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!

If you've had chickens for a while, you loathe raccoons. If not, you will. Here's why:

A while ago we started losing 1-3 chickens a night. Some were completely eaten, others barely touched. This is one of the more infuriating aspects of predators: they don't have an "off" switch. Instead, they keep killing until they run out of targets.

In the wild, their prey scatters and the predators only get one or two victims. But a fox or a raccoon that squeezes into a closed henhouse will kill your entire flock.

That's one reason I use open housing — no doors, and one side open — so the chickens can scatter. (Open-front housing has other advantages, which you'll see when you read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses.)

How did the raccoon get in, in spite of my electric fence? Different ways, it appears. There was only one well-defined game trail, but when I adjusted the electric fence so that anything using it would surely get zapped, the losses continued. Raccoons have no fear. A dog or coyote that gets zapped by an electric fence will never come near it again, but raccoons will prowl it endlessly, looking for spots where it can squeeze under. They can squeeze pretty flat, and if you put the fence wire too low, it shorts out. Farming sounds so easy! But I'm sure  you agree that farming is no panacea.

When adjusting the fence didn't work, I set snares. Snares are pretty easy to use, and by placing them only on game trails heading towards your all-night chicken buffet,  you can see how they can be very selective,  nabbing only the miscreants. After a few nights of nothing, we caught a single raccoon. And the losses stopped.

All that carnage from one smallish animal? Don't tell me Nature is kind!

In the bad old days, there was a Federal bounty on just about anything that moved, including raccoons. And old-timer told me that the bounty and the price of pelts paid for his pack of coon hounds. One result was that chicken and sheep farmers had little to fear from predators.

When the bounty dried up in the Seventies, so did the hunting and trapping, and the raccoons, bobcats, and coyotes became an ever-increasing threat. Even since I started raising chickens in 1996, things have gotten much worse. Benton County keeps cutting the amount they're willing to chip in as matching funds for the Federal predator control program — which only targets animals that are actively killing livestock — with predictable results: If you don't learn all about electric fences and snares,  your chickens are goners. It's almost as bad in town as it is in the country!

Karen and Dan were moving a batch of pullets from the brooder house onto the pasture one evening, and saw three rats scurrying around. You know what that means: if you see three in the open, there must be thirty in hiding somewhere!

We usually don't have much trouble with rats on the pasture. Our chicken feed is in big galvanized range feeders outdoors, and we move the feeders each time we refill them. Any rats who take up residence in tunnels under the feeders have their tunnels exposed when the feeders are moved. Something — probably owls — takes care of the rest.

Only it's not working right now. Natural pest control is great when it works, but when it doesn't, now what? That's the problem with farming. You do the same thing over and over, but the results are different every time!

Well, whatever you believe about "live and let live," you have to draw the line at a rat population explosion. Their population can balloon really fast, and you can't have them overflowing from the pasture into the house! So it was time to take steps.

The simplest method of dealing with rats on a pasture occupied by hens (barring the use of a sniper rifle and a night-vision scope), is to use rat poison in tamper-proof bait stations. Now, I don't like using poison any more than you do, but this is a good example of Plamondon's Law: "The alternatives are even worse."

Bait stations are basically plastic boxes that creatures larger than a rat can't get into. On the better bait stations, the bait is secured one way or another to prevent the rats from carrying it off and possibly leaving it somewhere inappropriate. They have to eat it right there in the bait station, where any crumbs won't cause trouble.

(I also looked up the poison in question, and it's a lot more toxic to rats than it is to chickens, not that the chickens will get any exposure to it with the spiffy bait stations I use.)

I have some J. T. Eaton 903CL Rat Fortress bait stations, which I like very much. They have a clear lid so you can see if the bait needs to be replaced, which is a great feature. They're surprisingly hard to find. [Update: an Alert Reader found them at FarmTek.com — a good outfit that I've done business with many times.] Except for the clear lid, the Motomco rat bait station below seems to be equivalent.

I use the Tomcat brand bait blocks, which are weatherproof one-ounce cubes with a hole in the middle, so you can thread them onto a retaining wire that keeps the rats from walking off with them.

