Here's a data point for you: we just butchered and sold a batch of New Hampshire broilers, 11-week-old cockerels. They ranged from 1.25 pounds to 1.5 pounds. These little broilers are what is meant by a "spring chicken."

Hybrid broilers of the same age would have dressed out at 5-6 pounds.

This 4x difference in weight is why no one raises standard-breed chickens for meat anymore. The labor in raising chickens is per-chicken, but the payoff is per-pound, so it's hard to make money with little chickens.

The "writer effect" is this: The opinions of the most effective writers spread and become conventional wisdom, even if they're wrong. The reason being that it's hard to listen to people who don't get the word out in the first place, or are too hard to understand.

Back when I was starting out in poultry, there wasn't much information on the Web, and I had to rely on conventional research -- buying books and haunting libraries. Back when millions of farmers kept poultry, there were a lot of books in print about poultrykeeping, but by the Nineties the literature had divided into expensive, specialist tomes aimed at graduate students and professors, and popular works written by enthusiastic amateurs.

What was missing were the works for practical farmers -- people who expected to sell poultry and eggs from flocks of anywhere between, say, 25 and 5,000 chickens. Such flocks were the mainstay if the industry until the Fifties, but pretty much vanished after that, with the exception of folks who were essentially large-scale hobbyists. No new books were being written by practical farmers, and the old ones all went out of print.

With the rise of the alternative food movement, interest in small-farm poultry and eggs revived, and newcomers turned to the in-print books about poultry, which meant the books by and for backyarders. As I learned from experience, trying to base a business on the advice of hobbyists is a mug's game, and we had to learn a lot of things the hard way.

The main take-away was, "Find the right experts." Lots of people want desperately to believe that the world works in a certain way, and that you can risk your retirement account (or what's left of it) on a picture-postcard farm and come out ahead. What you need is examples and advice from people who've really succeeded at what you're thinking of doing, so that you can figure out (a) if you want to try it yourself, and (b) how you should go about it.

After reading every 20th-century poultry book I could find, my rules of thumb are this:

• Most writing is done by journalists and hobbyists who have never tried running a business.
• Nevertheless, they are free with business advice and can be very convincing.
• For many topics, the audience is not doers, but consumers. Stuff written for consumers is generally useless: dumbed down, moralistic, designed to inspire, titillate, or outrage rather than inform. It can hardly be otherwise, because the writers are rarely experts. Expertise requires immersion into a topic for a long time. It's rare for someone who has done this to be willing or able to write for a mass audience. That's the writer effect again.
• Be cautious about advice from anyone who hasn't been using the same methods for five years. A new farm that's utterly doomed generally takes three years to fail, and may look enticing right up to the end. This is partly because it's running on outside money, and it takes a while for this to dry up, and partly because certain problems (such as parasites or over-grazing) don't build up to crisis levels for a few years. Not all books with an "Our Wonderful Farm" theme make it into print before the foreclosure.
• Look for original sources. This is an important rule in science and scholarship, and it's good for everyone. It seems like every journalist in the country has written something about Joel Salatin's farm. This stuff is sort of interesting, but they're neither are accurate nor as detailed as Joel's own works.
• Newness is not necessarily goodness. Over time, we develop new technologies and lose old ones. Sometimes the lost technologies are more appropriate to a given task. My dad was an aerospace engineer, and the peculiar requirements of the loading mechanism for the T.O.W. missile baffled him for a while, but his interest in antique firearms came to his rescue. In the mid-nineteenth century, every imaginable loading mechanism was tried, and he adapted the concept used by (if I remember correctly) the Martini-Henry rifle to the needs of the missile launcher. This sort of thing happens in every field.
• Often the experts are not great writers, and their books can have very low production values. The writer effect means that books with good production values, aimed at a large audience, tend to be more visible than the books with the best content. Some of the smartest people in the world can't spell.
• As with everything else, following chains of recommendations works best. Pull your most useful books off the shelf and see what other books the author recommends, or lists in the bibliography. Follow links from the most helpful Web sites.

In a previous post, I talked about chicken geometry, a topic which revolves about where things should go relative to other things for best results, and how much to use.

For example, anyone who keeps free-range hens at a density of over 100 hens per acre is probably scamming you, since their acreage turns into a barren, parasite-infested mudhole. This is partly due to the way the chickens scratch at the ground, ripping up the turf, but it's mostly a matter of overloading the soil with far more manure than the ground cover can handle. Do the math.

