Including Practical Poultry Tips
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.
Today was the start of the heating season, and I built my first fire of the year in the wood stove. I really enjoy wood heat, now that I’m doing it right! I used to do it wrong, and it was a lot less fun.
My chimneys are very tall and I don’t like sweeping them. On the other hand, I don’t like being in the situation of, “Gee, it’s a long time since the chimneys have been swept. I wonder if we’ll have a chimney fire today?” So on Saturday I had the guys from Chimney Pro in Corvallis come out and sweep both chimneys, which they did quickly and well. So my peace of mind is all topped off.
Years ago, I was slow to get the chimney swept and at one point could frequently hear chunks of creosote clatter down the stove pipe. Not good! That was also the period when I was burning a lot of wet wood, which not only clogs the chimney something fierce, but is hard to burn and makes using wood heat a torture. We bought a better unit(an Oregon Wood Stove unit that, as you can see in the picture, is more than a fireplace insert, almost amounting to a free-standing stove) and mended our evil ways, ensuring dry wood by buying wood that was pretty dry to start with and storing it inside our shed.
Cheap firewood. Sometimes you can get firewood cheap, or for free. Ordinary split cordwood is a bargain around here, when compared to other sources of heat, but you can sometimes do better. For many years a local company that made shipping pallets offered its scrap wood very cheaply. The pieces were fairly small, but it was dry and cheap (never more than $30 per pickup load, or about $60 a cord with a full-sized pickup), and you could burn it exclusively if you wanted. If you got your supply before October, it was nice and dry, too. It made a lovely fire.
People are stuck in their ways, and many won’t even consider burning anything but ordinary cordwood in their stoves, so opportunities like this often go begging. They’re often poorly advertised as well, so ask around and keep your eyes open!
I’ve heard of many similar bargains across the country, from outfits that generate wood scrap that is not enough like cordwood to sell for cordwood prices, but needs to be gotten rid of, since manufacturers can’t simply burn their waste in big piles or dump it in the landfill the way they used to. Ten years ago there were many places where you could get scrap wood for $10 per ton. I don’t know what prices are like these days.
I have the good fortune to have Starker Forests as a neighbor. They have a good-neighbor policy that is just amazing! Among other things, they’ll let us cut downed wood for free — and will even send a forester over to show us where the good stuff is.
That’s pretty good by anybody’s standard, but there was a Golden Age of Free Fuel in this area that was even better. It used to be that sawdust was free for the taking from any of the many local lumber mills. When my house was built in 1940, its original furnace was a sawdust burner. It had a big bin for sawdust and an augur, like those used in pellet stoves, but bigger, to feed sawdust into the furnace. Free heat, and you didn’t even need to own a saw!
Newspapers and carboard. When I was a kid, my parents experimented with making newspaper logs, which didn’t work out. Much later, I discovered that the simplest way of getting heat out of newspaper was to simply lay a bunch of newspaper sections flat at the bottom of the stove and build the fire on top of it as usual, as if the flat sections weren’t there. These flat sections burn slowly but completely over the course of an hour or two. While not dramatic in any way, they allow you to turn all your used newspapers into comfort.
I also read a good trick online: newspaper burns too fast and kindling is a little too hard to light, and what makes it particularly easy to get a fire started is to use some corrugated cardboard as well. Rip it into strips a couple of inches wide and use liberally along with your kindling. I like using small boxes for this. Big boxes ones I flatten and recycle. I almost never blow on fires anymore.
Big fires vs. little fires. There’s a big fad for fires that can keep you warm all night long. Isn’t that what blankets are for? I don’t want my house to stay warm when there’s nobody around, so I build relatively small fires as needed, and stoke them once in a while, when I take a break from work. Admittedly, in harsher climates, you need bigger fires!
Wood heat in combination with other heat. I’m very happy with my combination wood heat and electric baseboards with fancy programmable set-back thermostats. I blogged about setback thermostats and wood heat. This has worked very well for me. I let the nighttime temperature linger for a while after I get up in the morning, to encourage me to build a fire. I wouldn’t build fires if it were already nice and toasty! And these particular thermostats (unlike the original ones on my heaters) are very responsive: they back off smoothly in the face of heat from the fire. So I get as much benefit from wood heat as I’m willing to get, but if I get distracted and don’t tend the fire, I don’t freeze! This combination approach works especially well in the fall and spring, when a fire in the morning is the only heat the house needs all day.
