So when was the golden age of American farming?

I think the answer is different if you're thinking from the point of view of the farmer or the consumer. If you're the consumer, the answer is obviously, "The golden age is now." You'll see why in a minute.

For the farmer, we need to separate what's picturesque from what's good. Some aspects of the bad old days were:

• Being connected to town by dirt roads that were often impassible.
• Farming that was so labor-intensive that you couldn't get along without hired help. (Even in Ten Acres Enough, Morris had to hire two people year-round on his little farm, and more at harvest season.) Let's face it: the American farmer has never been a good manager, and never liked dealing with hired help.
• No understanding of disease -- the germ theory of disease wasn't widely believed until the 1860s and wasn't proven until the 1870s. This resulted in a generally low level of health in both man and beast.
• Not being able to give your kids a high-school education unless they boarded with strangers in town.
• Travel that's so expensive that the local general store had a monopoly over your business -- and mail-order hadn't been invented yet.
• No mass communication except newspapers and no free public libraries, leaving rural folks at a huge disadvantage in education.
• Produce traveled to market via unrefrigerated slow freight, resulting in almost unbelievably low quality in the city.
• An unbelievably high level of fraud and double-dealing at all levels of society, not just by politicians and CEO's, resulting in low levels of both quality and trust.
• Horses were essential, but many farmers weren't good with horses. Few things are more dangerous than a team of horses hitched up to farm machinery and handled by a farmer who doensn't have a close working relationship with them.
• Farming is dirty work, but hot water for bathing and a room warm enough to bathe in were scarce.

So I figure that the Golden Age had tractors, paved roads, Rural Free Delivery of mail, high schools that could be reached on a school bus, radio, pickup trucks, tractors, refrigerated freight cars, the Sears Roebuck catalog, free public libraries, and labor-saving devices that allowed the hired help to be given the boot. So the Golden Age for farmers started around 1910 and ended roughly around 1960.

When I was a kid, people hearkened back to simpler times of horse agriculture and houses that lacked bath soap, but I think that such times are receding into the mists of antiquity -- it's a lot easier to relate to farmers with running water and a tractor than those of earlier times. And it's easier to emulate them successfully as well.

Golden Ages sow the seeds of their own destruction. What's good for the farmer isn't necessarily good for the consumer. For example, eggs used to move from farm to city by unrefrigerated slow freight. In The Dollar Hen, Milo Hastings reports that eggs actually hatched in transit during the summer of 1901. Since incubation takes three weeks, this gives you an idea of how awful the distribution chain was back then!

Factory farms took over the egg business quite suddenly. Farmers with operations relatively close to town and who had walk-in refrigeration could guarantee the freshness of their eggs. Midwestern farmers whose eggs traveled by slow freight could not. In the Fifties, the market was taken over in just a few years by farmers who offered end-to-end refrigeration. The market price for eggs shipped the old way fell to unprofitable levels, and, just like that, eggs from diversified farms were a thing of the past.

Which goes to show that running a picturesque, old-timey, poltically correct operation counts for nothing if the eggs are bad. Lots of people don't understand this, and when they start a little farm of their own, they skimp on quality six ways from Sunday, with the idea that they can do no wrong because they're politically correct. It doesn't work like that. As my Engineering professors liked to say, "Partial credit will not be given if the bridge collapses." Only suckers give you credit for good intentions. Everyone else wants results.

Fortunately, in this day and age, results are at every farmer's disposal, large or small. On-farm refrigerated storage is no longer a novelty, even on the smallest farms. Nearly a century of extending paved roads, telephone lines, and rural electrification mean that isolated farms are at no particular disadvantage except travel time. The nature of commerce ensures that most farmers and processors are focused on commodities and ignore niche products. If you play your cards right, this is a second Golden Age -- and one that is more easily shared with your customers.

Keeping the chickens' water ice-free during the winter can be a struggle.

The classic technique for full-grown chickens is the old bucket switcheroo: when you go out to tend the chickens, you bring out a galvanized bucket of warm water with you, and leave it for them to drink. You take away the partly empty bucket you left for them last time, which may have frozen. You bring the frozen bucket inside with you and leave it in a place where it will thaw a little, so the ice will slide out easily.

I think 10-qt galvanized buckets are the right size for this, though 12-qt butckets are okay if that's all you can find.

