and will stay healthy down to twenty below if they can stay dry and out of the wind. In both cases, of course, they need plenty of feed to keep warm. So for many of us, winter is not an "OMG!" moment, just another thing to deal with.

I've written a Winter Chicken Care FAQ page.

I've also written a page on keeping your chickens' water from freezing, which for me is the biggest wintertime nuisance.

The needs of winter housing are different from the summer, though probably not as different as you think! I've republished Dr. Woods' Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, and if you follow the link you can read the sample chapter to realize that this is an intriguing book! (and one of my perennial best-sellers).

This winter I won't be using lights on my hens, who I think are too exposed to the weather to benefit from them. I think lights are a good idea for most flocks if you need more winter eggs. And a lot of chicken coops are awfully dark in the winter without them!

When William Wallace Cook wrote Plotto: A new Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction, his introductory chapter made a lot of readers sit up and ask, "Huh?"

So Cook got do work and came up with an instruction booklet in the form of a seven-lesson course on how to use Plotto to help you overcome the thorny task of coming up with plots for short stories and novels.

The 32-page Plotto Instruction Book is impossible to find, and I counted myself very lucky when I discovered that the University of Oregon library in Eugene had a copy. A quick round-trip to the Emerald City later, I'm the proud possessor of xerox copies that I scanned and cleaned up for the benefit of anyone who has a copy of Plotto.

You can get your copy of the instruction booklet here, on my Web site.

If you've bounced off Plotto before (and many have), be sure to work through the entire instruction booklet. It makes quite a difference!

What happens if you are suddenly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes these days? This happened to my son Karl, who is 17 and autistic, this July. He seemed to have a cold, but took a turn for the worse, looking suddenly very thin and tired and with an odd, deep note in his breathing. He couldn't keep fluids down.

We called 911 and he took an ambulance ride into the hospital. En route, they gave intravenous fluids and tested his blood sugar levels. "We don't know how high they are, because the meter only goes up to 500." Yikes!

At the emergency room, it was more IV fluids, followed by IV insulin, which they increased very slowly. His main complaint at this point was thirst, since he was allowed only ice chips because of the nausea. With insulin, he started feeling better as they increased the dose.

After a couple of days in intensive care, a couple of days in an ordinary hospital room, and meeting with a diabetes educator and a nutritionist, he was released.

There were many good things about the care he received and some not-so-good ones.

The good:

• The ambulance crew did all the right things, and his high blood sugar was known long before he even reached the hospital.
• Everyone at Good Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis was cheerful, competent, helpful, and reassuring.
• The hospital recommended and provided the latest and most appropriate insulin and supplies for Karl. More on that later.

The not-so good:

• The doctors told us, "This is Type 1 diabetes, and that means his pancreas is a goner. You may have a brief 'honeymoon period' where it recovers, but it's burn out soon enough and there's nothing you can do." This is nonsense with no basis in actual research; quite the contrary. It's an outdated assumption that's still widely believed by doctors in spite of having been proven false.
• The nutritionist told us, "Karl needs lots of carbohydrates to survive, so aim for 75-90 grams of carbs with every meal." In fact, the body needs no carbohydrates whatever to survive. The body needs fats and proteins (essential fatty acids and essential amino acids) to survive, but there's no such thing as an "essential carbohydrate"! Again, this is based on outdated assumptions that were proven false years ago.

Keeping Karl's pancreas going. If there's some pancreatic function left, the body makes some of its own insulin, and this makes blood-sugar control work one heck of a lot better. This is because the body increases or decreases its insulin production according to the needs of the moments, secreting more insulin if blood sugars rise and less if blood sugars fall. This feedback loop helps keep blood sugars where they ought to be. This is important because every minute your blood sugars are above around 140 mg/dl, your body is being harmed, while levels that are two low can cause you to be unable to think clearly or even cause you to lose consciousness.