I put three bait stations on the pasture four nights ago, each next to a feeder. I didn't expect much activity, since the feeders were full, but I figured that when the feeders went empty, the rats would switch to the bait. The next morning, though, all the bait had been eaten! The rats preferred it to chicken feed and whole corn, apparently. The next night, almost all the bait had vanished again (one bait station was relatively unvisited). The next night, the same. Last night, some bait was left in all of the stations. [Update: The bait is no longer being eaten at all.]

I think this means that the rat population is starting to dwindle. In the past, I've used bait stations around the house, brooder houses, and barn, and the pattern was the same: initial interest in the bait, followed by lessened activity and a distinct absence of rodents that sometimes lasted as long as a year.

(By the way, if you are of the opinion that "rats are something that happen to other people," you will eventually be proven wrong. Sadly, they're likely to strike your brooder house first, and kill a lot of baby chicks. You don't want that! I recommend using bait stations or snap traps in your brooder house when it's not in use, or bait stations outside it all the time. Having your helpless baby chicks killed by rats is just too heartbreaking.)

You want to get the good bait stations. I just bought some cheap ones, and I regret it now. Too flimsy and insecure. I'm probably going to throw them away and buy some of the ones above.

By the way, there is now an organically certified rat poison. Is that weird, or what?

If you're wondering what kind of grass is best for grass-fed chickens, the answer is, "green grass."

What I mean is, lush green grass is loaded with vitamins and is has lots of available nutrients, but as it fades to brown, it becomes more and more useless to chickens. Chickens aren't ruminants and can't digest cellulose, so it's the soft, green, palatable grasses that count.

Lush spring pasture is the best, of course, and that's easy enough. The trick is providing green grass year-round, or close to it. Cool-season grasses will stay green all winter in mild climates, and warm-season grasses will stay green all summer when the cool-season grasses have all browned off.

Wheat and oats make great pasture for poultry until they die in the summer. Perennial fescues aren't my favorite grasses, but they hold up well year-round, and (as it turns out) poultry don't mind endophytes the way cattle do, so the biggest black mark against fescues simply isn't relevant with poultry.

I've even heard good things said about crabgrass as a poultry grass!

And let's not forget clovers. In a lot of climates, Ladino clover is considered the best, partly because it provides good nutrition (vitamins and protein, but few calories, just like grasses), and partly because its season is later than most grasses, giving lots of summer greenery when the grasses have faded.

So, remember, focus on stuff that stays green first, and worry about the details later, if at all. Most henyards will require a mix of species for long-season greenery.

And for the complete word on green feed for chickens, you'll want to read Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser. Heuser was a poultry science professor at Cornell University, and he wrote this poultry nutrition book right at the tipping point — just after poultry nutrition became fully understood (with the discovery of vitamin B12), but just before the move to factory farms. So the book has a small-flock, traditional mindset that matches the mindset of today's dedicated hobbyists and farmers like us, while still being modern and trustworthy. And it has a whole chapter on green feed! It's a big book, very detailed and thorough, and (unlike more recent books) was written with the intelligent layman in mind. This book can open up new horizons, while saving you from the many feeding blunders that people make.

Sure, you want to buy baby chicks this year, but what if you only want pullet chicks? None of those nasty crowing roosters? If so, you're like a lot of people. Corvallis, for example, has an ordinance forbidding roosters in town, but hens are okay.

The problem is that the feed stores normally have straight-run chicks. That is, boys and girls together. What do do? Time's a'wasting, since the baby chicks will hit the stores in a couple of weeks.

Learning chick sexing is difficult and disgusting. See this video from Dirty Jobs if you don't believe me!

Well, that was fun, but what does it have to do with do-it-yourself chick sexing at the feed store? I'll tell you. The feed store will have at least one of these breeds for sale:

• Rhode Island Reds
• New Hampshire Reds
• Production Reds

All these breeds have something in common: The chicks with chipmunk stripes on their backs are females! Well, maybe not all, but at least 95%. And if you pick only the ones with well-defined chipmunk strips, it's more like 100%.