The water will freeze much more slowly if you provide some kind of insulated sleeve for the bucket (not styrofoam: chickens love to eat styrofoam). If you make a wooden float for the top, just a disc a little smaller than the bucket with a few 1" holes drilled in it, that will not only reduce the cooling rate, but will prevent the chickens from soaking their combs and wattles, which leads to frostbite.

Electric Birdbath Deicers

A more high-tech solution is to use electric heat. A lot of people use overhead heat lamps, in spite of the grotesque level of expense and overkill that this entails. ($54 per year if you leave a 250-watt bulb on for 90 days.) I like Birdbath Heaters combined with galvanized pet waterers. These thermostatically-controlled heaters use a lot less electricity, and all the heat goes to warming the water. I like galvanized pan waterers because mixing plastic and electric heaters makes me shudder. Sure, the heater has a thermostat, but I prefer not to trust such things fully. If you use a plastic waterer anyway, use a low-wattage heater. A 50-watt heater won't do much damage. I use 200-watt heaters in my galvanized waterers. 200 watts sounds like a lot, but mine only run when the hen lights are on, and in the morning the waterers may be frozen solid!

You can also use a thermostatic switch to keep the lamp off when it's not too cold.

I think attempting to keep the chickens warm (except during the brooding period) is a mug's game and I wouldn't spend a nickel on it. People in climates where temperatures fall below -20F might find it worthwhile, though.

You can also use heated waterer stands, which will work with a variety of waterers including the usual double-walled water founts. Me, I use automatic waterers when I can, and buckets when I can't, but lots of people like galvanized founts.

As for keeping the water flowing through the pipes, you're on your own. Here in Western Oregon, there are only a few days per year with daytime highs below freezing, so I run garden hoses everywhere and let them freeze and thaw as they please. On days where the hoses don't thaw, I carry hot water out to the waterers. This works fine if you use metal fittings everywhere and use waterers with metal valves, like the one above. These can freeze solid and not care. (Of course, I have to prevent my pump and PVC piping in the well house from freezing, but I leave the stuff on the pasture and in the chicken houses to take care of itself.)

Let's do the math. There were 76 billion eggs laid by US chickens last year (not counting hatching eggs), laid by 280 million hens (23 dozen eggs per hen). The vast majority of these hens are in factory farms. Suppose we wanted to get rid of factory farms. What would it take?

Well, before factory farms there were ordinary farm flocks. Between about 1900 and 1950, a typical "egg farm" held steady at about 1,500 hens. Some had more, some had less, but a farm family making most of its income from eggs typically had a 1,500-hen operation.

This makes sense when you realize that studies of labor efficiency on old-fashioned egg farms measured productivity at 2.0-2.5 hours per hen per year. A 1,500-hen operation would take between 3,000 and 3,750 hours of labor, which will soak up the time of two wage-earners.

Factory-farm techniques allowed the number of hens per attendant to increase to the current astronomical levels (around 150,000 birds per henhouse, with multiple houses per installation, and only one attendant per henhouse.)

280,000,000/1,500 = is about 187,000 egg farms that would have to be created, providing jobs for 187,000 new farm families. A 1,500-hen flock should lay (at 23 dozen eggs/hen) 34,500 dozen eggs per year.

Now, the median household income last year was about $50,000. Presumably, we can't get rid of factory farms without paying an average wage, so we need to extract $50,000 of wage income per 1,500 bird flock. $50,000/$34,500 = $1.45 per dozen (as opposed to only about $0.0145 per dozen for the factory farm). That pays the farmer. Because the farmer only receives about half the retail price of the eggs, the consumer will have to pay about $2.90 extra for non-factory-farmed eggs.

This cost premium is more than the price of a dozen factory-farmed eggs (around $2.25 the last time I looked). Various other economies of scale that benefit factory farms won't be available to smaller farms, so I figure that, in rough terms, non-factory-farmed eggs will triple the cost -- in round numbers, $7.00 a dozen.

That's for old-time confinement operations, which would have eggs that taste just as bad as factory-farmed eggs. Real free range eggs (not the fake kind that produces the eggs in the stores) cost more to produce. The labor efficiency isn't that much worse, but production plummets in poor weather and there are predator issues. I figure that the costs will work out to around five times as much as factory-farmed eggs -- $10-$12 a dozen.

