Month: November 2008

Breed Preservation and Breed Improvement Are Mutually Exclusive

It’s always sad when well-meaning people embark on a doomed effort. Current attempts at breed preservation are a good example.

Breed preservation is a very simple task. The goal is to take the surviving remnant of an old breed and maintain it so that it retains whatever fraction of its genetic diversity still remains. This is fairly easy to do with chickens, which are reasonably inexpensive to keep in the required numbers. Basically, the technique is to keep several hundred individuals and do random matings, with no culling and no attempt at selective breeding. This can maintain the breed, unchanged, indefinitely. That’s what preservation is all about.

Selective breeding is the opposite of this: you breed only from selected individuals. With each generation, your flock becomes less representative of what you started with, and becomes something new instead. (Quite possibly, it becomes extinct through inbreeding.)

Sadly, groups like the American Livestock Breeding Conservancy just don’t get it. In their breeding guides, they are heavily into selection and culling, which is the worst thing they could do. Sigh.

This is the sort of thing that causes poultry scientists to periodically call for an effort to do it right. Selective breeding has caused commercial strains to lose about 50% of their genetic diversity (I’m surprised that it isn’t much higher). Conservation organizations like the ALBC aren’t helping, because they, too, are heavily into selection. So far, government attempts at breed preservation have always seemed to fail as soon as budgets became tight.

The remaining option is probably for someone to endow a foundation with enough money to acquire several dispersed facilities and hire some geneticists to acquire stock and manage the breeding program. The methods of breed preservation are well-understood by geneticists, but apparently not by anyone else.

This would be a very cool thing. I’d contribute my share.

Deep Litter for Healthier Chickens

The “deep litter method” was one of the most important poultry developments of the Twentieth Century. It resulted in a dramatic drop in disease and a reduction in the amount of labor it took to keep a flock of chickens. It also gave an early example of how biodiversity works to our advantage, even with confined livestock.

People these days think they know what “deep litter” is, but mostly they don’t. Here’s a quick checklist:

  • Deep litter is not about compost. It’s about healthier chickens. Do your serious composting on a compost pile.
  • More is better. It’s not deep litter unless it’s at least six inches deep.
  • Compost as a clean-up tool.If the top of the litter gets caked over with manure, skim off the caked part and toss it into a corner. Within a few days, natural composting will cause
    it to turn back into litter again.

  • Litter is a probiotic. Deep litter has anti-coccidiosis properties (it develops a population of microbes that eat coccidia), but only after it’s been around for a few months, so never remove it all. When you start bumping your head on the rafters, remove part of it, but not all.
  • Lime helps. Stirring in hydrated lime at about ten pounds per hundred square feet will keep the litter more friable.
  • Chickens don’t wear gas masks. If you can smell ammonia in the chicken house, you don’t have enough ventilation. Open the windows, even if it’s twenty below outside. Ammonia is a poison gas; cold weather is just a nuisance to grown chickens.
  • Don’t break a sweat. If you’re spending a significant amount of time messing with the litter, you’re doing it wrong.

Check out my Deep Litter FAQ for more information.


Deep Litter for Healthier Chickens

Why We Don’t Eat Eggs at Thanksgiving

Chickens have a natural laying cycle that peaks in the spring and troughs in the fall. The typical flock is at its worst in November, and actually lays better in the depths of winter.

By early spring, long before the weather is nice or the supply of natural food has increased much, the hens start laying like crazy. It’s not about temperature and it’s not about food: it’s about natural cycles. The hens lay their eggs before the food supply is very good because it’s the growing chicks who need easy pickings, not the broody hen, who hardly eats anything when she’s incubating her eggs, anyway. So the natural egg-laying season has to happen before the time of plenty.

In the fall, the pickings are still pretty easy, but what would baby chicks eat during the upcoming season of scarcity? So the natural tendency is for egg-laying to cease.

This means that Thanksgiving is an unlikely time to feature egg-based dishes, while Easter is a great time. Similarly, farm flocks are thinned in the fall so that only the most valuable animals are kept over the winter, so it’s a good time for a turkey dinner. At Easter, it would be madness to slaughter turkeys, because the whole point of keeping your remaining turkeys over the winter was so they’d lay hatching eggs in the spring, and Easter happens before this is truly under way.