Injected insulin doesn't have a feedback loop, so if you give yourself too much or too little, oh well. Even small mistakes in carb counting or insulin dosage can lead to big swings in blood sugar, unless you have some pancreatic function left, in which case the swings are much, much smaller. So keeping the pancreas going is very important.

In spite of what the doctor said, there are promising, known-safe methods of prolonging the honeymoon period, including the use of nicotinamide (also called niacinamide, one of the forms of the B vitamin niacin), using enough injected insulin that the pancreas isn't constantly exhausted, and keeping blood sugars under control, since high blood sugars actively harm the insulin-producing cells.

Keeping blood-sugar levels under control. So, in addition to vitamin supplements, the goal is to use insulin to keep blood sugar under tight control, keeping it below the danger zone of 140 mg/dl and above. (This is the goal set by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, as opposed to the old-fashioned stance of the American Diabetes Association.)

Tight blood-sugar control is hampered by the fact that you have to match the amount of insulin you take to the amount of carbohydrates you eat, plus the fact that insulin's effect varies from shot to shot, and the carbohydrate values of the foods you eat are not reported with much precision. Nutrition labels can be off by 20% in either direction, for example.

To take an example from Karl's menu, a kids' chicken strips basket at Shari's restaurant is supposed to have 82 grams of carbs, but this can vary by 20%, or 16 grams either way. The safe range of blood-sugar levels is 70-140. A gram of carbs will raise Karl's blood sugar by 5 points, so if he's at 100 at the start of the meal, if the meal has 16 grams more than advertised, he'll end up at 180, and if it's 16.4 grams less, he'll fall to a disastrously low 20!

What does this mean in practice? It means that eating a meal with 82 grams of carbs is like playing Russian Roulette (and the advice we got from our nutritionist was wrong). But if we dropped the carbs to just 30 (say, with just chicken strips and no fries), a 20% variation is only 6 grams, and if he starts with a blood-sugar level of 100, the variation is only 30 points each way, from a low of 70 to a high of 130. This is within the target range.

So the only way of actually achieving blood-sugar targets is by cutting carbs from the diet. You eat fewer carbs. With every carb you cut, the margin of error goes down and control goes up. Simple, huh? Sometimes I think that the problem with doctors is that they aren't engineers.

Except that some doctors are engineers. I've been reading a wonderful book on blood-sugar control, Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars, which is by Richard Bernstein, an engineer who became the first diabetic to take blood-sugar measurements multiple times per day, using the then-new blood-sugar meters, which were considered to be laboratory equipment, not home-use devices. The insight he gained from this, and his engineering background in control theory and general problem-solving, allowed him to come up with a treatment plan that really works, reversing his diabetic complications. He entered medical school at the age of 45 so he could become a doctor and share his results directly with patients. His book is very practical and thorough, with both step-by-step procedures and a clear description of the underlying theory. A must-read for anyone with diabetes, or who helps care for someone who has.

A slimmer volume on much the same topic is Blood Sugar 101: What They Don't Tell You About Diabetes. I recommend that you buy both.

Insulin and equipment. On the other hand, I have nothing but praise for the insulin and equipment the hospital handed out. These days they have what are called "insulin pens," which have an insulin cartridge and replace the old syringes and bottles of insulin. One advantage of insulin pens is that they just don't look like syringes, so if we give Karl an injection in a restaurant, anyone around us with a needle phobia doesn't even recognize what we're doing! The other advantage is that the whole process is simpler when you don't have to mess around with a separate syringe and bottle.

Karl uses two kinds of insulin: Lantus, which is very long-lasting and provides what's called "basal insulin," the kind your body needs 24/7, and Novolog, a fast-acting insulin that deals with mealtime carbohydrates.

Lantus is, in theory, a 24-hour insulin, but if you read the instructions they admit that it's only 14 hours for some people. We started out by giving it to Karl only at bedtime, but his afternoon and evening blood-sugar levels weren't so good, so we now split the dose between breakfast and bedtime, which is a common practice. He gets a total of 7 units of Lantus per day.