True free-range farmers are thin enough on the ground that most of them can sell all their eggs locally, which is why you can't get them in the city. Eggs are cheaper in the country, so eggs you buy from me for $5 would cost you $10 in the big city.

I don't know about you, but here in Western Oregon, all the power outages happen during the winter. They vary from flickers that last less than a second to outages of around three days. Here are some tips that work for us:

• Have a wood stove you can cook on and heat the house with. I have two! If you have propane or city gas, pilot-light-style ranges, water heaters, and some kinds of furnaces will keep working when the power is out. (I don't have gas.)

• Have a ridiculous number of flashlights and lots of batteries. Trying to get anything done during a nighttime power outage is very difficult without a flashlight! Everyone in the family needs a flashlight, and you need a bunch more because they get misplaced.

• Pick your poison where lamps are concerned. I've settled on propane Coleman lanterns even though they are expensive to run. They're convenient, bright, and clean-burning. Gasoline Coleman lanterns set off my smoke alarms. Kerosene lanterns are too dim for area lighting. I've put hooks in the ceiling in my living room and bathroom just for the lanterns.

• Have your water situation figured out. I have a generator and can run my water pump during an outage. Your situation might be more complicated.

• Get a Honda generator. It's sort of fun to go without electricity for a couple of days in the summer, but it's a pain in the winter, especially when your basement floods without a sump pump, you have freezers full of chicken, or, worst of all, if you brood chicks with heat lamps during the winter. Honda generators are good. Some other makes are probably just as good, but I don't know which ones they are. Figure out how to use your generator before the power goes out. Remember to have some gasoline. Buy plenty of extra-heavy-duty extension cords and multi-outlet adapters and store them somewhere sensible.

• Use APC Smart-UPS UPS systems. These are the only ones I know of that work well when plugged into a generator. Put them on your computers and your TV/DVD/Tivo setup. There's a "sensitivity" adjustment on these to determine how eager they are to switch to battery power. Set the sensitivity to "low." Your equipment won't mind. I always buy used units, since the systems themselves last forever, though the batteries (which are replaceable) rarely last beyond five years. See if you can find a local source for both UPS and batteries: they're expensive to ship.

• Have a good library. Even if you keep the Tivo running during the outage, the loss of power restricts your actions.

• Have a method of brewing good coffee. This is essential! A Melitta one-cup coffee maker and a stack of filters will see you through until the ol' Mr. Coffee starts working again.

There are plenty of other ways to do it, but these work for us.

We're probably going to get a super-insulated electric water heater this winter, and we'll get one that's twice as big as we need, so it will take a long power outage to run out out of hot water.

Link: http://www.motherearthnews.com

Mother Earth News has always been a good magazine that people tended to ignore for the wrong reasons. It has always had plenty to offer to people who were willing to get their hands dirty. When I'm looking for obscure poultry information on the Web, I often find a thorough article in Mother Earth News. Maybe the ink is barely dry, maybe it's thirty years old, doesn't matter. Country living is not well-anchored in time, anyway.

My parents had a subscription, and so do I. It's worth checking out. They do cool things like nutritional testing of free-range eggs (including my eggs, which tested out very well, thank you.)

There's plenty of practical, hands-on stuff that can either be cut out and pasted down or provide food for thought.

My biggest beef is the pop-up ads on the Web site. Geez, Louise! They're not just annoying, they're positively hostile. Please, Mother, get rid of them!

If you understand chicken geometry, your life will be a lot easier.

Take perches, for instance. Chickens will roost on the highest available perch. This might be on the railing of your porch or a beam above your car, or (in a pinch) on top of the car itself. (Free range is not an unmitigated blessing.)

If you have managed to keep your chickens within the confines of their yard, they'll still want to perch on the highest thing they can reach. The smart money, then, is to ensure that the highest thing is an actual roost. This will save you a lot of trouble.

Now, hens like to lay eggs in dark corners at the back of the chicken houses, so you need to be able to go there. This is easier if the roosts are very high, so you can bend down and walk under them, or very low, so you can walk on top of them. Anything in between becomes a barrier. I have used roosts as high as four feet off the ground and have had chickens roost on rafters ten feet off the ground without any trouble. I suppose it's possible for them to sprain their little ankles jumping down, but I've never seen any sign of it.