(People point out to me that the EU allows up to 400 hens an acre, which is true. The folks in the EU didn't do the math. Hardly anyone ever does, unless there's a dollar sign in the equation.)

So here are a few geometry-based rules to help with your chickens:

• Don't put feeders under the roosts.
• Rats like to hide under floors, wooden pallets, and other kinds of shelter. They don't feel safe unless the ceiling is low. Raising floors, pallets, etc. 18" off the ground will help keep 'em away, and will allow cats and terriers to hunt them.
• Chickens like to roost at the highest point available. Make sure that's a roost and not a nest box.
• Chickens like laying at ground level, in a dark space, and in corners. You can do worse than putting your nest boxes there.
• If your waterers aren't as high as a chicken's back, there will be some backflow out of their crops and into the waterer when they drink. Keeping the waterers high keeps 'em cleaner and more sanitary.
• For laying hens, high roosts can make your chicken houses more manageable. You can walk around bent over like Groucho Marx under roosts four feet off the ground. Useful for getting at those eggs in the back corners of the houses.
• Lots of hens like to crowd into a single nest. If the nest is large enough to permit this, you get fewer broken eggs.
• Chickens will rarely try to fly over a barrier they can see through, so they can be confined by absurdly low fences, such as a single strand of electric fence wire 5" off the ground. The same low wire deters dogs, coyotes, and raccoons.
• In hot weather, you can't count on chickens crossing a stretch of blinding sunlight to reach a waterer. Put the waterers in the shade with the chickens.
• Dominant chickens will often prevent the ones at the bottom of the pecking order from eating. Be generous with the number of feeders, and space them out. A bully can't be everywhere at once.

Wow, we even got our Toyota T100 pickup stuck in the mud. That's how soft the ground is with all the March rain.

If anyone knows of a good guide to making a cheap, light-duty gravel road, I could use some pointers. I'm thinking of investing in a gravel loop across the pasture so we never have this problem again.

[Update, March 30: the ground hardened just enough for me to escape. Yee-haw! I discovered that the pickup has enough ground clearance for me to drive right over my ultra-low electric fence (with strands at 5" and 10" off the ground) without carrying it away. Which is just as well, since the ground was so soft that I wasn't stopping for anything.]

I got a call from my printer (Lightning Source) that the ISBN number on my novel, "One Survivor" is wrong, and the spine text is misaligned. I'm all ready to fire my cover artist, except for one thing -- he's me!

It's hard to get good help these days, and that's doubly true of you insist on doing everything yourself!

This sort of thing happens to me all the time. If I had much fear of failure, I'd never do anything cool.

Just as I was getting over my last lingering cold, I've come down with another one. Which reminds me of one of the first rules of country living: don't load yourself down with chores. Stuff happens, and the more unavoidable, non-deferrable chores you've loaded yourself down with, the less time is left over for emergencies,projects, or recovering from a cold.

In a regular job, you can take a sick day, but you can't tell that to the chickens. And, anyway, no one moves to the country just to trade the rat race for a chore treadmill. (Actually, some people do, but you don't want to be like them.) Keep your burden light, and you'll have time live your life, or at least take a nap.

Back before people had nutritional science figured out, the key to success was to let livestock (and people) pick and choose from a wide variety of foodstuffs. Confined animals (and people) fared poorly. Sailors suffered from scurvy at sea, and people in institutions suffered from pellagra, but the same people never had these problems when given a little freedom, even though they knew nothing about nutrition. They just listened to their cravings.

Nutritional science means that you can get away with giving livestock (and people) a balanced diet without any food choices, but that doesn't mean it's always the right thing to do.

The most time-honored method of feeding chickens a balanced diet is cafeteria-style feeding. The original method included "chicken mash" (a mix of grains, steamed beef scrap, and other ingredients) in one trough, grain in another trough, oyster shell in a third, and pasture or hand-fed green feed on the side. The chickens were left to figure out how much of each ingredient to eat. This works quite well.

You can take advantage of the fact that the chickens won't starve in the midst of plenty in the following way: always provide a feeder full of a quality, balanced chicken feed, and offer anything else you've got on the side. If the chickens like the side offering, great. If they don't, they'll just ignore it and eat the balanced ration. This method leverages the fact that the chickens are better judges of chicken feed than we are. Practically the only way to poison or starve your chickens is to force them to eat an inappropriate feed by offering them nothing else. If you give them at least one decent alternative, they'll be okay.

