I read this rule in old poultry books but have never seen it in newer ones:

"A chicken chicken coop needs to be big enough to walk around in, or small enough that you can reach into any part of it from outside."

Coops that are somewhere in the middle -- too small to walk in, too big to reach across -- are nothing but trouble. Chickens need good care, and (let's face it) we give better care when it's convenient to do so.

In addition, coops that are hard to service usually provide limited visibility. Is that waterer in the back really working? Hard to tell. Is that an egg in the shadows? Everything works better if you can get up close and personal.

Keeping predators out of daily-move pasture pens can be difficult, since predators are motivated and can dig their way into the pen. Some things that help:

• Having a dog close to the pens. I'm told this always works. We haven't tried it.
• Electric fence surrounding the area with the chickens. This mostly works. See my Electric Fencing FAQ. Most people think that electric fencing has to be way more elaborate that is really the case.
• Electric fence wire on the pen itself. Does anyone do this but me? Hammer in a few nail-on fence insulators around the perimeter of the chicken pen, about four inches off the ground, add wire, and attach to the fence charger of your choice -- possibly a battery-powered one attached to the pen itself.

These precautions are fairly effective, but sometimes you get a predator who isn't afraid of an electric fence and wreaks havoc in spite of it. I'll talk about that in another post.

I've been shamefully neglecting my Norton Creek Farm Web page. This is the Web page aimed at folks who are interested in buying our farm products, as opposed to raising their own.

So it's actually up to date for once, and has some good info on it, including where to buy our free-range eggs and pastured broilers. (Hint: The Corvallis Wednesday Farmers' Market has moved.)

And the page doubles as a dollar-off coupon if you print it out and bring it to the Farmers' Market.

In other news, Corvallis has rung down the curtain on its free downtown Wi-Fi network, much to my disgust. How am I supposed to keep the kids from each other's throats without Wi-Fi? I bought all those laptops for a reason! I am looking into alternatives...

One thing that amazes me is how fast hens go through oystershell, even if you're feeding them a complete ration that theoretically has enough calcium in it. This is probably a good sign, meaning that they are getting some low-calcium nutrition off my pasture and eating less chicken feed.

They had run out of oystershell, and when I took a bucketful out to them today, they fought over it.

That's the thing about nutrition -- it's hard to tell what the chickens lack. You short them on something, and they'll be less productive, but you can't tell by looking.

I recommend providing hens oystershell 24/7, regardless of what else you're feeding them.

When I worked at Activision, one of the vice presidents told me that when he suggested a new feature to a game designer, there was a three-state process:

1. "It's impossible!"
2. "It's too hard."
3. "It's on your desk."

Note that the process doesn't have anything to do with getting a commitment out of the game designer. Just plant the seed and occasionally ask if he's figured out how to do it yet. If the idea is a good one, it will gnaw at the designer, and eventually a solution will appear as if by magic.

That was great management. The designer's own desire that his product be cool was the only tool required.

Karen got six little piggies on Monday. They're up on the back forty where we could use extra fertility. Pigs dig up the ground something fierce, leaving it rough, but they also leave it fertile.

Pigs are fun and trouble-free if you don't keep them too long. They're way too smart and they get awfully big. The last month or so can easily become a battle of wits that the farmer loses.

We keep them on pasture, first in a sixteen-foot square of lightweight hog panels, then a larger area of electric fencing. Pigs can get significant amounts of nutrition from pasture. We use galvanized "Porta-Huts" for pig houses. These can be dragged around pretty easily by hand and tossed into the back of a pickup truck for longer moves.

We sell pork by the half-pig to customers who sign up in advance. This year, for the first time, Karen called the butcher (The Farmer's Helper in Harrisburg, Oregon -- they're the best) as soon as she got the pigs, and set a butcher date (August 15). That's farming for you. You don't even get a day to enjoy the little piggies without considering their future as pork and bacon. Last year we had to keep the pigs about six weeks longer than we wanted, past the dry season and into the soggy Oregon winter, because we didn't get on the schedule soon enough. Never again!