With very high roosts, you'll have fewer chickens sleeping (and pooping) in the nest boxes, which his a good thing.

Another piece of chicken geometry is the nest boxes. Chickens like to lay in dark corners, so it's a good idea to do it their way and put the nest boxes there.

Ordinary nests are okay, but I like nests that aren't quite so cramped. I once had an ordinary eight-hole wooden nest box, but it seemed like three hens always tried to squeeze into the same nest, so I took out half the partitions (so that the nest had four double-width holes), and that worked better. Cornell University used nests with no partitions at all: just an eight-foot-long nest trough.

I tried an old gimmick from the Oregon Experiment Station and used 1/2 hardware cloth for the nest bottoms, with straw on top. This puts gravity to work by letting dirt and crud and broken eggs fall through the mesh, and the nests stay cleaner. The mesh is softer than a solid floor, too, so fewer eggs get broken.

Acreage is another example of chicken geometry. Chickens generally don't wander more than a couple of hundred yards from their houses, usually less. The more distant a fence is, the less eager a chicken is to go through it. I can confine chickens with an electric fence consisting of a single strand of aluminum fence wire, if the wire is far from the chicken houses. But if the chickens are fenced into a small area, it's hard to hold them even with 48" high electric netting.

One final example: 100 hens will eat about 25 pounds of food per day, which is about two galvanized buckets of feed, drink about six gallons of water (again, about two buckets), and lay about half a bucket of eggs. Since I don't have four hands, I would object to feeding and watering 100 hens from buckets -- I'd have to make too many trips. But 25 hens would need about one bucket of feed and one bucket of water, which is plausible. You can put the eggs into the feed bucket after you've poured the feed into a trough.

Now, you can carry a feed sack over your shoulder, which gets you to 50 pounds of feed per trip, enough for 200 hens. After that, carrying the feed in a pickup truck starts looking good.

If you want to drive to the feed mill only once a week, a half-ton pickup truck can carry a week's worth of feed for more than 500 hens. More hens than this might mean that you're spending your Saturdays making two trips, which might not be what you had in mind.

You get a price break if you buy a ton of feed at a time. Feed should be used up within a month at the outside. A ton will feed about 250 hens for a month.

A standard egg basket can carry about ten dozen eggs, which is the output of around 150 hens, give or take. A three-gallon bucket holds a couple dozen less. Carrying more than one basket at a time is awkward, and carrying more than two is impossible. If you have a lot of hens, you'll want to collect the eggs directly onto flats and pack the flats into egg crates so you can carry the crates off the field in your pickup. I figure that even a small pickup should be able to handle the eggs from several thousand hens.

It's always sad when well-meaning people embark on a doomed effort. Current attempts at breed preservation are a good example.

Breed preservation is a very simple task. The goal is to take the surviving remnant of an old breed and maintain it so that it retains whatever fraction of its genetic diversity still remains. This is fairly easy to do with chickens, which are reasonably inexpensive to keep in the required numbers. Basically, the technique is to keep several hundred individuals and do random matings, with no culling and no attempt at selective breeding. This can maintain the breed, unchanged, indefinitely. That's what preservation is all about.

Selective breeding is the opposite of this: you breed only from selected individuals. With each generation, your flock becomes less representative of what you started with, and becomes something new instead. (Quite possibly, it becomes extinct through inbreeding.)

Sadly, groups like the American Livestock Breeding Conservancy just don't get it. In their breeding guides, they are heavily into selection and culling, which is the worst thing they could do. Sigh.

This is the sort of thing that causes poultry scientists to periodically call for an effort to do it right. Selective breeding has caused commercial strains to lose about 50% of their genetic diversity (I'm surprised that it isn't much higher). Conservation organizations like the ALBC aren't helping, because they, too, are heavily into selection. So far, government attempts at breed preservation have always seemed to fail as soon as budgets became tight.

The remaining option is probably for someone to endow a foundation with enough money to acquire several dispersed facilities and hire some geneticists to acquire stock and manage the breeding program. The methods of breed preservation are well-understood by geneticists, but apparently not by anyone else.

This would be a very cool thing. I'd contribute my share.

Link: http://www.plamondon.com/faq_deep_litter.html

The "deep litter method" was one of the most important poultry developments of the Twentieth Century. It resulted in a dramatic drop in disease and a reduction in the amount of labor it took to keep a flock of chickens. It also gave an early example of how biodiversity works to our advantage, even with confined livestock.