Most people don't know this, so the chicks aren't likely to have been picked over by other customers. Just make the clerk pick out the ones with the racy stripes because "they're pretty," and don't take no for an answer. Voila! Sexed chicks at straight-run prices!

(People have asked me, "What do you mean, 'chipmunk stripes'?" You'll know 'em when you see em. Most of the chicks won't have any stripes down their backs at all. On some, the stripes on their backs will be faint, and others, they'll be clear. Get the ones with the most clearly defined stripes.

And if you think that's clever, you ain't seen nothing yet. It's one of the least useful facts in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. Just by reading this book, you become a chick-rearing expert. Imagine how much more pleasure you'll get when you're completely successful every time.

I read hundreds of poultry books, extension bulletins, research papers, and magazine articles when researching this book, stretching from 100 years ago to the present day. I discovered many useful facts and techniques that have been forgotten, like the chipmunk-stripe trick. And it's all been reduced to 155 clear and straightforward pages. You will reap the rewards of my years of work in a couple of hours!

Buy the book before you get your chicks, so you know what to do, not what you should have done.

While this story about eggs and weight loss isn't new, it was news to me! Basically, one group of overweight people were given egg breakfasts and another bagel and cream cheese breakfasts with equal numbers of calories, and the egg-eaters ate less during the rest of the day, felt less hungry, lost more weight, and had more energy!

"Where can I sign up?" you ask. Well, you could do a lot worse than to throw out your cereal and bagels and eat a more traditional breakfast. Grass-fed eggs, for preference. The concept seems to be that protein satisfies your hunger longer, while carbohydrates set you up for renewed cravings a short time after eating.

The Atkins Diet, Grass-Fed Goodness, and Me

High-protein breakfasts (and lunches and dinners) have worked for me, too. I've lost 45 pounds [Update, March 5 -- Make that fifty pounds!] on the Atkins Diet, which I started a couple of years ago, and it certainly reduced my appetite. I enjoyed food as much as ever, but I ate less of it. Grass-fed eggs, pastured pork, and grass-fed chicken that we raise right here on the farm have been a big factor in my success. My only regret is that no one has bred a pig 50 feet long so it has enough bacon! We always run out of bacon first, and you just can't buy bacon like we get from our own pigs.

Another thing that helps me is to weigh myself every day and put a dot on a weight-loss chart. This give me daily feedback about my progress. If I start backsliding, I see it and start managing my eating more strictly.

I recommend a digital scale for this — they're very affordable these days, and they're a lot more accurate than the old spring-type models. It's best to buy tools you can trust!

The Most Important Thing is Not to Quit

Probably the most important thing is to make a firm decision that you're never, ever going to give up. You're going to keep working on weight loss, one way or another. Your tactics may change, but the goal will remain constant. If you fall off your diet, that's okay — it doesn't mean a thing. We all mess up sometimes, and that means that the occasional failure is normal, expected, meaningless. But you're going to get right back on the diet again.

You can switch diets, too, if you get stuck or get tired of the current one. You can do anything you want, except giving up!

How I Used Self-Hypnosis to Get Unstuck

I'm still not at my goal, and I've stalled a couple of times. I got stuck after losing 20 pounds, but used a self-hypnosis recording to get me unstuck and lose another 25 pounds. I was impressed!

I don't know what you think about hypnosis, but you can't argue with success, can you? Oh, wait, of course you can -- but you won't, because you're too considerate. Science has caught up with hypnosis over the past couple of decades, and it's lot less mysterious than it used to be. This is reflected in the format of self-hypnosis programs that you can buy on the Web. They tend to start with a calm discussion of the problem and its solution (say, weight loss), then walk you through some progressive relaxation to hopefully get you in a receptive state of mind, then they restate the solution again in a somewhat different way, often using anecdotes or metaphors in addition to making obvious suggestions like, "You're going to get slimmer because that's how you want to be."

I'm fond of the products from Hypnosis Downloads.com, which has a huge selection of downloads. Also, they're use less gimmickry than anybody. No echo chambers, no new-age music -- they're more straightforward and workmanlike than anybody else I've run into. Not to mention that their prices are reasonable and they have steep volume discounts if you buy more than one program.