I previously wrote about metal siding on chicken coops. It lasts forever, is easy to install, and it's fairly cheap. Just one downside...

When I do the morning egg collection, every nest in the nest house has one or two hens in it, and they're clucking up a storm. "Cluck" doesn't give any idea of the actual volume of sound we're talking about. In metal-sided house, this can be very, very loud.

In the afternoon egg collection, most of the hens have wandered off, and everything's all peaceful. But it's pandemonium in the morning.

People in the autistic spectrum (which includes both my kids) may find the noise to be more than they can bear. For most people, it's just a nuisance. In either case, hearing protectors will restore peace and quiet and let you hear your iPod.

I'm going to use more metal siding as I repair old pasture houses, but the noise issue, if manageable, is real. Thought you'd like to know.

Do you define yourself in terms of what you love or what you hate? You've got a choice.

When I was a kid, back in the early Seventies, I liked the hippies well enough (a lot of them were tremendously interesting people) except when they talked politics or went off on a hating jag. Often they did both at once. All those hours of ranting about Nixon boiled down to, "Don't vote for him." Sheesh! I wasn't going to!

Now, obviously, if you have a line on the Best Stuff Ever, everything else pales by comparison. It's impossible for one thing to be the Best Ever without everything else being a little worse. People understand this. So you can talk about the good stuff without going on and on about how much you hate the bad stuff. Everyone gets it!

I see this come up over and over with small-scale farming in particular and alternative living in general. People aren't content to say that they've stumbled onto something really cool: they have to go on an extended rant about why everything else sucks. Very uncool. I burned out on that kind of thing in the Seventies. It just raises the question that philosophers have been asking for thousands of years: "Like, why can't everyone just mellow out and be groovy?"

For a long time, extended rants have been rewarded. News media and advertising, in particular, thrive on crisis. The idea that adopting a more rural lifestyle might be more fulfilling than an urban rat race doesn't sell many newpapers or bottles of pills. But if you tell people that the government is poisoning them through their tap water, it's a different story. You can get some media coverage for free when the idea is now, and buy ad time afterwards. All you need is a product that costs nothing to manufacture, so it gives high profits that can be used to buy more advertising. Whipping up a tap-water scare and then promoting bottled tap water as the solution is a good example.

But a lot of consumers have opted out of this sort of thing. They don't listen anymore to people they don't trust. It's a lot more important to be trustworthy than vivid these days. Back when I started out in the egg biz, I was foolish enough to repeat some of the usual horror stories about factory farms, but I quit because it was painful to watch my customers' eyes glaze over. I eventually learned that nauseating my customers isn't a good way to sell them food, and I was getting suspicious of many of the horror stories anyway. I hadn't ever visited a factory farm, so what the heck did I know?

So now I try to stick to stuff that I've at least seen with my own eyes, and preferably stuff I've done with my own hands. That way, at least I'm only propagating my own foolishness, not other people's. And I don't see that "trapped animal" look in my customers' eyes quite so often.

Accentuate the positive and your own experiences. Customers can get "lurid" anywhere. "Real" is in short supply.

I recently crossed a magic threshold, and the quality music playback on my desktop PC suddenly mattered. I think it's because I'm using Pandora all of a sudden.

So I dragged in a couple of big old stereo speakers that were out in the garage and replaced the satellite speakers from my el cheapo PC-oriented amplifier/subwoofer/satellite speakers set. Works great!

If you ever wondered what the difference was between a "computer speaker" and a "stereo speaker," the answer is, "None."

There are an infinite number of additional steps I could take, but replacing the satellite speakers on a PC amp/subwoofer/speaker combo certainly gave plenty of improvement for practically no effort.

For me, music is especially important when I'm dragging myself through a task I don't like, but if the sound quality is good and summoning up the music is painless, I listen to more. Commercials drive me away from FM radio stations in short order. With an instantly accessible personal music library and pretty-good commercial-free streaming music like Pandora, I find that I'm listening more.

The Corvallis Saturday Farmers' Market starts today -- 9-1 at Riverfront Park. I'll be there, selling free-range eggs and pastured broilers out of giant coolers. Be there!