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!

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.

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!

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.

People often ask me if chickens on free range need to be fed, or can they get what they need by foraging? And if they do need feeding, what kind of feed to they need? Just grain, or what?

In the old days, when people in town threw their garbage into the street and those in the country threw it out the back door, chickens and pigs ran around taking cleaning this up for you, and this kind of feeding would support some number of creatures, which would in time grow up and provide you with eggs or meat. On farms, the horses and cows would be spilling some of their grain, too, and other kinds of wastage would contribute to the chickens' diet.

Add some corn to their diet, and you get better results. This is pretty much how things stood on the average farm in 1900, where Milo Hastings reported that the average laying hen produced 83 eggs a year -- most of them in the spring. The hens would go broody and produce a batch of chicks, which under the circumstances would grow very slowly. If you were lucky, the cockerels would reach market weight 4-6 months later and the pullets would start laying in November, because if they weren't laying then they wouldn't start until spring.

Because the amount of feed you can find by foraging in the wintertime is slim to none, people sold all their non-essential chickens before Christmas and overwintered as few as possible. These carefully selected few still produced virtually nothing until spring because they were malnourished. On farms where grain was fed liberally, the chickens were merely vitamin- and protein-deficient, while on farms where chickens had to fend for themselves, they were starved for calories as well.

That's the old-fashioned way, the "natural" way. Yuck! So how can we make things a little more unnatural and a whole lot better?

This is where "balanced chicken feed" comes in. All the nutrients the chicken needs in one convenient package. When the concept was first introduced, nutritional science was in its infancy, so a "balanced diet" was missing some important elements. Vitamins hadn't been discovered yet, proteins weren't very well understood, and mineral requirements involved some hand-waving. And yet the concept of "Keep a trough full of balanced chicken feed in front of the chickens at all times" was a great success, and could almost double the production of the average flock, with most of the increase being in the fall and winter -- the time of high prices.

By trial and error, people figured out that "steamed beef scrap" gave good results, though they didn't know way. As it turns out, steamed beef scrap contained not only meat (which has all the protein and most of the vitamins a chicken needs), but significant amounts of bone meal as well, and this provided all the minerals for which the requirements were unknown. Add grain to this, and you have a balanced diet, right?

Well, not quite. Some of the vitamins were under-represented, and Vitamin D was entirely missing. Green feed takes care of all of this except for the Vitamin D, which chickens synthesize via UV light, just like humans, so if you give the chickens lots of green feed year-round and you get them to spend a lot of time outdoors, then you have a balanced diet!

Later, all the nutrients were figured out, and now chickens can be raised easily in total confinement, with only scientifically formulated chicken feed to eat. The nutritional requirements of chickens are better understood than those of any other creature, including humans.

(Sadly, the industry aims for least-cost feed formulation rather than maximum quality, so the diets fed to broilers and laying hens keep them productive, but the eggs and meat have far less nutritional value than they could. That's one reason why pastured eggs and poultry test so well nutritionally -- green plants are loaded with nutrients that allow the chicken and eggs to be much higher in vitamins and Omega-3 and lower in saturated fat.)

Over the years, every different method of feeding chickens was tested over and over, and the most consistent result was that if you kept a feeder full of high-quality chicken feed in front of the chickens at all times, you made a lot more money. That is true of every management system and every feeding system, across the board.

Supplemental feed like grain or scraps or garden waste is okay, and the chickens will eat a lot of it if it's palatable and less if it's not, but never take away the balanced chicken feed to try to force them to eat more of something than they want, because that's the surest way to lower productivity and profits.

Want to learn more about feeding chickens? Then you need to read Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser, which I reprinted because it's the most thorough and accessible book on the topic.

I've been featured in Mother Earth News' Ask the Experts segment, where I talk about the best chicken breeds. Thanks, Mother!

We got 200 day-old pullet chicks today. Fall's a good time to brood chicks if you're not in a particularly hard climate. The weather gets cooler as the chicks get bigger and more cold-tolerant, which works really well. These chicks will start laying before Easter.

Lots of people have had great experiences with fall brooding after reading my book, Success With Baby Chicks, which goes into year-round brooding in great detail.

Not so long ago, springtime was a difficult time on the farm. You had spent a lot of your cash during the winter, but harvest time was many months away. Spring faced you with your biggest expenses of the year: getting equipment back into shape, hiring extra labor, plowing, and planting.

On top of that, meat is hard to come by, since you thinned your herds in late fall to match the level of fodder you could store over the winter, and all the animals that you could spare are already gone. And you're even worse off where vegetables are concerned. Anything that doesn't keep for five or six months is gone.

So there you are: strapped for cash and with an inadequate diet. You can't even plant a garden yet, let alone harvest from it. What's a farmer to do?

But do not despair! A miracle is at hand to rescue you from your plight! It's called -- the egg!

Well before planting season, the hens perk up and start laying eggs like crazy. They have to start laying early so that the baby chicks will hatch during a season where the living is easy. And this means that your flock of chickens transforms your farm from an operation where you make money only once a year, at harvest time, to one where you have something to sell every day. And peak production happens right when you need cash the most!

On top of this, eggs are nature's perfect food, and provide your family with nutrition that was sadly lacking once the cow dried up and the last of the greens were gone. Imagine going from the lassitude of empty pockets and borderline malnutrition to the vitality of cash flow and health! Eggs did that.

And, as if that weren't enough, in a typical farm family, eggs provided a degree of social equity. Field crops and large-animal operations were considered to be a manly business, while the chicken flock was usually the wife's domain. She'd tend the flock, market the eggs, and spend the money. Every general store and feed store bought eggs, so eggs were as easy to spend as cash. The humble hen built a lot of equality into a system that didn't have much otherwise.

You've probably guessed already that Easter is associated with eggs because that's what's plentiful during the Easter season. It's impossible to overstate the importance of spring eggs in the old-time farm economy.

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!