I get emails from people every November, wondering why their hens stopped laying, and what they can do about it. This is one of those problems where anything you do will work, because the rate of lay will pick up in a couple of months even if you don’t do anything. But giving the hens all the chicken feed they want, housing them in an area that’s reasonably dry and more or less out of the wind, and preventing predators, pets, and children from hassling them will help.

The natural tendency for the number of eggs to increase right through the winter is another piece of evidence that, whatever their origins, chickens aren’t tropical birds anymore. They’re far more winter-hardy than most people give them credit for.

Signs of Winter

Signs of the season: I’ve seen the first Christmas tree truck of winter, taking a load of freshly cut trees to be sent on their way. A lot of Christmas trees are grown in my area. Cutting starts about now and usually ends the day before Thanksgiving, though last year there was some activity into early December.

The local Christmas tree industry was developed by a neighbor of mine, Hal Schudel, who developed sustainable, low-impact Christmas tree farming long before these buzzwords were popular. He introduced helicopter logging in 1955, so that Christmas trees grown on steep hillsides could be cut by hand and hoisted out by air, with no need for roads or heavy machinery — and hence no erosion. He also knew a superior tree when he saw one, introducing the Noble Fir (which makes a much better Christmas tree than the local Douglas Fir). Hal’s company, Holiday Tree Farm, has an interesting Web page.

I like having a self-made millionaire as a neighbor and role model.

Not that Hal’s the only one. My property borders on Starker Forests on two sides. As with Hal Schudel, T. J. Starker was into reforestation and sustainable yield long before these concepts caught the public eye. Both men were professors at OSU, too.

Starker has a good-neighbor policy which must be experienced to be believed. It’s not just a matter of, “Sure, take some of the downed wood for firewood, what the heck.” It’s more like, “We’ll unlock the gate for you and show you where the good stuff is. When’s a good time?”

One of the things I like about living here is the quality of our neighbors. They couldn’t be better. The only thing I would change is that the Christmas tree truck drivers could slow down a little. 40 MPH is pretty fast for a wet and twisty gravel road.

City People Are Crazy

Recently, some teenagers in my area were camping out and decided to kill and eat a duck for their supper. Bad idea. They were caught.

Now, in the real world, this would have been treated like the imbecile case of poaching that it is, but Benton County is run by city people, who are crazy. There was a hue and cry for a charge of felony animal abuse. Lots of people were itching to get those kids under psychiatric treatment. What could be a stronger sign of mental illness than hunting out of season?

You can see the article here.

This is not an isolated case. A guy in Albany was cited because he had an old, skinny horse, whose skinniness and age were taken as signs of neglect, even though there was a younger, well-fleshed horse on the same pasture (how can you starve one horse and not the other when they’re running around together all the time?). If you’re not in a rural county, it’s important to slaughter your animals before they become old, skinny, or lame, or you’ll be arrested. Even if they can be cured, a convalescence within sight of a cell-phone Samaritan may land you in jail. Don’t risk it.

If you’re planning to move back to the land, don’t make the mistake I did by moving to a county dominated by city people. They’ll sic the law on you. Find a rural country, preferably one dominated by farmers. You’re trying to get away from urban attitudes as well as urban architecture, and this requires that you have at least a county line between yourself and the nearest urban population.

Farmers on the edge of town have always been slapped with nuisance lawsuits for being farmers (the sound of roosters crowing or tractors running, dust from plowing, flies, etc.). This is one reason why such farmers are eager to sell out to developers: city people won’t let them farm. But now we’re being threatened with jail or mental institutions.

I grew up in Del Norte County in California, which is an impoverished county in the redwoods. The largest segment of the economy was unemployed loggers, and poaching was universal. The game wardens looked the other way if you weren’t selling venison in the street, because it helped people feed their families. But by the standards of law enforcement here in Benton County, everyone I grew up with belonged in the loony bin. Go figure.