When we were getting started on the farm, we got a great deal on used incubators — we paid something like ten cents on the dollar. How did we get such a great deal? Because the Emu bubble had just burst.
You see, for a couple of years, there was this huge emu fad. The idea was that emu feathers, eggs, meat, and oil were all in tremendous demand, that any emu with a pulse was valuable breeding stock, and that any idiot could become a millionaire by getting in on the ground floor. Stories of fabulous prices paid for emu eggs in unnamed New York restaurants were used as proof of the huge demand.
So there was a tremendous rush into the emu-raising business. A five-acre ranch could make you rich, working only part-time. Wow!
It was painful to watch the bubble burst. The bubble burst the instant the demand of eager new farmers wasn’t enough to soak up all the emu eggs and spare emus, meaning that, for the first time, you had to try to sell to consumers. And it turned out that consumers had never wanted emu products in the first place. Demand for emu products had always been very limited, and the focus of the industry had been to find more farmers to sucker, rather than to build a genuine demand for the product.
And that’s how we came to buy several GQF Sportsman incubators for ten cents on the dollar. The country was awash in emus and emu equipment that nobody wanted, sold at desperation prices by people who were quitting the business and perhaps losing their farms.
This sort of thing plays out every day, usually on a much smaller scale. The alternative farming business is plagued with fads. At any given moment, there are half a dozen widely publicized fads that are every bit as idiotic as the emu bubble. Want to keep your farm? Don’t go there.
The key think to keep in mind is how much your actual customers are willing to pay. I don’t have any mythical New York restaurant customers, so I have no outlet for insanely overpriced emu eggs. If I were to try to sell fresh, grass-raised emu eggs at the farmer’s market, I’d be lucky to sell one a week! They’d be more in demand as blown eggs for craft projects than for eating. This is not a base on which I could build financial security!
You have to sell to the market you have actual access to. Sure, you can bet the farm that you’ll gain access to a new market with a new product, but the first rule of gambling is, “When you run out of money, you can’t play anymore.” Betting the farm and losing the farm go together. I never bet the farm.
But I’ve gone through this experience on a small scale several times. There was the time when we got 100 Americauna pullets to satisfy our customers’ oft-repeated desire for green eggs. It turned out that what our customers wanted was not “green eggs” so much as “green eggs at the same price as other eggs.” The problem is that the green-egg hens only lay half as many eggs. Not a single customer was willing to pay a price that made green eggs worth our time.
Most fads are like that: lots of talk, but the customer won’t put his money where his mouth is. That’s why there’s so much fraud in the alternative food biz: many customers are too cheap to buy what they claim they want, but misleadingly labeled products are often within their price range.
Right now, with chicken feed at record high prices, the fad is for people to badmouth the most affordable ingredients like corn and soy, and ask for eggs from chickens fed hideously expensive or totally unobtainable substitutes. But they won’t pay the $10 per dozen that it would cost to satisfy their desire. It’s almost all talk. We don’t use organic feed, and our eggs are the most expensive in our area (because they’re the best). Anyone using more expensive feed than ours is likely to give up the business, because their costs are higher but they’re not getting as much for their eggs. Even at the best of times, the profitability of the grass-fed egg business is nothing to write home about, and taking on burdensome extra costs just makes things worse.
You have to be extra-careful in situations where the customer’s fervor exceeds your own. You need to do things that you believe in, not what other people believe in. Sure, your customer has to believe in your products, too, but you’ll never get anywhere trying to satisfy beliefs you don’t share.
When I got started in farming, I was very skeptical of the alternative-food dogma, and rightly so. Back then it was all, “Soy is our god, bow down the magic bean.” Vegetarianism was big, and soy worship was the cornerstone of vegetarianism. But I like meat and dislike tofu, and, besides, the food faddists get on my nerves, so I ended up in the meat and egg biz. When the tide turned and the mantra became, “Soy is the devil, we must exorcise the demon bean!” I wasn’t too surprised. Irritated, yes. Surprised, no.