People these days think they know what "deep litter" is, but mostly they don't. Here's a quick checklist:

• Deep litter is not about compost. It's about healthier chickens. Do your serious composting on a compost pile.

• More is better. It's not deep litter unless it's at least six inches deep.

• Compost as a clean-up tool.If the top of the litter gets caked over with manure, skim off the caked part and toss it into a corner. Within a few days, natural composting will cause
  it to turn back into litter again.

• Litter is a probiotic. Deep litter has anti-coccidiosis properties (it develops a population of microbes that eat coccidia), but only after it's been around for a few months, so never remove it all. When you start bumping your head on the rafters, remove part of it, but not all.

• Lime helps. Stirring in hydrated lime at about ten pounds per hundred square feet will keep the litter more friable.

• Chickens don't wear gas masks. If you can smell ammonia in the chicken house, you don't have enough ventilation. Open the windows, even if it's twenty below outside. Ammonia is a poison gas; cold weather is just a nuisance to grown chickens.

• Don't break a sweat. If you're spending a significant amount of time messing with the litter, you're doing it wrong.

Check out my Deep Litter FAQ for more information.

Chickens have a natural laying cycle that peaks in the spring and troughs in the fall. The typical flock is at its worst in November, and actually lays better in the depths of winter.

By early spring, long before the weather is nice or the supply of natural food has increased much, the hens start laying like crazy. It's not about temperature and it's not about food: it's about natural cycles. The hens lay their eggs before the food supply is very good because it's the growing chicks who need easy pickings, not the broody hen, who hardly eats anything when she's incubating her eggs, anyway. So the natural egg-laying season has to happen before the time of plenty.

In the fall, the pickings are still pretty easy, but what would baby chicks eat during the upcoming season of scarcity? So the natural tendency is for egg-laying to cease.

This means that Thanksgiving is an unlikely time to feature egg-based dishes, while Easter is a great time. Similarly, farm flocks are thinned in the fall so that only the most valuable animals are kept over the winter, so it's a good time for a turkey dinner. At Easter, it would be madness to slaughter turkeys, because the whole point of keeping your remaining turkeys over the winter was so they'd lay hatching eggs in the spring, and Easter happens before this is truly under way.

I get emails from people every November, wondering why their hens stopped laying, and what they can do about it. This is one of those problems where anything you do will work, because the rate of lay will pick up in a couple of months even if you don't do anything. But giving the hens all the chicken feed they want, housing them in an area that's reasonably dry and more or less out of the wind, and preventing predators, pets, and children from hassling them will help.

The natural tendency for the number of eggs to increase right through the winter is another piece of evidence that, whatever their origins, chickens aren't tropical birds anymore. They're far more winter-hardy than most people give them credit for.

Signs of the season: I've seen the first Christmas tree truck of winter, taking a load of freshly cut trees to be sent on their way. A lot of Christmas trees are grown in my area. Cutting starts about now and usually ends the day before Thanksgiving, though last year there was some activity into early December.

The local Christmas tree industry was developed by a neighbor of mine, Hal Schudel, who developed sustainable, low-impact Christmas tree farming long before these buzzwords were popular. He introduced helicopter logging in 1955, so that Christmas trees grown on steep hillsides could be cut by hand and hoisted out by air, with no need for roads or heavy machinery -- and hence no erosion. He also knew a superior tree when he saw one, introducing the Noble Fir (which makes a much better Christmas tree than the local Douglas Fir). Hal's company, Holiday Tree Farm, has an interesting Web page.

I like having a self-made millionaire as a neighbor and role model.

Not that Hal's the only one. My property borders on Starker Forests on two sides. As with Hal Schudel, T. J. Starker was into reforestation and sustainable yield long before these concepts caught the public eye. Both men were professors at OSU, too.

Starker has a good-neighbor policy which must be experienced to be believed. It's not just a matter of, "Sure, take some of the downed wood for firewood, what the heck." It's more like, "We'll unlock the gate for you and show you where the good stuff is. When's a good time?"

One of the things I like about living here is the quality of our neighbors. They couldn't be better. The only thing I would change is that the Christmas tree truck drivers could slow down a little. 40 MPH is pretty fast for a wet and twisty gravel road.