Most people use Novolog in insulin pens that have a one-unit resolution, but the Novopen Junior lets you inject at half-unit increments, which is twice as good! It's marketed mostly for kids, for some reason. I don't know why anyone would use anything else, though. Karl is getting 8-10 units of Novolog per day.

The needles have gotten almost unbelievably tiny and short, making them safer and pretty much painless. The blood glucose meters are pretty spiffy, too. We're using the Bayer Contour USB model, which lets you download the last zillion or so readings to your computer and look at the trends. The software that comes with the meter is clunky and you will spend some time swearing at it, but it gets the job done.

Measuring Pancreatic function. We went out of our way to get a C-Peptide test for Karl after he'd been out of the hospital for a while. This test measures remaining pancreatic function, and Karl's results came back with a surprisingly high reading, showing that his pancreas is still doing quite a bit for him. Long may it last! None of our doctors mentioned this test, but no one minded performing it upon request.

All my life, I've discovered that, no matter what the industry, industry-standard practices are a strange mixture of brilliance and blindness. The hospital did a wonderful job with Karl, for which we're grateful, and I'm glad that Karen and I are used to doing our own research, because we don't think their advice for home care was of the same high quality. Doctor's advice is a good starting point, but I don't think it's a good idea to stop there.

Amelia B. Edwards was a noted nineteenth-century author who wrote travel books and novels. She fell in love with Egypt in the 1870s and wrote a wonderful book on her travels, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. I liked it so much I brought it back into print!

More than that, she founded the Egypt Exploration Society, which still funds important archaeological research 125 years later. In her honor the EES has their Amelia Edwards Projects, which are clearly defined, affordable field projects that are funded by donations from members and supporters.

And she inspires more than research. Elizabeth Peters used Amelia Edwards as the model for her character Amelia P. Emerson in her wonderful and long-running series of Egyptology-themed murder mysteries (starting with Crocodile on the Sandbank).

That's influence that lasts and lasts!

It's harvest season, so gardeners have more produce and garden waste than they know what to do with. A few neighbors see my flock of chickens as a handy way to ensure that nothing goes to waste, without having to actually eat over-ripe or oversized produce.

Feeding scraps to your chickens isn't rocket science, and there are only a few rules:

• Don't feed anything rotten to the chickens. Chickens will usually turn up their beaks at anything unwholesome, but let's not take many chances. Mushy apples are okay, and a mold spot here and there will just be avoided by them. Don't feed them anything that smells funny!
• Don't take away their chicken feed. You get into trouble when feeding surplus and scraps and waste to chickens by trying to force them to eat it. Chickens like variety and like unprocessed food, and they have a pretty good "nutritional appetite," so they'll eat at least as much of anything new as they should. If you keep their chicken feed available, you won't poison or malnourish them with ill-considered offerings.
• Remove anything that attracts flies and rats. When feeding things that will attract unwanted visitors, don't offer the chickens more than they will eat in a short time. Since you often don't know how much this will be, be prepared to take away the leftovers soon after feeding.
• Slice or break open things with thick skins, like squashes. Chickens can't handle the rind but love what's inside.
• Be aware that most waste and scraps have few calories. Vegetables and garbage, for example, usually have very few calories per pound. Vitamins, yes; calories, no. Calories are concentrated mostly in grains and fats, which usually aren't what people are pressing on you.
• If you have a lot more scraps than your chickens can handle, consider pigs. Pigs are better than chickens at dealing with agricultural surplus, if only because they eat so much more!

Want to learn more about feeding your chickens?
And I have more blog and web site articles about chicken feed!

But what you really need, if you want to sink your teeth into the topic, is a copy of Heuser's Feeding Poultry. I republished this book because there wasn't anything good and accessible in print. In addition to discussing everything you can imagine, it covers topics like green feed and feeding scraps.