I'm also talking a long walk every day and doing my farm chores, but I've done all those things for ages and they've never caused me to lose weight. The Atkins Diet and the self-hypnosis are what have worked for me. Two years so far, and no backsliding, though I'm still not where I want to be.

But eating eggs for breakfast is a good start!

Mother Earth News has picked up another of my blog postings to carry on their site: Brooding Chicks in Winter. I must say that I admire their taste!

Everyone knows that the brooding period is by far the most critical time of a chicken's life. And it's important that they do more than stay alive -- they have to thrive, or they'll have problems later in life.

Imagine how heartbreaking it is to not only have baby chicks die during the brooding period, but for the survivors to do poorly later on. Or, even worse, for children to have this experience. I wrote my book, Success With Baby Chicks, so that imagining this heartbreak is as close as you'll ever get. What you'll experience is success, with frisky chickens living the happy chicken life and all the good feelings and enjoyment that this will bring.

I do this in a clear, easy-to-follow, unpadded 150-page book. Major publishers think that consumers want bulk, and pad out their books with filler, but I respect your time and stick to the point -- ensuring your success and enjoyment. Because you're sitting at your computer right now and reading my chicken-oriented blog, you know that the book is a good match for you -- and you want to read it before you get your first chicks of the season, so you'll be ready.

You want it on your reference shelf, too. I reread the book from time to time myself, since I sometimes forget the fine points and need to refresh my memory.

And then that faint feeling of dread that some people feel when they order baby chicks -- will they be all right? -- will be replaced with well-founded confidence. Or so my fan mail claims. So order your copy today -- it can't help you until you read it.

These two videos document the "Chicken of the Future" contest from 1948, showing what, for the time, were the best chickens and the best practices for raising them (some of which most of us would envy, even today!)

They're worth watching just for the glimpses they give of good chicken-raising technique, but be careful to take a good hard look at the butchered carcasses! They look just like rubber chickens. And the chickens of 60 years ago grew more slowly, had higher mortality, and were less productive than modern hybrids.

This contest was very well run. Earlier egg-laying contests were easy to game, and the results of the contests had nothing in common with what you'd get if you bought baby chicks from the contestants. They were basically an accidental scam.

For the Chicken of the Future test, they started with a large number of hatching eggs -- too many to cherry-pick the ones from the best hens -- which were all incubated together. The day-old chicks were brooded in identical pens, then moved into different identical pens after the brooding period. When the cockerels were 12 weeks old, they were all butchered at the same time (with winning pens giving a dressed carcass weighing probably a little more than two pounds!) subjected to USDA inspection and grading, and generally compared with one another.

Feed consumption and overall profitability were kept track of. Profitability was affected by chick mortality, carcass value of the cockerels, rate of lay and size of eggs of the pullets, mortality among the pullets, and feed consumption. Careful records were kept. In the Forties, dual-purpose breeds like New Hampshire Reds usually won in total profitability -- so much so that no one seems to have bothered entering any White Leghorns!

Another interesting point was that the contest flocks had outbreaks of disease, which was considered routine at the time. Up until the Twenties, when small farm flocks were the rule, sickness in poultry flocks was uncommon, but it got worse and worse as flock sizes increased, reaching its peak in the Forties and Fifties, in spite of the introduction of antibiotics. Gradually, better biosecurity methods were introduces and the amount of disease plummeted. An outbreak of disease in a contest flock would not be considered routine today.

The Corvallis Indoor Winter Market starts today, and runs every Saturday from 9 AM - 1 PM at the Benton County Fairgrounds. It's in a heated building and everything!

Karen will be there with grass-fed chicken and eggs. Plenty of other farms will be there too, along with farm-themed crafts. You'll be amazed at the variety of produce grown in the off-season in our part of Oregon.

If you've got a stack of empty egg cartons that's getting in your way, bring 'em in. We'll reuse them.

With plenty of smiling vendors and swarms of cheerful customers, stopping in at the indoor winter market sets the tone for your laid-back Saturday.

We'll see you there!