I feed a high-protein layer ration in one feeder and whatever grain is cheapest in another. I feed a second grain as scratch feed, scattering it in the grass. Hand-feeding keeps the hens friendly. Oyster shell goes into yet another feeder. Grain is usually cheaper than a balanced ration, so you can save a little money by feeding it on the side.

For some reason, lots of people don't like the idea of separate feeders, and want to mix everything up. Don't do that. It wastes your time and annoys the chickens. Other people prefer superstition to science, and go out of their way to find a hippie-dippy feed formula, or feed nothing but grain. Don't do that, either. When humans adopt ludicrous diets, they minimize the damage they do to themselves through the miracle of cheating. Your livestock have no such option, so their diets need to live up to a higher standard than ours.

So now you know the secret: a feeder full of high-quality chicken feed gives you the freedom to try anything else on the side and see what happens.

What is it about March and mud, anyway? It rains all winter long and there's no problem, then March comes along and the ground turns to soppy, soupy mud wherever the turf isn't super-thick. Why is that? I'm mystified.

It's so bad this year that some of the hens actually have dirty feathers. I'm not sure I've ever seen this before. Normally they look sharp in all weather.

This, too, shall pass, as the weather warms up, the rain slackens, and the grass suddenly leaps into insane rates of growth. In a month I'll probably be complaining that I can't keep up with the mowing, even though I use a tractor.

Helpful hint: Wear an old pair of overalls over your other clothes when it's muddy, even if your other clothes are another pair of overalls. That mud gets everywhere!

We discovered years ago that our best chance of keeping our record-keeping and advance orders straight was to have a laptop with us at the farmer's market. But most laptops can't be used in bright daylight, let lone rain. What to do?

One solution we hit upon was to take the record-keeping PC with us to the market. For this, we turned to the Panasonic ToughBook. These are ruggedized PCs that can be tossed around, rained on, and generally treated like farm equipment. Spill-resistant, dust-proof, with shock-mounted disk drives and daylight-readable screens, they're the bee's knees for outdoor use.

We've been using a ToughBook CF-27 for years, but are upgrading to a faster and more modern (but used) ToughBook 29. Used ToughBooks are plentiful, since just about every cop car in the country has one, and the military uses tons of them, too.

Our CF-27 was slow but not too bad with QuickBooks 2005, and can run Web browsers and Microsoft Word and so on adequately. It only has an 800x600 screen, which is a nuisance, but livable. I forget what I paid for the CF-27, but they're practically giving them away on eBay -- most going for less than $100.

Putting Microsoft Live Mesh on the CF-27 (in a possibly-vain attempt to make all our computers sync their data effortlessly) was the final straw. It's now so slow that we avoid using it, which is bad. Hence the ToughBook 29. These are going for $600 or so. (New ToughBooks cost a couple of grand, which is not something I can afford to bankroll out of farmer's market sales.)

If you want to play around with the concept, you might consider blowing $100 on a nice CF-27 and seeing if it's perfect except for being slow and having a low-resolution screen. You might discover that you never use it, or that its seven-pound weight is a turn-off, or that ruggedized PCs just aren't your cup of tea, at which point you'll be glad you didn't spend more money. When you don't need the CF-27 anymore, sell it on eBay, which will cut your total cost of ownership to almost nothing.

You have to be careful when selecting a model, because Panasonic has allowed their product line to become bloated, with many semi-rugged models that aren't outdoor-rated. You want a model that says it has a daylight-readable screen and is moisture-resistant.

If you buy a used ToughBook, get one that has all its part, port covers, etc. Lots of these units have various pieces missing, including both the hard drive and the shock-mounted hard-drive carrier. Get one with the correct operating system already installed (almost always Windows XP Professional). You can ignore this advice if you want -- parts and driver disks and such are readily available on eBay -- but you'll be happier if this doesn't balloon into a big project.

[Update, 3/22/2009: My CF-29 has arrived, and it's even nicer than I expected in every way -- screen brightness and clarity, speed,weather-tightness, and overall condition. Though its 1.2 GHz processor isn't up to modern standards, I maxed it out on memory (1.5 G, and it seems very snappy. Highly recommended]

The aftermath of my cold has slowed me down, but I've made my final pass through my science fiction novel, One Survivor. Karen will go over it one more time, and then I can upload it to Lightning Source. It should be available in a week or so.

And it's about time, too, considering I started this project in 1987!

After that, we'll finish up the third book in the Tom Slade series. And there are plenty more books where these came from -- chicken books, farm books, novels, you name it -- all stacked up waiting for us to find some time.