So my advice is to be careful with, “The customer is always right.” They don’t have skin in the game and can pick up or drop a fad in an instant. Talking the talk costs them nothing. It’s different when you’re trying to produce something they’ll like. Production is expensive and time-consuming. Let’s all be careful out there.
Got my new glasses today. I’ve worn glasses since I was nine, and, all things considered, I’ve always liked them. When I put on my first pair of glasses, the world became incredibly sharp and detailed. It was amazing, like a gift. I loved it!
So my glasses never bothered me. In college, I tried soft contact lenses, but they irritated my eyes, and I gave them up. They might have become better since then, but I’m not tempted. The only things I liked about contacts were that they never steamed up and were less annoying than glasses in the rain, but these weren’t really important to me.
When I went to a WEITEK reunion a few years ago (WEITEK was a high-tech company in Silicon Valley I worked at after my gig at Activision. Some of its people went on to found nVidea), a lot of the folks there had to hold my business cards at arm’s length to read them. They could no longer focus their eyes at normal reading distances. A passing optometrist would have made a lot of money selling bifocals on the spot!
I dabbled with progressive lenses for a while. These have a transition area between the long-distance part of the lens and the reading part. This worked great on my first pair of progressives, but when I needed a stronger reading correction, it stopped working right. Only a tiny part of the lens worked for any given distance. This was especially annoying on large-screen computer monitors. I started using larger type on my browser (control +) to compensate.
So I broke down and ordered a pair of bifocals for indoor use, from All Family Vision Care in Corvallis. They have a large reading area and the rest for computer use. I sat down at my computer, and man, the type on the screen was huge! Looks like I’m going to have to declare victory.
I’m happy with my new glasses,though they were expensive. You can get affordable glasses, but I never do. I still reach out of that “wow!” experience I had when I was nine, with my first glasses, so I always go for the thin-and-light lenses with the fancy anti-glare coating and, frankly, just about every extra I and the optician can think of. For my outdoor glasses, I always get the spiffy self-darkening lenses that turn into sunglasses in bright light and become clear again in dim light. A pair of lenses usually lasts me about two years and the frames about four.
You know how it goes: you move into a four-bedroom farmhouse with an immense barn and a seven-bay vehicle shed, and after a few years, all of it is bulging with stuff. Where did it all come from? What’s it doing here? And why can’t I find anything anymore?
So for the first time ever, I’ve rented a huge commercial dumpster (30 cubic yards). It showed up in late afternoon, so I didn’t put much into it today — a couple of broken-down wheelbarrows, the kids’ childhood little red wagon, sadly and irreparably rusted, a tractor gas tank with a hole in it, several decrepit office chairs and other defunct furniture. Soon the balance will shift as more farm stuff gets put in — rusted-out feeders and the like.
In case you’re wondering, it’s going to cost me roughly $300 to have the dumpster delivered empty and then taken away full, more or less depending on how long I keep it, since there’s a $16 daily rental fee on top of everything else. I’m sure I can fill it, so the issue is, “How fast can I fill it?” If I can fill it fast, I save on rent.
The driver who delivered it, interestingly enough, used to live here on Norton Creek Road when he was in high school. I keep running into people like that. Seems a little strange, since there really aren’t many houses here, but it seems as if everyone lived here once upon a time!
A lot of our clutter is recyclable. I’m pretty sure that Allied Waste will separate out all the iron and steel with an electromagnet, so I may not go to the trouble of recycling it myself — not if the price of scrap metal is as low as I think it is. It’s a long drive to the scrap metal dealer, and I don’t see the point of burning lots of gas to recycle scrap metal unless it’s a money-maker! I can recycle cardboard and such locally. Other stuff can go to Goodwill and other local nonprofits.
The dumpster has metal doors at one end, so you can carry stuff inside — you don’t have to heave it over the top the way you do on a smaller dumpster. It’s ideal for the kind of large objects that you’d never fit into a regular trash can — things like mattresses, water heaters, or twisted metal roofing from chicken houses that did a tumbleweed imitation during a storm.
And I’ve already found some missing treasures!